#398 | I'm Immortal, Immune To All That Is Wrong

12:26Dustin Furman:one that would have done it uh if i did i can't remember oh rocco bot body or whatever he's from mega 64 oh yeah name it now froggy fresh is on this list yep hey chris your rival my my my uh my heated rival your heated rival liquid chris is so funny seeing liquid chris there is so insane i recognize some of these names but i don't know who they are vinnie vinesauce justin wang uh yeah the guy who made this game is the guy who did Binding of Isaac yeah and I saw someone had tweeted in him months ago if he would be interested in doing the show and he said yes and I just kind of forgot about it until this game popped up and I'm like oh it's that guy now I kind of feel like a dickhead asking him to do the show because his game is big you know then again binding of Isaac must have been even bigger than this and he did you see the numbers he tweeted out yesterday where he was like there's like 50 ,000 concurrents playing binding of Isaac yeah I was like whoa

13:34Chris P.:binding of Isaac is huge a lot of people love binding of Isaac

13:38Dustin Furman:yeah binding of Isaac I played it on Vita I didn't really get it like I understood it's a Zelda like kind of with Zelda game like game with rogue elements or whatever lots of randomness I just wasn't really into it I felt like I was missing something that was when PC games started migrating to the console space like indie games Hotline Miami was another example like I love that game personally but that was in that same era but yeah now I feel like a dickhead because I didn't ignore him intentionally I just forgot right yeah Yeah, these things happen. Yeah. And now I'm going to go, your game sold 300 ,000 copies.

14:22You want you're rich again.

14:24Dustin Furman:Do you want to come in? I mean, when I saw that number, I mean, it's awesome. I love that. It's like, I always do the math in my head. Just like not even the price of the game, but I'm like, what about what about did you make? And out of 250 ,000 units, I think I came up with the cost of like, he made like 7.5 million or something.

14:44Colin Moriarty:It's like, imagine getting rich more than once. I know that's awesome that's that's crazy that's good shit I'm just desperate to do the like you

14:54Dustin Furman:know the thing that people say is like just what is it fire financial independent retire early

15:01Colin Moriarty:you ever see that right right the idea that you can like kind of live lean actually and not even

15:05Dustin Furman:really ever need to be mega rich to retire I've been obsessed with that since there used to be blogs I would read about that but those people would like starve themselves basically it's like I work a job for$90 ,000 a year at whatever, and I go home and I eat beans.

15:21Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

15:22Dustin Furman:Yeah. I'm like, oh, that's fun.

15:24Colin Moriarty:That's like the Dave Ramsey stuff. Like he's hardcore. A lot of times the people he's talking to like need it, though. He's like, I don't want you to see the inside of a restaurant unless you're working at it, you know, type of thing. Yeah. He's just insane. But these people have like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

15:43Dustin Furman:Yeah. Dave, I can't even listen to Dave Ramsey anymore. I haven't in years because these people are so fucking stupid that Colin that I can't even believe it. Like the reason I like John Deloney, who is from his network, who is the psychologist that talks about like, you know, relationships and shit like that is like, at least there's a subjectivity to a lot of it. It's like, Dave, I make$40 ,000 a year and I ran up$150 ,000 in credit card debt. It's like, and I got a car loan for an$80 ,000 car. do you want to hear one of the craziest things about credit card debt in the United States I just read this last night the median credit card debt per person in the United States zero zero dollars do you know what that means for people that have credit card debt do you have any idea how bad it gets once you go past the median for people because the average is four thousand dollars a person if the median is zero uh oh credit card debt.

16:42Dustin Furman:I'll say one thing, no matter how poor I ever was. And I was really poor when I got out of college, I never had credit card debt. Never. And I made fucking dick. And I literally, as I've said, I explained on the show, ran out of money multiple times out of money, totally out of money. Right. I just always felt like I knew better. I don't know why, like a lot of people find themselves in a position sometimes, but like sometimes you see the things that people run up and you're like, man, I don't know what you're doing. And then you see people calling the Dave Ramsey or something and they really don't understand anything they don't understand APR they don't understand compound interest they don't understand you know capitalized interest they don't understand any of it and it's like damn dude there's that other guy too uh Caleb Hammer oh yeah Caleb Hammer he's he's more he I watched him when he was like irrelevant it's really I told you I was like it's funny see I was probably one of his first 10 ,000 subscribers on YouTube or something.

17:35Dustin Furman:And the thing that he does that I think is very subtle, it's not so subtle if you watch a lot of it, but is he is outing the people that take advantage of the system. You know, everyone on that show has military disability. Like, and then you find out they served in, you know, in Ramstein for two years in Germany and did nothing. And then and they have and they have 75 percent disability for the rest of their lives, whatever. it's like you're a fucking full of shit dude that's the shit that gets he gets me mad when i watch that um because uh oh my god find it guys be careful out there with your finances it's very important it's very important live within your live below your means if i want to give you a recommendation live below your means be safe you don't want to be fucked up with money especially in this age of inflation because you're going to get fucking inflated into dust if you will in some case in some case getting the debt early is actually good as long as you're if things are being inflationary as long as you are confident you'll have a job and i don't know how anyone can have that confidence in this age of ai yeah yeah did you read that thing that was going around from that guy that worked at one of the he like retired from or quit an AI company and went to write poetry and said everyone's in real trouble.

18:58Dustin Furman:Did you see this? Oh, the thing, it went around on Twitter. Yeah.

19:02Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I read it, but I'm not, I'm not on board as that guy is. Maybe he's somewhat right, but honestly, what do I know? I don't really know anything,

19:11Dustin Furman:but it sounded a little alarmist. I'm curious to see how this all goes. I'll say that. Yeah. Very curious. All right. Welcome to Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast. It's good to be here with you guys today. Thank you for tuning in, as you always do, for almost 400 episodes now. We come to you live each and every week. You can get us three days early and ad-free over on Patreon, patreon.com slash last-handmedia. Early ad-free access to this show and every episode of every show we do in our network, so there are a bunch of other shows in our network that we're not on that cover Xbox, Switch, the games we're playing, and so on and so forth.

19:50Dustin Furman:So please do it, Nintendo, of course. please check that out oh i already said switch um what else discord access rss feeds spotify access so on and so forth sacred symbols plus is another big perk we do that each and every week it's a supplement to the show where we do deep dives and review discussions and interviews and so on and so forth just did a really great conversation quite lengthy conversation um or was it lengthy maybe last week's was the lengthier one uh with hoag about ubisoft and about the structure of Ubisoft and moving forward, Vantage Studios, these creative houses they've created and how they've gotten to this point.

20:26Dustin Furman:That's a really great conversation. People like we spoke with your friend, Evan Miranda, at his local game shop there in Butler, Pennsylvania. Look forward to that as well. Check that out. Our Kingdom Hearts conversations in there. Games will start coming out of real consequence. And so I assume the review discussions will begin in earnest soon enough, probably with Resident Evil, I would imagine would be first. although I did want to get a high guard thing going no one was really interested in that and there was something else that came out where I was like maybe people are playing this but I don't even remember what it is so it couldn't have been that important.

20:58Dustin Furman:Sacred streaming continues in fact we'll be sacred streaming today when we're recording this episode so you will have already seen it because there's going to be a state of play and we'll integrate the state of play news later into the show as well so fear not about that but you can check out all the sacred streams on YouTube on our YouTube channel Moriarty Crush Jaffe returns on Monday see what happens flying real close to the sun with David Jaffe. A lot of fun. Xbox developer direct we did recently as well. We did Mega Man playthroughs, the Metacritic draft, and so on. Michael Welter wrote in and said, Colin, am I crazy or did you guys ever end up doing the Sacred League hosted by Chris?

21:32Dustin Furman:He seemed excited about his questions and it just never happened. I feel like that was forever ago now. I mean, I tried to push this for a while. I'm going to blame it on Dustin. Sure. Ultimately. Yeah.

21:45Colin Moriarty:You don't want to mention the stream I did Monday?

21:48Dustin Furman:Oh, yes. The stream. I tuned into that and I was laughing because I loved that the character was just smoking a cigarette. I didn't know like what that was all about, but I just thought that was hysterical. Thank you for handling that, by the way.

22:02Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it was no problem. We played RV there yet. It was fun. Yeah. We got a lot of feedback about doing a friend slop game. A lot of good feedback. Good. Some negative feedback. Steam didn't do well, but we had a great time. we'll maybe do it again sometime if colin needs time off maybe a different game uh but yeah not my friend brandon joined in we were gonna have lock unreliable lock that's what i like to call him he's a piece of shit he's a piece of shit failed on me so uh but we had brandon in and he was great chris was there brad was there it was a fun time and i highly recommend the uh the replay if you haven't watched it it was really fun uh we i was just clicking into um

22:47Dustin Furman:our live channel just to see how it did because it's almost a 10 000 views which is great that that's that's as good as our lower end things that i've done like metal eden you know um right ball pit there are 25 people waiting for the state of play stream already you got to go do something they just have a tab open yeah it's too much it's too much it's too it's too much too too much devotion there yeah exactly you guys are too dedicated to the show please stop um by the way i do appreciate you doing the stream um you had kind of gotten half the story out i think to the audience which was i needed to work on lilymo stuff which is true we are gonna go gold soon so i need to get my shit done um and i have been and and the game is awesome i can't wait for people to see it it's it's i've been playing a ton of it and it's uh saint slayer and it's uh it's so fun and it's it's it's so deep it's really interesting what they've been doing but there's something else that came up too which is that i was supposed to be doing that over the weekend but my mom uh fell ill with a fairly serious ailment she had a burst appendix uh they didn't think it was burst until they took it out and uh and they realized it was burst but it was all fucked up and my mom's 75 years old so um appendix surgery is if your appendix burst it's really bad but appendix surgery is fairly mundane it has been for like 100 years um but because of her age and then because of like what ended up happening afterwards it's like damn you know a little brush with mortality as it were and i've remarked many many times especially when dagan and I did knockback, which was like, I've just kind of avoided that stuff over the years, luckily.

24:31Dustin Furman:And eventually you have to kind of confront that more scary stuff. So it wasn't only that I couldn't do the stream on Monday because I needed, so I was supposed to do the limo stuff for the weekends and I couldn't do any of that stuff really. Cause I was with my mom and we were dealing with all that. Um, and so, yeah, it was a combination of both of those things, but thankfully everything's fine now. I just saw her yesterday. She says, hi, she appreciates everyone reaching out. Cause I tweet, I asked her, I'm like, can I tweet about you? So maybe get, get you some love from people and make you feel good at a time like this and uh people really showed out so i i appreciate that and uh yeah she's doing well now so so yeah thank you for covering that because there was just no way i could deal with all that at once uh time wise dude that's that's so great have you ever

25:11Chris P.:have you ever had this thought by the way like i feel like this is a pretty common thought but i've actively thought about like what if i just get rid of my appendix now yeah yeah i mean what i just avoid this altogether because what is it what is it really doing for me just kind of sitting in there until it explodes arbitrarily one day with no with no sign like i don't like that idea

25:31Dustin Furman:yeah it's best they don't know what like it's vestigial that's what they call right they don't know what it does yeah i think it's i think it's for like is that the word i'm gonna look for it

25:41Chris P.:i think vestigial yeah i i think it's what i remember is that it's like it's it's for digesting like i think like harsh plants and shit like shit that we don't eat anymore so it's or at least At least that's what I remember reading like years and years and years ago. I could be wrong.

25:56Colin Moriarty:The Cleveland Clinic says once thought to be useless, we now know it helps balance good and bad bacteria in your gut and support your immune system. Don't need it. It says most people can live without it. What is that supposed to mean? Yeah. What is that? Yeah. What? Most people can live without it. Okay.

26:14Dustin Furman:I understand what you mean, Chris. It's what people do like sadly, like with breast cancer sometimes or like if you're like really in danger of getting certain cancers they'll just remove that part of your body um yeah like early if they feel like you're really high danger it is an interesting sort of thing i i always just wonder about just the luck of the draw with all that shit you know there's the body's like an amazing thing it's crazy yeah do you ever think like what is called a bio a biogenesis or whatever like the very like the spark of life and we don't understand it it's crazy that like they're like we don't know how life is created from nothing or not from nothing but from the ingredients of life like amino acids and stuff like that and it's interesting that like we can't go into a lab and create new life and it's interesting that something so complex like we us yeah just operate like it's one of the things that makes me like more religious or more supernaturalistic is like people will be like oh that's the beauty of science and i'm like it is but it's also crazy it is crazy i mean there's there's that thing there's that thing years ago

27:17Chris P.:where they got like I think they they got a neuron in a petri dish to learn how to play pong or something. Did you ever read about that? I don't know. I don't think they were growing like neurons in like literally a petri dish and they had it like wired up to like a chip and it was actively learning how to play pong. Interesting. It was called something like that. Yeah, I can't remember.

27:36Dustin Furman:I read about this ages ago, but yeah, I have it up here now from Genesis Gemini. It's so weird. It is. It is. It is weird, man. Like it's just it's so incredible. But I was talking about this on a show at some point where I was like, it's funny. I don't necessarily believe in intelligent design because one of the things that convinced me that that wasn't so was when I did some research into it and like the body is actually really inefficient. Like if it was designed to do certain things, it wouldn't be like this. like the way veins and all these things like well like like just like yeah something like the optical nerve like runs like really far and then comes back or something like that and it's like if it was made to do that why wouldn't it just go straight it looks like the process of

28:22Chris P.:just like ingredients kind of rejiggered to make sense like i know what you mean but like when you said that the immediate image in my head that popped up is you remember that like image that was floating around a couple years ago but like this is the this is the way that human design this is the way a human should look like in order to perfectly survive a car crash do you remember that yes do you see it in your mind's eye that that in that homunculus man

28:47Dustin Furman:i can't see it like i can't see the apple oh unfortunately that's just the way it goes sometimes yeah well anyway thank you all for the kind words thank you guys for dustin especially for covering that and chris obviously you're on that as well thank you for that too yeah um and uh yeah we'll be back for Moriarty Crush Jaffe and have some good times next week on Sacred Streaming. Merch lastdaymedia.store I think it's going to be time to launch that new merch soon.

29:14Colin Moriarty:I just thought about

29:15Dustin Furman:that the other day because I was like, oh, I kind of

29:17Colin Moriarty:forgot about that.

29:18Dustin Furman:Maybe for episode 400, we can try to figure something out for that. I mean, not to have it ready to go, but maybe a preorder or something like that.

29:23Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah. Yeah, we can do that.

29:25Dustin Furman:I feel like, I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking it, but I feel like this is going to be a big one. Maybe not. Maybe a little fucking die on the vine. I don't know. But I think hopefully people will get it. We'll see what happens.

29:37Colin Moriarty:Yeah. Sacred Symbols is sponsored by Factor. I love cooking, but let's be honest, it's not always convenient. Ordering out can get expensive and unhealthy. So that's why I love Factor. Eat well without the planning or the cooking. Factor has quality, functional ingredients, including lean proteins, colorful veggies, whole food ingredients, and healthy fats. They're meals that fit your goals and schedule. healthier eating calorie management and more protein with over 100 rotating weekly meals it's easy to keep things fresh and delicious throughout the winter always fresh never frozen and ready in about two minutes with no prep no stress as i said earlier i love factor because while i love to cook sometimes you just need a healthy convenient option and factor fits that roll perfectly.

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30:47Chris P.:Why have we asked our contractor we found on Angie.com to be our kids legal guardian? because he took such good care when redoing our basement that we knew we could trust him to care for our kids, all eight of them, should something happen to us. Are you my dad now?

31:03Dustin Furman:Uh, no, sorry, I do basements. Connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find pros for all your home projects at Angie.com. All right, let's get into some topics of discussion. We'll get into the news. We'll obviously cut the state of play stuff in. We'll record that later. And then we'll end with what we're playing and six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas from the audience. But I begin with a sorrowful comment, but it needs to be made trying to get away from these. But because we we personally know this person, I definitely want to acknowledge this.

31:37Dustin Furman:Astro Parra King wrote in and said, hi, crew. I understand that the write in is late, but I hope it will make it onto the show. It did. It's the very last one we got. I wanted to express my love to a community member and close friend, Sean Mason. he recently experienced a loss in his family and wanted to convey the community's love and appreciation for him Sean is an integral part of our community and I wouldn't have made many of my friends without him we love you buddy and we're here for you during this difficult time so yeah Sean Mason is a teacher and an athlete but he's also a big fan of last day made a big supporter of ours and I would say one of the pinnacle kind of known members like known fans that's like in the community and very helpful and doting on people and whatnot and uh his mother passed away um which is uh unthinkable and horrible and i know he's very close to her um and so yeah we we wish him the very best i reached out to him privately uh i got it so i asked dustin for his number you ended up getting it for me but then when i put it in and i got it from astra that's the funny part oh oh that's that is funny and when i when i put it in i'm like oh i already have it oh and i went and looked and i'm like oh we we tweet we texted like a few years ago about something else like something

32:52Colin Moriarty:random was it when you were interviewed by him for his class that might have been what it was

32:57Dustin Furman:yeah i think we put that on youtube yeah if you want to yeah anyone's interested um and uh so i was like oh we've already texted so that's good so it's not so weird um because like it's like i don't but i texted him you know we would personally talk to him because i was just like this is such a horrible thing and uh and he's a really good good sweet person so yeah we're wishing him the very best please keep him in your prayers and your thoughts whatever yes whatever makes sense for you epstein islands cartographer wrote in said colin for crying out loud the next time chris has a cold or allergies please threaten physical violence once he sniffs more than three times p.s if you read this on air i know chris will follow it up with what do you want me to do the answer is mute your mic and blow your nose christ chris some people had took umbrage with your illness last week yeah i'm somewhat sensitive to that stuff and i feel like i was maybe it's just because i'm running the show and i'm not really paying the closest attention to your

33:50Chris P.:little quirks but i didn't notice i thought i was being pretty good about it but i guess not i don't know we'll see well here's the here's what i will say it's like you're complaining about this when the Dow is over 50 ,000. That's crazy. It's unbelievable. Maybe get some priorities there, but it's hysterical. No, I'll be I'll be better about it. Like I really actually when that when I'm going through shit like that, like when I'm like stuffy or like sniffly or whatever, I'm like very cognizant of that kind of thing. So like I try actively to like move away and like good gates on them. It probably would have been worse.

34:28Chris P.:It's a little awkward from like the way that I have everything set. Like the way I have everything set up is pretty ideal for everything else, except for being able to like, kind of like mute on command, you know, like, cause I kind of got a, it's, it's a little out of the way. So like, I just try to like move away, but yeah, I'll be cognizant of it next time. And mute. easily. Oh, ew. I was, I didn't like that. That actually felt eerie. That made like, that made like the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Oh, good.

34:56Dustin Furman:I like it. Well, Ari Aster for you.

35:04Dustin Furman:Epstein Allen's cartographer. Thank you. I I've said on the show that the last few years I've developed randomly like some sort of allergy to something. I have to blow my nose every morning when I wake up and stuff. It's like unheard of. I wasn't really a nose blower. You would do it when you were sick. I kind of hate it, but it feels good to do. You know, it does feel good. Just get it out.

35:26Chris P.:I know what you mean because like at a certain point i developed allergies and i remember i i cognizantly remember actively learning how to blow my nose because i i because i didn't have to do it until so late in my life relative like i was probably like eight or nine or something right but i remember like actively like what do you mean blow your nose like what is this like what are you saying i didn't actually understand same thing i same thing i feel about whistling now like i can't whistle now still can't you know never learned how don't understand it quite frankly

36:00Dustin Furman:not great at it yeah great at it my lips are too dry yeah i can't figure it out i'm looking at him i'm like trying to yeah it's i can't do it my my mom could do like the whistle with like the

36:14Chris P.:the finger that's like very like oh the faint yeah very startling like what the fuck

36:23Dustin Furman:you can imagine like our caveman ancestors doing that to like call out to each other while they're hunting or something very cool yeah or like the uh the religious yeah exactly exactly right um have you ever seen the videos of like children getting sinus infections i've seen a couple of these and like doctors like blow into their nose or their mouth or something to like make it come out like because the babies don't have like the balloon thing yeah i don't know like i don't know yeah i don't know exactly what it is oh because like the babies don't have the strength it's not not even anything serious like they just don't have the strength to like get the shit out and like i've seen it like where the guys like blow and like this huge shit comes out of their nose or whatever and i'm like damn dude i think it was like one like a chinese guy i was doing it like an over in china some baby the baby stopped crying there there is a product that you can it's like a little squeeze like saline saline is that what that isn't yeah it's kind of like that and it

37:20Colin Moriarty:you know sucks the boogers out but i've seen another product where it's actually something that it has some kind of filter and you use your mouth to suck air to get the snot out of a baby's nose and i'm like no yeah that's i've seen that i'm gonna love the baby with every part of my being but that's that's not happening i'm not using my air to suck out i don't care if there's a filter or if there's like some kind of system here but i know you got to eat it yeah i can't

37:56Chris P.:just i can't just a tube that's the rule i can't think of a more dog shit interaction yeah that's like that's pure trash yeah i would never suffer a baby figure it out taking that

38:10Dustin Furman:learn i learned how yeah it's like when a baby's like a baby bird's breaking out of the they say not to help the baby out of the because it's got to become strong enough to break out of the the shell it's the same thing here like you got to get that out you'll figure it out yeah it's all nolasco wrote in and said good day gentlemen chris i've been seeing your social media post but i need to hear you talk about how great that super bowl halftime show was for me it was much better than expected from the taco stand in la to the kid being woken up at the party dustin and colin as caucasian men i thought i thought we already settled that i wasn't caucasian that i was in fact black did you feel the hate or did you guys tune into the all-american halftime show thanks for everything fellas uh so super bowl did you guys watch the super bowl yep and uh not a very good game yeah it was it was okay at the half nine nothing like can i Yeah, good.

39:00Colin Moriarty:I thought I had a sports thought. Oh, sports. Once I wanted to throw it out to you. I was like, if this continues, could we have a situation where the kicker is the MVP? Yeah. I looked it up. That happened in the 70s. And then I thought they still should have given an MVP to the kicker.

39:15Dustin Furman:I agree because he I think he tied the record right for the most fields or broke the record for the most either tied or broken, but he scored most of the points. And so I actually agree. It would have been a very good. A lot of people are saying that there should have been a defensive player on the Seattle that should have gotten it. but there. Yeah, I agree. It was kind of a, it was, it was a pretty lame game. I thought, but, but here we're, we're, and by the way, I always, I often think the Superbowl is anticlimactic. I think the championship games that lead into the Superbowl are, as I said last week, just so much better because they're home.

39:46Dustin Furman:The crowds are nuts. They mean everything to get there. Once you get to the Superbowl, it's so pageant. It's a, it's such a, it's not even the game is like, who cares for a lot of people? Yeah. Um, so we want to talk about the Superbowl halftime show. Chris, this man is bad bunnies from your bad bony is from your, is from your native Puerto Rico. Yeah. Uh, what did you, what did you think of the, uh, the halftime show? It seemed like people liked it. It was a little divisive, I guess, but.

40:16Chris P.:Yeah. So, I mean, I, I actually, I wasn't going to watch the game cause I just, I never do. But then my mom was like, do you want to watch the game? Do you want to do FaceTime and watch the game? oh that's nice because uh she wanted to tune in for the halftime show it's a big deal for uh puerto rico to have something like that happen so i was like you know what all right fine i did like a free trial for youtube tv and i was watching it and i don't know much about bad money to be honest like i i heard a little bit of his music a long time ago and it's it's very club oriented so like it wasn't necessarily like the stuff that i would like look up but i did i do remember that his last album was actually like very very good and i would hear shit from it all the time and i actually that That's the only one that I actively listen to.

40:56Chris P.:So I had some kind of knowledge of this guy. And I did like some of the stuff that he made. But I really wasn't expecting much out of the halftime show just because I didn't really know what it was going to be. And so, yeah, like I was about 14 minutes or so. I thought it was really cool. I thought it was really like the set design was awesome. I thought the song choices that he made were really good. I thought the start and the end of it were solid. The fact that they had a real wedding. and that was like an actual wedding on stage was pretty cool um they had a lot of new york like staple people there um lady gaga shows up and i'm a big fan of lady gaga too so that was which was very funny that she was there she's like just the one she's clearly not not puerto rican in any way but it's just like yeah we accept it this is fine uh but i thought it was a good show i thought it was fun i didn't understand a lot of it because I don't speak fluent Spanish.

41:53Chris P.:I got the gist of most of it. And some of the songs that I did recognize, I knew the words to and stuff. But I thought it was a good vibe. It reminded me of being home. It was really cool. My mom was like thrilled about it. And that made me happy. So it was like a nice, it was a good vibe. And then the game came back on and then it was kind of boring again.

42:11Dustin Furman:Yeah, the game kind of got blown open at some point.

42:14Chris P.:Yeah, it was kind of over. I kind of called it really early at a certain point. Like I understand that I didn't know that much about how the game works, and I'm sure that there were ways for the Patriots to catch up. But at a certain point, I was like, this is kind of over.

42:30Dustin Furman:Yeah, I think Seattle understood that the Patriots were not going to score very much and that they could just play good defense and kick field goals and kind of just be patient. No mistakes, you know, no hero ball, as they would say. So yeah, no turnovers, anything like that. Dustin, what did you think? Did you get to watch the game

42:49Colin Moriarty:or did you did you not tune in uh i watched the game uh and saul asked did i feel the hate and it's like yes absolutely i felt i mean honestly i felt like a minority i got to turn into the all-american halftime show you know i have to self you know we gotta have our safe space yeah uh but no the bad bunny halftime show great performance like all like the there's the pictures of like their the trees were people walking on and off the stage which was kind of cool i don't really like bad bunnies music so but i can respect the performance you know and the and the show of it all you know no problem with that i did you know he mentions this all american halftime show i've watched i've been seeing the clips from it and it's it's it's awesome in its own uh its own way pretty entertaining yeah i hadn't i saw a few because i don't really

43:48Dustin Furman:even know i don't know i don't know who any of these people are really anymore even the people on the all-american one the when i see like a coachella poster i'm like come on man what is like these are all made up acts like i've never heard of these people um and then you look them up and they have like you know 15 million monthly listeners on spotify or whatever and it's just just a bunch of so i i uh you know i my sisters are really into like the the the halftime show they like watching that i remember so we always pay attention to it and uh i thought it was it was i thought the production of it was really good um i understand people saying like it's in spanish that's like 10 of the united states speak spanish um what about everyone else but it's like opera is in italian you know a lot of people like k-pop i don't know that i'm really

44:38Chris P.:that offended by that uh the thing the thing to me about that is that like at live shows if i don't know the band even if they're speaking english i'm like i don't know what they're saying right exactly that's true i mean so like i just don't i that was always kind of like a hollow problem

44:53Dustin Furman:for me like you're you're there for the vibe and it's also not foreign like puerto rico is part of the United States. That's not common knowledge, Colin.

45:04Chris P.:It's very, very uncommon knowledge, apparently.

45:08Dustin Furman:Yeah, I don't know what, well, I mean, the schools are just failing. I mean, we know that, but, and I feel like Hispanics, there's like a, it's like, it's like, it's like the ancestors of slaves. It's like, there's a real presence in America. like America, America is partially Hispanic, you know, that's just the way it is. We took a bunch of Mexico in the 1840s, you know, California and Texas and all these different places where, and I'm not saying that they're, you know, the Spanish were indigenous to those lands. They weren't. What I'm saying is that like the, the, the intersection of these cultures means that it is a piece of America.

45:49Dustin Furman:So from that perspective, I didn't really give a shit. I, I, the one thing I will say about the alternate one is that, and this goes into what I was saying, like people busting my balls with Craig, you know, stuttering Craig's game award show, whatever, is like I kind of like people taking swings and trying something. You know, like I think it's cool that someone was like, we're going to put money up and try to make our own halftime show because we don't agree with X, Y, or Z. Like, it's not for me, just like the game award, the new game award thing is not for me or whatever, but I'm like I kind of like that people try to do things.

46:21Dustin Furman:So I don't I don't mind it now. I think a lot of people think that I would be a Kid Rock fan because I like rap rock so much, but actually I've never liked Kid Rock. And we've talked about that in the past. It's not even him. Like I have no problem with him. In fact, I find him somewhat impressive from a entrepreneurial standpoint. He's worth an enormous amount of money. Like he's very, very rich, like hundreds of millions of dollars, not from music, you know? Certainly not from his. Well, I mean, he has, I mean, he made a lot of money for music too, but sure but yeah i just um my hockey coach in high school was a big kid rock fan and he used to pick me up to go to practice and stuff and i'd always have to listen to him i'm like i just hate this shit and he used to be and at the time because new metal and rock record were like contemporary and he's like but you like this this this i'm like i don't know i just don't i just don't like this like there's something about it i don't like so so i as i even that i have a bias for kid rock like i'm like i don't really even like kid rock i just think uh I think that that from what I understand that stream did well enough where like I bet you it happens again and other people start doing it like there's some way to wedge in like there's the halftime show the halftime is so much longer in the Super Bowl than it is in a real game and so like there's enough time to like get people to go and then come back and as I understand the numbers show that people did leave and watch it so from that to be fair from a business perspective it still did really well i mean it's almost like you know whatever but i'm like yeah there's something there's some juice here from an entrepreneurial point of view i think so i was that's where i got interested in it because you can kind of leverage the super bowl use all of their marketing right and then just kind of get people to segue via social media or whatever to your shit so from that perspective i kind of i kind of dug what they did i i think i agree i can

48:05Colin Moriarty:respect the idea of you know wasn't it the biggest stream in the history of youtube or something

48:10Chris P.:a lot i don't that's what they said that's yeah they said fundamentally no way that's true

48:15Dustin Furman:yeah like i don't know what it would have like there must be be things i think some of the bigger

48:20Chris P.:ones is like there's like a not world series but there's like soccer games that stream those are like huge old like the idea that i saw that play but i was like what the fuck are we just lying

48:30Colin Moriarty:now that's so crazy but my thing is just what i think is so funny about it and i really don't I mean, I guess this is inherently political, but I just view it as funny is that it's like you do this alternate stream and then you have a guy that's just whining the whole time. Like it's a big wine fest about like, oh, I drink my beer. I can't drink my beer. I can't. I just want to walk my dog. Did you have you seen that? Colin told me about it. Now I'm seeing it everywhere. And I'm like, that clip is crazy because it's dude.

49:02Chris P.:that song is just like catch my man yeah walk my dog and it's like you can do all of these things right you're you could actively be doing these things instead of doing what you're doing like no one's ready so it just comes like yeah i think it's weird i would respect it it's fine to do like there's a history of like random during the halftime show shows like this is not the first time this has happened i guess the it's the first time that it's happened for like an explicitly political reason i guess as far as i can recall but there's always been like i feel like i remember does the puppy halftime or that they do the whole thing and like there's there's there's other things like that i feel like i remember there was like a maybe not nickelodeon or like cartoon or something i remember there was like a specific halftime show that was like oriented towards kids at some point like i remember like it's it's a common not common but like it's a precedented thing to have like another thing instead of the halftime show so it's not necessarily that that's like weird it's just like the impetus it's just like we don't like this american who's speaking spanish even though by the way bad one he's been at the halftime show before oh he performed like someone else he was on stage with like shakira oh shakira and he spoke spanish and that set too and nobody had a problem with so it's like i don't know man it just comes across shakira i guess she sings and

50:21Dustin Furman:she's not even american is she no well no isn't she like from south america that's that's another

50:26Colin Moriarty:There's been so many non-Americans to perform. That's what I'm saying. So they speak English. Yeah. Yeah.

50:31Chris P.:That's true. Yeah. Cause a lot of, a lot of the complaints come across as like an authentic and fake. And it's like, if you want to do something else, that's fine. But I do think if you're going to do something else, I do think it has to, you got to come out with a better message than like, if you're, if you're swapping between the halftime show and the turning point one, it was like, it was like people dancing, having a good time celebrating. getting married like it was like a celebration of like being people and then it goes over to like i just want to drink my beer it's a wild juxtaposition and it comes across as like a little bit lamer like they could have had country singers there that were like just high energy and really cool and interesting but like they just kind of didn't i didn't know who that guy was i'm sure he's a fine i don't know i'm sure he's a fine guy like whatever but like it's a weird song to play it like at a high energy sports thing that you pre-recorded and still somehow managed to desync

51:28Dustin Furman:yeah the desync on bah with the bah i saw you know i was like oh no dude chris we need derrick

51:35Colin Moriarty:to make a gay version if you don't think he's already doing that it's your i thought about that like with the day i saw it i'm like i need the gay version from derrick

51:46Chris P.:bad he's like he's he's cracking at it i saw that and i was like i didn't even have to ask because i like i saw it it's just like it's so easy because even i was thinking i even i was thinking of like ways to do it i texted him i was like yo it's and he's like don't worry yeah big minds are on this right now big minds the finest minds really finest finest minds but yeah i loved i loved it i thought it was cool i get i get why there would be like a barrier because uh if you want to understand what's being said i guess it would be kind of tedious to look it up but like it's live music i never really i never concerned myself with that stuff but i get i get if that's uh i some people's main thing like when kendrick was on stage i kind of didn't know most of what he was like i knew some of those songs but like i didn't know every word of them

52:29Dustin Furman:yeah i agree i agree i'm i'm i think i i think i i'm in the same boat as you i uh i did like the very broad way or like it's not even broadway just like the the stage play kind of presentation of it i thought was kind of cool close it reminded me of it reminded me of in the heights

52:46Chris P.:which is like a oh yeah uh like a lin-manuel miranda like broadway show about like washington washington heights in uh in the bronx and stuff it's it's it was cool i shout out by the way that he he managed to draw attention to the power grid problem over there in like a pageantry kind of way like he had people dancing on the poles and they were like sparking and shit like it's like this is cool like I like anything that like can convey something but it's not like explicit so it's like it's kind of like there for people who know and for people who are interested but it's just set design for everybody else it's I like that stuff he's an interesting guy I think I might delve a little bit further in that's the idea I mean that's why you do it because it's weird like artists like that are weird to me because it's like sometimes I'll hear a song by them and I'll look up the lyrics and it's like oh this is beautiful it's like a really like beautiful song and then the next one is like partying yeah you know so it's kind of like it's a weird juxtaposition but yeah i kind of like the guy now more than i did before so which

53:47Dustin Furman:i guess is the point so that is the point football's over now so um what's done is done now dustin i was thinking too because i think you're the one who introduced me to the uh oh we bring up something why are you gay why are you gay i don't know if it's the same one but i saw the same guy but i saw a video where it was like have you seen this video where he's like he's asking if if you if you're gay and you fall asleep for a long time do you have you seen this what and it's like these two guys he's like did you did you sleep for 12 hours straight or 12 hours

54:21Dustin Furman:wait i'm guessing he's just like you are gay i didn't think it was the same person and then i read something where i'm like oh that guy kind of does skits now yeah i'm like shit that might

54:33Chris P.:be that guy you know um i know i know that guy's been riding riding that meme for a while there's one video i saw i don't know who it was some people in the in the comments or in the you know who are listening might know this but it comes across my feed every now and again and i always forget to save it but it's these two guys on a podcast and it's like i will and it's this guy going i will snap my fingers and you will not you will forget that you are ever gay and he goes like what exactly yeah and it's such a great bit i'm like damn i wish i had thought of that

55:05Dustin Furman:but some good bits out there you know final inquiry before we get into the news comes from trent miller he says hello fellow kids did you all see the man break down in tears because he's going to miss gta 6 after being arrested for killing his girlfriend what game would you would you have that reaction to colin would it be the new megaman chris perhaps a hypothetical splinter remake dustin the release of the finale of one piece this video uh is really funny i got it from the independent over in the uk man weeps over missing release of grand theft auto 6 while being arrested for murder of ex-partner a man who murdered his ex-partner wept over fears he would miss the release of it what's the what's with the use of the word partner by the way i'm so sick of this fucking word you know like because it always like to me that means like you were it's a same sex relationship which is fine but now people are just using it it's like just say what it is

55:57Chris P.:i don't like it either actually like this is this is the one example where i'm like probably very

56:01Dustin Furman:woke where i'm like you're appropriating this yeah you're like i don't think you said i don't

56:06Chris P.:know it feels weird for like yeah a straight couple to be like this is my partner it's like that's your that's your wife yeah it's your wife your girlfriend shut up uh robert richens age 35

56:17Dustin Furman:of Luther Street, Oxford, was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 16 years in one month. A minimum term of 16 years in one month for... It's the UK, so I'm surprised they don't just let him out. Hearing it at Oxford Crown Court on Friday, 6 February. The dates, man. After previously pleading guilty to one count of murder, the 35-year-old rang police last May from his home in Oxford and then told them he accidentally killed someone. Despite the efforts of officers in South Central Ambulance Service to save Rachel Vaughan, 40, she died at the scene. Arrest footage released by...

56:47Dustin Furman:Now, I always want to say Thames, but it's Thames. We have to remember that in the English language. Thames Valley Police. Because I remember being a young kid and saying like, oh, Thames River or whatever. And it's like, oh, the fucking Thames River. It's the Thames. And I'm like, I'm sorry, I speak English. And it's the T-H-A-M-E-S. Yeah. Shows Richens telling officers, quote, I'm going to miss GTA and that referring to release of Rockstars Games, adventure game Grand Theft Auto 6 for release in November. So people can find the video. This video has been making the rounds. You guys obviously saw this.

57:17Dustin Furman:Very funny.

57:17Chris P.:yeah it's it is it is crazy to just like if if if if that comes to mind when you're being arrested for something like that it means it's very important to you right like presumably yeah like the most important it's like top of mind right so to think that you spent all this time waiting and you're so close and then you're like i'm gonna kill my girlfriend yeah yeah that's wild yeah hold off on that like you could have just you could have waited at least yeah like you know jesus what's the rush right right right um loser this guy's a real it's like that normick thought of like this guy's a real jerk dustin anything you want to add about this

58:00Colin Moriarty:yeah i he's asking what what our hypothetical reaction like what would have to be the release of one piece i think in prison they let you read books you know someone can get me oh yeah you'll could I could see the finale of one piece in prison so maybe Kingdom Hearts 4 I mean that's kind of the the game that it's like oh I'm gonna miss that you know I I watch you know a lot of

58:26Dustin Furman:fight and argument footage or whatever and people like have phones in prison in jail now I don't know if they're supposed to but it's pretty common I'll tell you that uh so um I feel like like people have tvs they've had tvs forever right in prison but that was not a thing at one time and i wonder how long it'll be before like you're allowed to use the internet yeah it might be cruel and unusual at some point to keep you away from all these things

58:53Chris P.:so i'd argue it's cruel unusual to let you on it yeah you know at a certain point like i feel like one of the benefits of being arrested and put in prison is just not i don't know what's going on on twitter right yeah that's right you can't know it's unknowable it's totally free you're free you have someone you have someone in prison you have someone send you pictures of printouts that you have to read of twitter oh yeah um i don't know i i feel like this is a

59:19Dustin Furman:trap question i wouldn't kill anyone don't have it in me oh yeah that's not the question yeah well

59:25Chris P.:that's not that yeah it's not the spirit of the question but it's interesting to know that when you guys kill someone that you'll have something in mind i will say like if i got arrested for anything before like i think gta would be the game really because it's been so long and it is the biggest thing like i don't think i have a unique answer like a splinter cell remake like i know what that's gonna be it's gonna be an unreal engine version of what i played already

59:49Colin Moriarty:i'm not gonna say like uh oh i'm gonna miss i'm gonna miss beyond good and evil

59:54Chris P.:oh no i'm gonna miss beyond good and evil too he'll be out before it comes out yeah i'm gonna as Star Citizen.

1:00:06Dustin Furman:You've had enough time with Star Citizen, sir. Alright. Trent, thank you for writing in. Why have I asked my electrician I found on Angie.com to bury my pet hamster Nibbles in our yard for me? Because I was so moved

1:00:19Colin Moriarty:by how carefully he buried my electrical wires. I knew I could trust him to bury my sweet Nibbles after his untimely end.

1:00:26Dustin Furman:Nibbles, gone too soon. May he scurry in peace. Hey, sorry about your pet, But I just wire stuff. Nibbles would have loved you like a brother. Connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find pros for all your home projects at Angie.com.

1:00:43Colin Moriarty:Why have I asked my HVAC guy I found on Angie.com to change my grandpa's trachea tube? Because 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.

1:01:01Chris P.:I think we should call it doctor.

1:01:04Dustin Furman:Connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find pros for all your home projects at Angie.com. Let's get to the news. We'll cut in the state of play now. All right, we've cut in here for state of play reactions. Then we'll get you back in the news that we've already recorded. And then we'll be recording after this, but it'll be stitched later in the show. the six questions comments concerns lots and ideas because you never had a chance to do it before we had to go and do the state of play um before we get into what was in the state of play there are by my count 31 games to talk about we don't have to talk about half of them really um because we know about them or whatever but let's get everyone's opinions on what the state of play was all about it lasted about an hour five something like that maybe a little longer yeah i think so um i was really impressed but i'll i'll leave it there for now chris what do you

1:01:57Chris P.:think about this state of play yeah man i thought that was like a great show i i can't think of the last time i was consistently interested uh in the majority of what a state of play showed and also like the caliber of the announcements not necessarily just something that i'm interested in of just like oh you know that's a new ip and that looks kind of cool um a lot of legacy stuff that I just was not anticipating. And big triumphant returns of certain IP that I'm sure we'll get into and solid, like an interesting start with some... I don't know. There was a lot here for me, I thought, and a lot of big things that I just did not anticipate to be here.

1:02:41Chris P.:And some really cool announcements for things that are even just readily available. And I think the biggest thing really is that so much of this was 2026. I'm sure there's going to be things pushed or whatever, but... So I appreciate when a showcase is immediate, you know, and it's not like, oh, hey, look forward to this thing. It's going to be out in six years. Not that there wasn't some of that. I'm sure there's I'm sure there's a couple of these that are going to, you know, be like that. But for the most part, like everything seemed to be 2026, 2026. And it's just like this is this is great.

1:03:18Chris P.:This is exactly what I want out of a out of a showcase like this to be relevant to like the present. and I thought they did a great job. Dusty boy.

1:03:29Dustin Furman:What's your opinion?

1:03:30Colin Moriarty:I told people last night on my stream. I said just because it's over an hour doesn't mean to get your hypes up because these are this is state of play and we really have no idea what we're getting with this. Turns out it was excellent across the board. Even I feel like there was there had to have been something for you there. Maybe you don't like, you know, every game that was announced or shown, but there's got to be something for everybody here. A lot of updates on some pretty interesting, cool-looking games. I didn't expect to see Control Resonant there at all, so it's cool to get an update on that.

1:04:09Colin Moriarty:Some old games as well. Maybe a little too much in some ways with Capcom, where it's like, okay, we get it. Resident Evil is practically days away, but I think the other thing, too, is just the amount of surprises in the show. Some particularly for you, Colin, of course, would get into a good old shadow drop at the end. Good shadow drop. Always feels good. Yeah. So like I feel like PlayStation, like Hermie Holst right now is sitting in his throne. He's like, are you not entertained with this?

1:04:41Dustin Furman:The first, first or second party shadow drop, I think since Entwined came to PS4, PS3, and Vita, which I believe was 2014. that was out of Pixel Opus. That was their first game before they did Concrete Genie. And that was famously dropped, announced and then dropped right at E3, which was massively inconvenient for me because I had to go home from E3 and then immediately review that game. So I didn't have to. I just felt like I should. All right. For me, I feel like this is very easily an A-rated state of play. If you really do have a problem with this run of games, again not everything being for you there are plenty of things on for me in this but if you can objectively see that this was a very high quality very consistent um state of play then i it's as i said on the on the on the stream it's like maybe find a different hobby at this point um because one of the things i noticed was i think i'm pretty sure this is true outside of for loop and i guess depending on how you how you count yote legends there wasn't even any games as a service.

1:05:44Dustin Furman:There wasn't a gotcha game. There wasn't even like really truly a China slop game or like there was a good just variety of quality stuff here. Like I really feel like this was a very deliberate showcase that would have been called a showcase in a different era. And by undercutting the messaging of showcases versus state of play, they have in the short term set a good precedent for themselves in the long term. It's a more dangerous precedent because now people will know and expect that it could be anything. It could be like 20 minutes on one game. It could be 35 minutes with all third party stuff.

1:06:17Dustin Furman:It could be this huge thing like we have now. So this will cause a problem for them later. But for now, I think it was really good. And I thought it was incredibly strong. People in our chat were saying, was it the strongest state of play? And some people were saying was I'd have to go back and study what was in those states of play. But it feels like it. But again, recency bias is a thing. I was I was really impressed with the run of games and there are at least i don't know 20 games for me out of 31 i would say so i'm very pleased very pleased i thought they did a really nice job it was brisk and yet still over an hour because they kept moving few interviews i think they give a little bit more uh they seem to treat their japanese partners a little differently culturally in terms of those guys go on a little bit more yeah but that's fine and I would love to know the work that went into making such a strong showcase because there often are duds like even in the showcases I really love or the states of play or whatever I really love there's always like some fart in the wind and I don't even really know what that is there are games again not for me but nothing seemed like I was like oh that was kind of like there's always some whack random shit yeah I just I didn't feel like there really is any of that this time around.

1:07:38Dustin Furman:Started strong, middle strong, end strong. All right. Let's go through the games, all 31 of them. We can really go over them quickly, I think, with the exception of some of them. I will say there is a 32nd item, which is PlayStation Plus games. I didn't include this in the original news because some of them leaked already because I knew we were going to have a full list of them here from the showcase. That was the or from the state of play. That was the rumor so just so you guys know playstation plus an extra premium so extra and premium tiers get the game the game catalog beginning february 17th the following games will be absorbed into the game catalog for you to enjoy as part of your subscription at either tier again not for the lowest tier ps plus spider-man 2 a huge inclusion if you've not played that for some reason already it would be hard for me to believe that you haven't played that yet but if you haven't there it is uh test drive unlimited solar crown the racing game is joining neva the adventure uh neva i think is yeah the adventure game neva's uh sequel which i guess is a prologue was revealed and is coming out imminently so that is their season a letter to the future is a bicycling game that's coming to both ps5 and ps4 this i thought was interesting because i know people really dig these games monster hunter stories one and two are both being added to the game catalog from Capcom the cooking game Venba which didn't come out that long ago is being added to the list I think I came out last year Echoes of the End is some sort of action game I don't know anything about it Rugby 25 come on come on yeah so there's someone someone in some territory is going to like it PlayStation Plus premium game the PlayStation 2 Wally port is the game that's coming fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at things all right let's get into the games themselves we'll go into the order that they were revealed number one kenna scars of cosmora or kena depending on how you say it that game course of came out what was it early 2021 on ps5 ember lab it's not called kena 2 i have it written here as kena 2 but it's not called that by the way i couldn't find press releases for almost anything but there are playstation blog post write-ups, which are a little less useful because they're a little more verbose.

1:09:55Dustin Furman:But basically, Kenna is returning, very familiar, third-person action with role-playing elements. Looks really pretty. It seems like PlayStation Studios is somehow involved in getting this off the ground. And they say this in the video and in the interviews that we saw, but they say it here, quote, we hope you enjoyed what you saw in the trailer. Partnering with PlayStation Studios has empowered us to craft an even larger world. One built with an emphasis on tightly designed regions, deliberate progression, and a strong sense of adventure. We're super excited to share more in the future and can't wait for you to get your hands on what we've been crafting.

1:10:28So sounds like a timed console

1:10:31Dustin Furman:exclusive for those that care about that. Any interest in this game, Chris?

1:10:35Chris P.:Yeah, I mean, I have the first Kena game and I just never launched it. I don't know. It must have come out at like a crowded time or something, or I just must have been playing other things. But I This was a nice surprise purely because I like when a game like that, like a modest kind of almost flying under the radar kind of game gets a chance at a sequel because I do think oftentimes those types of games have a lot to figure out the first go and I feel like the sequel allows them to really shine. I feel like that used to be so true of a lot of early PS2 and 360 games and things like that where just like you know you build it you figure it out and then you really really build upon what you figured out and i feel like it's like a i feel like it's just a rarer thing now i feel like a game comes out and it sucks and then it's an immediate like toss that you know i feel like there's no real path for something that doesn't smash it out the gate which i mean you know it is what it is but it was nice to see that like i just was not expecting a a sequel to that game.

1:11:41Chris P.:I know it did okay. From what I recall, I would imagine it, it did pretty well from just being that early to the PS five, but I don't know. Like this, this, this made me happy to see.

1:11:55Dustin Furman:Let's see. Yeah, there are no, I'm looking for sales figures. I don't, I don't think they've ever revealed them. Yeah. Yeah. I don't see any here. Ember lab, as i recall dustin was an animation like those are animation guys right this was yeah like yeah

1:12:13Colin Moriarty:there's like a sick majora's mask animation i believe they did on youtube yeah everyone should go check out but the first kind of game i played and i think i got i don't know if i got bored with it but i remember thinking it was cool visually and i like the world if i remember right i remember thinking the combat was like a little clunky something wasn't quite clicking for me but it showed a lot of promise so seeing that there's a sequel and that they're partnering with playstation in their words to broaden the scope make something a little bigger well you know maybe a little better a little cooler i'm in that sounds awesome a lot of times especially with a team like this that i think is kind of their first game yeah that was their first game i think so you know This is like prime sequel, like huge improvement territory.

1:13:06Colin Moriarty:And what they showed looked really, really cute, really beautiful. So I am definitely down to check it out later on.

1:13:13Dustin Furman:Yeah, I'm looking at my trophies because I was like, I just don't. I know I played it, but I just don't remember it. I beat it in. It actually came out later than I thought, because I was like, didn't it come out early 2021? It came out September 2021. So almost a year after the PS5 launched. And I was looking at my trophies and I'm like, oh, Actraiser. the Actraiser revival came out right around this time and that's what definitely distracted me from this so I didn't get to it until late October early November but I did beat it I never platinum did I think I will uh replay it when this come you know because I just I don't know man I just don't recall really very much about it at all in my mind I think I'm getting it kind of confused with that other there's like another arrow shooting action game around that time you know what I'm talking about that might have been a launch game fuck what was that game called

1:14:01Colin Moriarty:I'm gonna find I know what game you're talking about I do not remember what it's called

1:14:04Chris P.:is it god I don't know is it a PlayStation game specifically or no uh it wasn't specifically a

1:14:11Dustin Furman:it might have been like timed on PlayStation what is it the pathless the pathless yes I had to look

1:14:18Colin Moriarty:up the launch I knew it was a launch title that's so funny that's what I'm getting it confused with

1:14:20Dustin Furman:because I was like it was a launch game and that was a launch game that's the sword of the sea guys right yes yeah precisely all right so we have that number two uh is ghost of yote legends we knew this was coming because they had kind of teased that there was gonna be a multiplayer component at some point we didn't know that was gonna be this soon though obviously yote came out just last october and this will be out march 10th this is a free expansion for all owners of ghost of yote um and my old colleague andrew goldfarber wrote about it over on the playstation blog quote Legends is our online co-op multiplayer mode where you'll team up with friends to challenge monstrous supernatural versions of the Yotei 6.

1:14:58Dustin Furman:It will arrive in patch 1.5, free for all of Ghost of Yotei owners. Legends will launch with three mission types. In survival, you can team up with three other players to take down waves of increasingly difficult enemies on one of four maps. You'll fight to control territory on each map. While you control a location, you can activate a blessing, offering you an advantage in battle. But if you lose control, you'll unleash a curse, putting your team at a disadvantage. Each map will have its own unique curses and blessings. In story, you'll team up with another player to tackle a series of 12 missions.

1:15:25Dustin Furman:After completing each set of three story missions, you'll unlock an incursion, which is a large-scale four-player assault on a stronghold belonging to a member of the Yotei 6. Each incursion will culminate in a boss fight versus a giant supernatural version of the spider, the oni, the kitsune, or the snake. As for the other members of the Yotei 6 in April, we'll release a raid putting your team to the ultimate test, where you can expect to take on the dragon and Lord Saito himself. In Ghost of Yotei Legends, you can play as one of four classes, samurai, archer, mercenary, or shinobi. While any class can use a katana and range weapon, they also excel in one of different Ghost of Yote's weapons and combat systems, and each can earn their own unique armor cosmetics as you complete feats through gameplay.

1:16:03Dustin Furman:The samurai can wield the odachi and has access to the widest range of weapon types. The archer can use the yari, which is a spear, as well as carry an additional range weapon. The mercenary has access to dual katanas with a variety of utility-focused abilities, and the shinobi can use the kurasagama, as well as the suite of stealth focused skills. There's a bunch more for you guys to read over there. I'm sorry.

1:16:23Colin Moriarty:That was good pronunciation, Colin, on your Japanese.

1:16:27Dustin Furman:Kusurigima, Kusurigama, did I say that right? Kusurigama?

1:16:31Colin Moriarty:I thought you were native, honestly.

1:16:32Dustin Furman:Oh, thank you. I try. Like me. I'm working on it. So yeah, again, that's March 10th. I think we all said on the stream, and I think like Legends took a while to come to Tsushima, as I remember, and I was, because I was at the PS5 version, right, that it came? no it's ps4 no ps4 no um i feel like it's smart for them to move fast in this era i don't feel like waiting as like very long is a good idea people are still interested in the game it's still selling you could probably sell some more copies get people's friends on board maybe drop the price a little bit um and i imagine we're not going to get an icky island style expansion for this although i think they said they were open to it and the game did sell so maybe they will do something with it but um i wasn't that interested in tsushima i thought it was good I thought it was great, but I wasn't in love with it.

1:17:18So going back to it wasn't tantalizing to me.

1:17:21Dustin Furman:I really loved Yotei in a way I didn't love Tsushima. And so this, even though I'm not super into it, into multiplayer stuff, I think I will check this out. Maybe we'll do it on a stream, the three of us together, and maybe we'll get Brad involved or whatever. So Chris, are you going to check out Ghost of Yotei Legends other than when we stream it?

1:17:35Chris P.:Yeah, I think, I mean, I really liked the first Ghost of Tsushima quite a bit, and that Legends mode was like surprisingly cool. um i appreciate that like it reminded me a lot of like those like mass effect 3s multiplayer component where i'm just like this doesn't need to be here and it's cool that it is because it's quite good um so yeah i'm looking forward to it one thing i'm curious about though like and i wonder if you i wonder if you feel similarly where like i'm looking forward to this i'm definitely going to be checking it out but march 10th that's like five days after marathon yeah that's new both two multiplayer games it kind of reminds me a little bit of um my experience with forza horizon five or like the lat in 2021 where that came out and then a week later halo infinites multiplayer launched early as like a shadow drop and i'm like well you could have i probably could have gotten really into this game if you didn't kind of undercut it so i'm curious disrupted me yeah yeah like i wonder like i wonder about that i don't think there's that much overlap really but like they're very very different games obviously but i would it's definitely going to affect some people so i'm curious as to that strategy but i'm looking forward to checking it out for sure like ghost of shima ghost of yote plays really really wonderfully so that multiplayer space is going to be cool dustin ghost of yote legends yeah i

1:19:02Colin Moriarty:played a little bit of ghost of tsushima legends and i remember thinking it was really cool and And looking back, I wish I had put more time into it because I think in particular, the raid was really awesome. So I don't want to have that happen again with this one. I love that they take the multiplayer in a total fantasy direction, whereas opposed to the normal story is very grounded. And it just feels like Chris was saying, extremely generous, just like last time where it's like, dude, this game doesn't need this at all. In fact, this feels like something they could charge for. I don't want to give many ideas, but to see this come out, be totally free.

1:19:44Colin Moriarty:And assuming it's at the very least as full featured as Ghost Tsushima Legends, I think it's going to be pretty awesome. So and the trailer was cool. I like that you're fighting a crazy versions of the Yotei 6 again. Pretty cool. So I am definitely going to check this out. it is annoying that my friend group is going to be all about marathon yeah when this comes out so we're gonna have to break away for a night or two to check this out sure all right number three is

1:20:14Dustin Furman:uh death death stranding 2 on the beach coming to pc via nixes working alongside kojima productions to port the game uh this is coming out soon march 19th and it will be on both steam and epic game store. According to a blog post, it says, quote, with help from our friends at Nix's software, Death Stranding 2 on the beach for PC will come with a variety of improvements and new features, including NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel Upscaler and FrameGen, as well as uncapped frame rates. Immerse yourself in the world of Death Stranding 2 like never before, with added ultra-wide monitor support, including 21.9 ultra-wide screen for both gameplay and in-game cutscenes for both PC and PS5 and 32.9 super ultra widescreen for PC all in 4K resolution.

1:20:58Dustin Furman:And let's see. Oh, in Death Stranding 2 on the beach, players are given the freedom to take on deliveries and tackle combat challenges however they see fit. Whether you like to go stealthy or charge in guns blazings with a DualSense wireless controller integration, complete mouse and keyboard support, as well as support of 3D audio via Dolby Access, DTS Sound Unbound, or Windows Sonic for headphones, giving players all sorts of options no matter how you like to play. They also confirm in here that there will be new modes and features at launch, and those will be available on the PS5 version as well as the PC version.

1:21:27Dustin Furman:You can connect your PlayStation account to get your trophies if you want and some access to some special goods that will encourage you to do so. And there are, I guess, some pre-purchase options on both Steam and Epic should you be interested in exploring them. I platinumed Death Stranding 2. I'll probably never play it again, or at least for many years to come. But are either of you going to check it out on PC? Dustin, this seems right up your alley. high end PC gaming with Japanese games, right? Perfect. You can flex your muscle and your knowledge of both things at the same time.

1:21:59Colin Moriarty:Right. Yeah, this is actually one that I don't think I need to check out at all, mainly because the PlayStation 5 Pro version of Death Stranding 2 is so good and so beautiful that I'm sure I mean, my PC would be able to run it and have an even higher frame rate. But so maybe years from now when I want to play Death Stranding 2 again, I will check it out hopefully on an even nicer PC someday. But I think this is mainly exciting for people that have been waiting that are PC players. I think Jimmy is in this camp where he loves Death Stranding, but he's like not waiting for the PC version. I'm like, OK, well, God bless.

1:22:42Colin Moriarty:Here it is. And here it is, Jimmy.

1:22:44Dustin Furman:Yeah, about a year in between, a little less. so there's that Death Stranding 2 on the beach to PC via Nix's fantastic game I'm sure it's going to be even better on PC so go check it out number 4 ironically is For Loop which we're seeing again for the first time since it's a reveal and For Loop of course comes from Bad Robot Games is a second party game being published and funded by Playstation and Mike Booth is the chief creative officer of Bad Robot Games and Mike Booth of course is one of the creative leads behind Left 4 Dead at Valve back in the day people seem really rough and mixed on this game I think it looks kind of cool again I don't know that this stuff is for me so I don't want to judge it from that perspective and that's obviously a vital perspective but I don't really know what why people are so down on this I think it's an interesting idea it's a cool person to get in bed with in terms of the pedigree of the original game that he did and I know back for blood wasn't the greatest thing in the world for a lot of people but I don't know.

1:23:43Dustin Furman:I'm a little confused about the reaction to this game, but it seems like everyone hates. And by the way, this is the only true game as a service that they showed the entire time. So Chris, where are you on for loop?

1:23:53Chris P.:Yeah, man, I'm getting, I'm getting the same kind of spider sense tingling from this that like I remember getting from the original showcases of No Man's Sky where like, and it's not the same type of thing, obviously, but I don't know. Every time I see this game, I'm like, I don't something about this like it's I don't even know necessarily what it is but something about this is not clicking like it it looks a little stiff um the the art design is kind of generic like the characters kind of look like Call of Duty Black Ops characters like there's something about there's like a lack of distinctiveness to it um there's like they showed a boss or like some kind of interactable there's like a Rubik's Cube thing that looked cool so there's like interesting ideas there and i think like what they're trying to build from like a design perspective is interesting i just don't know if it's like coming together that that well or i don't know it's it's not it's not grabbing me and i'm kind of a mark dude like i like you know co-op games and especially like four player stuff i love left for dead i think left for dead is one of the like such a such an iconic and and great like jump really is a fucking sick Like it's it's it's it really is like perfect and simple.

1:25:10Chris P.:It's not overcomplicated. There's not really a lot to it, but it's there's just enough to be. I don't know, like it's very special. And so I want to like what I'm seeing. I just I'm I just I'm not grabbed by it. And maybe that'll change as we understand the game more. they obviously like they showcased it in this state of play with the context that they were specifically asking people to come up and you know test it and join up in betas and stuff like that so maybe maybe it's maybe a lot of the stuff that i'm concerned about can be fixed or maybe some of the stuff that i am worried about isn't that big of a deal and it plays better than it looks or because that's always possible too it's kind of hard to tell with these kinds of games so I mean I'm open to it but like yeah I don't know I just I get a weird feeling about it every time I see it I hope it looks better the next time we see it and we can see how far it's come but as it stands right now I'm just kind of not looking forward to this and it really does bum me out because I think again Left 4 Dead is such a great game and I would love to look forward to the next thing that they're doing but just kind of numb on this one personally Dustin do you agree?

1:26:27Colin Moriarty:yeah i think that this game's major problem is in terms of its visuals it looks boring and generic like i just feel like there is nothing that strikes me as like being very visually distinct about this game and obviously that's not everything but we've been talking so much about like live service games and and uh how they look in particular and i honestly like this is way from a visual standpoint less appealing to me than having whatever you know the fortnight look or whatever um i think that it could be cool in terms of the gameplay and the multiplayer and the different roguelike elements to it but nothing they've shown so far has really gotten me like amped up like chris was saying so the the proof for this one is going to be in checking out the the betas and when it comes out and seeing how it actually plays and how the multiplayer is i like that they were talking about how they want you to experiment in the game and that's always something that can be really satisfying in games like this where if you have a moment where you're like wow i can't believe that just worked and so there's an element of that that could be you know combined with the multiplayer aspects that could be really neat so i need to see more i'd like to play it But I'm not amped for it.

1:27:55Dustin Furman:It's funny. I do say with my whole chest, whether or not this game works or not, that I probably would have made this bet if I were Sony. Just because of the person making it and the legendary nature of the game. I mean, Left 4 Dead is what? One of the 10 most famous online shooters ever? I mean, I don't think that's. I don't think that's. Yeah, maybe I could say.

1:28:18Chris P.:I don't know.

1:28:18Dustin Furman:If you don't split, if you split all the Call of Duty games. In other words, like it's got to be in there. I mean, but left for dead was fucking huge, dude. Like that was one of the games I remember even working in journalism where everyone played that game.

1:28:28Chris P.:Yeah, it's not a PlayStation.

1:28:30Dustin Furman:Not getting those games was bad for PlayStation. Like that was a damaging thing for them. So that from that perspective, I'm like, yeah, for loop kind of closes the loop in an interesting way on that whole level of creativity that didn't quite shine through for back for blood. But then again, what do I really know? I personally think the art looks cool. I mean, I, I, again, I'm, I lack from an overexposure to some of this shit. so it's what i always say about marvel dialogue where i'm like i'm not and like why i can tolerate it a little bit more than other people because i'm like well i don't really know what you're talking about you know um there's elements of it that looks there's elements of it that look cool

1:29:02Chris P.:but like you know like that cube thing looks awesome yeah it does it does and that reminds

1:29:07Dustin Furman:me i said it really does remind me of a returnal enemy like the way it attacks with the lines where you would feel like that would be yeah i don't know i don't know and see how it does for people that are curious about it there are a couple of things to say about you being able to play. First of all, if you go to the PlayStation blog post and just look for it at the bottom, there's a link you can click or you can just go to playforloop.com and sign up to play. In the beta, the closed beta will only be on PS5 and PC, but only for North American players. The beta phase will evolve over time and include other people in other geographies.

1:29:40Dustin Furman:So just note that if you're listening from Europe or Australia or whatever, you're not going to be able to check it out right away. But I'm very curious to see what people think of it. And I feel like this is a game that will benefit a great deal from people playing it so yeah very much like marathon did yeah i will say

1:29:54Chris P.:uh the only thing that i will say that i think will not get better i i think i think the name is dog shit i think it's a terrible name i don't know for loop just sucks i don't know it's not

1:30:06Dustin Furman:they were trying to integrate four into the game into the name of the game and it's i get it but yeah i agree with you it's not great it's what i was thinking too about that game 2x ko oh yeah the fighting i'm like that game especially because it's a league of legends game i'm like you named a league of legends fighting game 2kxo or 2x ko whatever the fuck it is like what um yeah so i i agree with you in some way yeah yeah i don't know all right let's see here uh five and six were for capcom games pragmata and requiem we don't need to linger on these games pragmata is coming april 24th there is a gameplay demo is that available now yes oh it's been available that's right i have no interest in playing that um before i'm obviously gonna play the final game but i mean like i don't need the demo i don't want to play that resident evil requiem they insist on showing this game more and more and more and more and more it comes out february 27th enough already but i appreciate the i mean it's gonna sell so well these are huge games resident evil 2 remake i think across all platforms and versions of it sold something like 15 million copies by itself so it's like come on dude that's crazy you don't quite need to push this hard, I don't think.

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1:31:35Dustin Furman: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 number seven was a game for you though chris it comes in the form of legacy of kane defiance remastered which launches on both playstation 5 and playstation 4 on march 3rd this is an old crystal dynamics game of course and what's interesting about this game is as i think in the legacy of kane run i'll have to look but i'm pretty sure this is the final legacy of kane game in the release there's like five of them right because it's like blood omen

1:32:09Chris P.:Blood Omen 2

1:32:10Dustin Furman:Legacy of Kane Legacy of Kane 2 Blood Omen 2 and then this I believe

1:32:15Chris P.:Yeah and then it gets into like Nazgut and then it gets into like the MMO I think that either did happen and died or never happened I can't remember exactly What about Kane and Lynch

1:32:25Colin Moriarty:Where does that fit? Kane and Lynch That was good

1:32:29Dustin Furman:That is a pull man Defiance came out back on PlayStation 2 in the fall of 2003 and interestingly Dustin who wrote and directed it

1:32:42Colin Moriarty:amy hennig amy hennig i was gonna say that i believe this was the game the last game she did be short portion to know your dog ended up making uncharted cool um so go check that out if you want

1:32:53Dustin Furman:chris i know you're probably looking forward to that and of course this leads into soul reaver one and two remastered which came out i think a year or two ago and i think they're doing more right they're doing like another maybe yeah i don't know what's going on i want to try like I am familiar with these games. These are, I don't think even blood omen. I want to say soul reaver. These are like rentals for me, but as I understand, they're kind of different from each other. And there's, and I don't think I, what was it? Was it blood omen that no one likes? Like blood omen is kind of rough.

1:33:21Chris P.:It's a little, it's a little difficult, right? Yeah. Cause it's, I think it's cause if I'm not mistaken, it's blood omen, blood omen to legacy of cane. And then it's legacy of cane soul reaver. And then, and then this next one,

1:33:33Dustin Furman:no, it's blood omen, legacy of cane, Legacy of Cain Soul Reaver then Soul Reaver 2 then Blood Omen 2 right right right

1:33:38Chris P.:yeah yeah I don't know it's it's it's I really only like honestly I only have experience with Legacy of Cain Soul Reaver it was the only game in the series that I'd ever really played I'd never I'd never continued but I don't know it's interesting to see like I never thought I would see Legacy of Cain again at all so it's cool that that exists again and that it's being brought forward. I think it's big for and cool for game preservation to have this stuff, you know, usable on modern machines. I think it's really cool and I'm happy for it. But I have no experience with this version of Legacy of Kayn.

1:34:16Dustin Furman:But I'm curious about it. Dustin, this next one might be for you, maybe? Are you interested in the old PS1 game Brigandine?

1:34:25Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I saw it. It looked kind of interesting, but I don't know much about it. I like Fire Emblem and this had that tactical look to it. But have you played, so you played this before the PS1?

1:34:37Dustin Furman:It's one of those games I rented and copied.

1:34:42Dustin Furman:Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was released right in that era because I feel like it came out that fall. I was in ninth grade and I think in 10th grade, that's when I started doing all the copying and would go to that video store. So yeah, what I think is more interesting about it though is that it was like, I don't know who owns the IP. Atlas published Brigandine in the United States, but I don't know who owns it. And then there was a sequel that came out in 2020 called Legend of Runes Area or Runerzia or something like that. And it was made by Matrix, which was interesting. Matrix is the studio that made Alundra.

1:35:18Dustin Furman:So I was like, and they do like Yu-Gi-Oh or some shit now. So there is that. So they're trying to like get this thing going again, I guess. in some small way what's funny about it is that the artwork is so much more colorful and oh

1:35:36Colin Moriarty:anime that i am do you i've seen this box art a million times for ps1 in like stores and conventions and stuff but i didn't connect the dots because this is so much more retro

1:35:47Dustin Furman:anime look yeah yeah definitely that's what i was saying that's exactly what i was saying like the new one seems to be much more colorful and modern but it what was that what was that Landgrisser is that other random strategy role playing game series that I played a little bit of and that was like using it, but that's about units and stuff like that. This is, I think, about individuals. So that's kind of cool. Excuse me. So that's something to keep an eye on. I don't think I'll play it, but it was probably the most obscure game they showed in the entire run. okay um numbers nine and ten i guess we can go through pretty quickly dead or alive six last round is coming june 25th dead or alive six of course first came out and is the last dead or alive game came out back in 2019 so this is them um revisiting it for the last time a turbo version as it were from uh team ninja and koei tecmo and they also announced i don't think they called it Dead or Alive 7, did they?

1:36:49Dustin Furman:But they said there's a seventh core game in development, which is not a huge surprise. So they're staying fairly busy over there with DOA. Are you guys fans of Dead or Alive? I was saying to you guys, and I'm sure I've told the story in the past that I have such fond memories of renting Dead or Alive. It was either one or two with Dagan because of the bouncy boobs thing. And it wasn't even a perverted thing as much as it was like, we were like, I can't believe this is in this video game. What is going on? We thought it was hysterical because it wasn't hot it was like little triangle polygon things like flicking around yeah that was back in i don't know 96 or 97 or something like that so anything here for you guys or dustin were you hoping of

1:37:28Colin Moriarty:course for beach volleyball beach volleyball man i've i've i've seen that game before but i've never played i've never played a dead or alive game and i'm not into fighting games but uh you know you got to respect it you got to respect the trailer that just had an immediate boob shot in it you know these guys are dedicated gooners yeah these are masters of the craft of gooning let them goon yeah let let them goon goon on uh number 11 was control resonant

1:37:57Dustin Furman:got a little bit of a look at this chris i don't know if you have anything i i did watch it i didn't really want to i think this is about as much as i want to see we only know that the game is coming out in 2026 it has no date yet it looks exceptional obviously it's very different than control in a lot of different ways as well, which I respect that they did that. Not unlike Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2 being quite different from each other. So anything to say here about Control Resonant?

1:38:21Chris P.:Not really, man. I'm looking forward to it. I'm sold. I was sold before they showed it even more. And what they showed just made me even more excited. I love the kind of Gravity Rush-esque kind of perspectives shifts, like moving on walls and stuff. And the melee combat looks cool. I don't know. I'm just on board for whatever it is they're doing. I think Remedy just makes some of the most interesting stuff, especially in the space of what we would call AAA or Polish or whatever you want to fucking call it, just high-quality lookers. So I'm looking forward to it. I don't need to see any more. I'm good.

1:39:03Chris P.:I tried not to look at it, but I don't know. I'm such a mark for Remedy games.

1:39:09Dustin Furman:why I did feel like I wanted to see a little more I guess but like I'm in a place with like Saros or Resident Evil where I'm like I'm not watching this I don't need like I don't know why you're showing me so much of the game even Progmod is getting to that point

1:39:23Colin Moriarty:Dustin anything here for you Control Resident looks awesome I love the like character action switch up for this game the gravity shifting moments the cool skyscrapers that are like melting into like sideways it was pretty nice pretty cool i'm in 100 all right let's see

1:39:47Dustin Furman:we have crimson moon next it's funny i actually found a press release for a game that came out in 2023 from in japan called crimson moon this is not the same game this is a gothic action adventure rpg coming to playstation 5 sometime this year what's interesting about this is that this is coming from probably monsters probably monsters is the development team and the one-time family of developers that was the owner and shepherd of concord and firewalk before selling all that to sony i'm pretty sure they've they might have released one game so far but they've like been around forever and have released nothing so if there's one thing that i'm deeply skeptical of with these guys it's just them being involved in it because there's obviously something deeply wrong or was deeply wrong with whatever they're doing over there but this game crimson moon looks pretty good.

1:40:32Dustin Furman:They describe it as a quote action adventure RPG set in a gothic world full of angels, demons, and ancient gods. Players will embody the Nephilim, a human-angel hybrid serving the order of the Crimson Moon tasked with reclaiming the cursed city of Gildanark from the evil that infests it. Looks like a bloody action RPG. You can play by yourself or you can play with a friend, which is cool. That's fairly clear in the trailer, though they do confirm that. Again, my skepticism of the game just comes from the inclusion of probably be monsters that might be unfair but i don't know how unfair that is i mean they've raised an enormous amount of money we went in all of that when we talked about concord about how much money they raise and how they just shut shut down team after team after team after team they still are just sputtering along so hopefully this uh this becomes a hit for them are you guys interested in this either of you i want to say this in the nicest positive way

1:41:22Colin Moriarty:possible this looks like like a ps3 game not in terms of it's like graphical quality there's something about maybe ps2 where it's just like hey you're some knights and you it's real gory

1:41:36Dustin Furman:there's metal music playing it reminds me of it reminds me of a melee evil west yeah yeah yeah so it looks it looks fun um i am curious about the soundtrack if that's just going to be like

1:41:51Colin Moriarty:you know the heavy metal approach is going to be is that something they just did for the trailer or is that going to be like, is it going to have a Doom-like feel to the soundtrack of the game? So, looks cool though.

1:42:05Dustin Furman:The next game they showed was Beast of Reincarnation. We've seen this game quite a bit at this point. This is from Game Freak, the Pokemon studio. A game not anything like Pokemon, of course. We have a release date of this now for PS5. August 4th, so this summer, later in the summer. And I gotta say, I think this game looks fucking sick. Like, I... I'm totally sold on checking this game out. I think it looks fun. I think it looks quirky and unique, playable. And it's one of those games that I really don't want to see any more of. And I kind of just want to see what Game Freak can do. Obviously, these are different teams internally and Game Freak has made other games other than Pokemon.

1:42:41Dustin Furman:We've frankly, we always bring up a Tempo. But this game looks like it has some juice and I would love to see them do something else. It's kind of. It's funny to see them make something so high quality, seemingly high quality, considering frankly the shit that they churn out on a fairly regular basis so but people love that shit and that shit costs like 10 million dollars to make this is probably the most expensive project that they've ever done are you guys am i alone on this beast of reincarnation or are you checking

1:43:11Colin Moriarty:it out i'm checking it out i know we saw this game at the recent xbox developer direct and i don't know what maybe maybe i wasn't paying attention enough but this trailer to me much to colin chagrin looks very sekiro in its combat particularly in the uh parry mechanics uh there's parts that look like the grapple hook from sekiro and that made me made me pretty excited pretty interested in it i thought it looked cool before and i wanted to know more but uh this trailer in particular something about it uh really made me pay attention and i think looks cool i'm excited to see what game freak can do uh when they're not making a game a pokemon game for you know ten dollars and a stick of gum for for nintendo yeah why don't they give them more money i just don't get it guess they don't have to yeah like when will the pokemon audience

1:44:12Dustin Furman:get upset with something like really upset with it i saw some shit from the recent pokemon games where I'm like, this is crazy. Like that people are playing this. No offense. It was so much more charming in the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance era, to be honest. Even the DS era. It's like something missing with it now. All right. So Beast of Reincarnation comes out August 4th. This next one was a nice surprise. This is from Ubisoft. They made an appearance. Rayman 30th anniversary edition comes out the day that our podcast comes out. So you'll be able to go buy it right now. And I was right, guys, in the podcast, I was like, this feels like a digital eclipse game.

1:44:51Dustin Furman:And it is. They're working with digital eclipse, which is itself owned by Atari. And Rayman, the original Rayman platformer, the Michelle Ancel design one was PS1, as I said, during the stream, a PS1 launch game. So this is a game that goes all the way back. It was on Jaguar and other stuff, too, if you care. It says, quote, here, celebrating three decades of Ubisoft's legendary mascot, this definitive edition lets you play multiple versions of the 1995 game, including the handheld adaptations reformatted for the PlayStation 5. You can also take on 120 additional levels pulled from the bonus level pack Rayman's new levels, Rayman 60 levels, and Rayman by his fans.

1:45:26Dustin Furman:It includes a faithfully reimagined soundtrack by composer Christoph Haral, as well as optional enhanced gameplay features that change up the classic gameplay, such as a 60 second rewind, multiple save slots, instant level unlock, and infinite lives. As an added bonus, Rayman 30th anniversary edition will include a never before playable prototype, giving you an inside look at how Rayman's gameplay was developed. Since it's digital eclipse, there's going to be a lot of accoutrements to the game. And I'm using a French word intentionally, perhaps, including, I think, almost an hour of interviews and legacy footage and all the rest.

1:45:57Dustin Furman:So I think that'll be pretty cool. I'm not a huge Rayman fan. I'm not going to pretend I am. I did love Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends. Like I wasn't much of a Rayman guy like Rayman came to like N64. And then I think the third one was like a fucking PS. Like, what was that? A PS2 game and a GameCube game. It wasn't really until Rayman Origins, which was on Vita and Legends, which was also on Vita. I was like, damn, this shit's fucking great. And I don't know if it's going to be as good as that old stuff. I'm definitely going to go play this this weekend for sure. Absolutely. And I wasn't I'm not a Rabbids guy or anything like that so i don't have much else to say dustin you said you were an early adopter of rayman so are you excited about this this is specifically the first game so nothing from else from the

1:46:42Colin Moriarty:series yet yeah i i mentioned on the stream rayman was the when i got my playstation the two games i got with it were rayman and crash bandicoot 3 so the thing about this game that i remember is that I do. I love the art style of this game. The pixel art looks so good. The music is really good. It is hard as shit, though. I think it was hard as shit then when I was a kid. And it's hard as shit now. So what's funny, too, is that I just recently within the last week watched a YouTube video about the type of stuff that I surf at one in the morning on YouTube about all of the differences between all of the Rayman releases between PlayStation Jaguar and.

1:47:28Colin Moriarty:Game Boy Advance, the DOS version. And surprisingly, there are some significant differences between these releases, particularly in terms of difficulty and music. And so this is pretty interesting. And Digital Eclipse, I've only played the Tetris collection, but it was awesome. It was so good to the point where I was like, man, I wanted to check out the Mortal Kombat version. And I'm not even into Mortal Kombat. From a documentary like preservation standpoint, these are excellent. So I'm going to be checking out, checking it out this weekend. Absolutely. Even though I'm so deep in Dragon Quest, I'm going to carve some time out for this because it'll be very nostalgic.

1:48:16Colin Moriarty:And I'm very curious about some of these other versions of the game, including like Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance.

1:48:23Dustin Furman:Yeah, I'm it's funny. I was feeling the similar thing because I don't give a shit about Mortal Kombat either, but I did when I was a kid. But yeah, the legacy collection is supposed to be really well done. They did the Golden Tee collection recently, which I thought was pretty funny. These guys are always just doing interesting stuff. They did Atari 50, which is supposed to be excellent. I've still not played that. That's supposed to be really good. And of course, they really cut their teeth in the collection space on Mega Man Legacy Collection, which is an exceptional port. And they've done a lot more since then.

1:48:48Dustin Furman:The Disney Afternoon Collection is kind of reemerging right now with Switch 2. so um yeah i'll be checking out rayman 30th anniversary no doubt about it that brings us to game number 15 which is mina the hollower great to see it what a beautiful game as i was saying during the stream and if you played game boy color you just see something so perfect and well executed and very nostalgic but i was a little disappointed about what this was that they are releasing a demo which will be available by the time you hear this podcast and the progress in the demo will carry over to the full game indicating that it's soon and yet they refuse to put a release date on it still just of spring i was a very disappointed in the in the no release date thing um but it is what it is i suppose uh are you either of you gonna play mina when it comes absolutely i played the demo on switch 2 and it was so good i stopped playing the demo

1:49:41Colin Moriarty:wow because i was like i'm in i don't need any more and i won't play the playstation demo either just because i'll wait till it comes out it looks it's just it's it seems so perfectly executed

1:49:53Dustin Furman:I'm really really excited about that alright let's see here what else we can move through some of these a little more quickly probably well number 16 was Neva Prologue that comes out imminently that is launching into the game right that was did we say that that was the original is I think there's a new oh right this is a new one yeah so the original is on PS Plus and this is the new one I don't care about this personally but sure someone out there does number 17 I do want to talk about though that was Yakko Shinobi Ops bringing four player co-op Shinobi Stealth Action to PS5 in 2027, it says. And it's written by author on PlayStation blog, which I think is interesting.

1:50:33Dustin Furman:Just as author. It says in Yakko, quote, in Yakko Shinobi Ops, four players take on the role of Shinobi working together to infiltrate heavily guarded enemy territory. Enemy soldiers patrol every corner, traps lurk in the shadows and dangers everywhere. Only by combating their unique abilities can force Shinobi accomplish their mission. While the game can be enjoyed solo, we believe the experience truly shines when four players collaborate as one unified force. I was saying that this game is made by Acquire. Acquire is the studio behind Tenchu and Shinobito. And Brad and I were saying, that looks like the main character from Tenchu.

1:51:09Dustin Furman:I don't know if they're like the blonde one. I'm like, that's him. That's what he looks like. But I don't know if they're trying to drag all that in and who even owns the rights to those games anymore is unknown to me. In fact, I'm pretty sure that they started making Shinobito because they lost the rights to Tenchu at some point. I think it looks kind of neat. I don't know that I'm going to necessarily play it. 27 is a while away. We'll definitely see more of it. Very interested in the way the game seems to. It's hard to tell what is in game and what is being shown in a unique way. Not even like cinematic, but just zooming in.

1:51:41Dustin Furman:Yeah, that kind of stuff. I'm like, I need to see the way the game functions on like a B2B basis. But it does look pretty cool. and I know you love stealth games. So I'm wondering, Chris, are you going to be into this?

1:51:53Chris P.:Yeah, I mean, it's got my attention. I'm going to be keeping an eye on it, but I feel kind of the same as you where I'm just like, I'm not really sure what the moment to moment gameplay of this game is going to be. And I don't really know fully. Like I was a little disappointed that it was isometric because I was looking forward to it. You know, I don't know. I don't love isometric games. There are exceptions. I love Bastion and, you know, Hades and there's always a handful. but um when i first saw it i thought like oh is this tenchu is it gonna be like a stealth action game and it is but it also is it's different you know so it's it's got my attention i'll be paying attention to it for sure but i don't know how i feel about it just yet i'm happy to see stealth um being invested in i will say that let's see here what is this dustin this might be a game

1:52:40Colin Moriarty:for you i don't know you and your friends yeah i'm curious uh about it i i'm sure i'm sure brad would play it with me when the when it comes out but um i want to see more i i'm trying to the trailer had like all those like super gruesome kill shots in it that were kind of cool but

1:52:59Dustin Furman:yeah it's it looks interesting let's see what else we have here project win list is interesting this is the next game up. This is the chicken one. I'm sorry. Is this the chicken one? This is the chicken one. And in fact, here, I'll put it in. There's an awesome piece of art at the top of this here. I'll put it in there for you. This comes from Crafton, Montreal studio. So these Crafton, of course, is the the Asian company that owns PUBG. And of course, they also did the Callisto protocol. This is their Canadian team making a Musso. We were surprised when we were seeing this because it is clearly a Musso.

1:53:36And I was trying to think, and I'm sure someone will write in and tell me, like, what is a game that's truly a Misseau, like this looks like, that wasn't made by Omega Force?

1:53:47Dustin Furman:Or at least had Koei Tecmo involved in it. I'm not saying they have a monopoly over it. It just seems like they did have a monopoly. Like, no one else seemed to be interested in making this, like, fodder, these fodder games. And yet, this seems exactly what it was. Because Tecmo Koei and Omega Force are so willing to work with anyone that I was saying when we were streaming during it. I'm like, I wonder if they made it. And then only at the very end was it indicated on the on the splash screen that it was made by a craft and internal studio. I love. Love the protagonist of this game, and I am so into it.

1:54:21It looks so fucking fun and stupid, like when when they're fighting on the battlefield and he's fighting, like there's like some woman.

1:54:28Dustin Furman:It seems like the antagonist, maybe. And they like make eye contact and like and they see each other on the battlefield, like the chicken and the woman. and I'm like this is so silly it looks fantastic and it's an action RPG that's how they describe it in the press release but again I would say um that it's most like an Omega Force Musou and gameplay now this is apparently based on a Korean fantasy series I don't know if you guys saw this and I'm not familiar with it at all but the bird that drinks tears yeah and he is the bird that drinks tears and I believe it because he looks like the bird that drinks tears he's going to drink a lot of tears out there on the uh on the battlefield i'm looking forward to this chris i gotta know what you think about the chicken yeah it's awesome this is like what

1:55:13Chris P.:an unlikely thing to i i i love thinking about what the pitch to this must have been and that everybody was just on board and it's like yeah yeah let's make this let's make a let's let's make a chicken brute muso and it looks fucking awesome it does i really i'm i am really

1:55:31Dustin Furman:into it i like a musou every now and again and i really haven't played one since dragon quest heroes the thing about the musou is that if you're not in the dynasty warriors samurai warriors that kind of shit you gotta wait for the ip right there's zelda persona pirate warrior you know one piece was an early one an early licensed one um and finally they got the dragon quest i never even played the second one but i really liked the first one but they're they do get boring as fuck after a while like that is the problem with them i remember i remember trying dynasty warriors and samurai warriors when i was younger and i'm like i just i kind of get it but i kind of don't like it never seems to get challenging it just seems like you're going through the motions and i'm sure there's more to it than that for the more modern ones but that's where i am on those dustin chicken muso for you yeah nice cock yeah gotta say

1:56:26Colin Moriarty:what i'm most interested in obviously like i'm watch i have the trailer up now and it has the scale in terms of enemies as for a musou game but in this trailer there's also lots of moments where the main character is walking you know in environments by himself or in big open environments kind of exploring it does mention that in the playstation blog because it says an open world action rpg so that's really intriguing to me because musou i always think of like the game where it's like you have the map at the top and it shows where all the different things are happening and you got to navigate around and it's kind of a level focus and so if they can take the scale of a musou game but then make it an open world action rpg as they say that is way more interesting to me than a standard musou game and so the uh yeah the art direction dude i mean yeah this chicken guy is sick you know this guy is he's beefy he's strong what about the cox cock though yeah i want to see show it to me and how does he taste the cocker not the cox cocker well the whole thing oh no oh the whole thing sure sure the whole fry him up he's gonna be like that guy that dove head first

1:57:48Dustin Furman:in the fryer right dude that's crazy way to kill yourself i'll tell you man what a wild just wild wild stuff out there going on out there project winless from craft let's keep an eye on that i'm rooting for that game i think that game looks really fun and interesting again pun intended oh perhaps perhaps kind of makes me want to go play an omega force game but we all know that's not going to happen number 19 was star wars galactic racers playstation blog has no post on this and i can't find a new press release for it either but we obviously learned about the game back in december and we have a little bit more information about it now in fact i don't think that star wars.com even posted anything about it so i don't know like where everyone's heads are with this this is the first game in the whole list where there seems to be nothing new about it but it does look cool i guess they showed a new character right um and uh or the confirmation of a new character.

1:58:40Dustin Furman:This is coming to PS5 at some point this year. Apparently, there is still no release date on it. I must say, I mean, I'm still everyone knows I'm beyond fucking jaded with Star Wars. This looks cool. I'm not going to play it. I'll tell you right now, just because I'm not going to play a racing game, really. But it does look good. It really does look good. So I'll say that. Chris, you seemed pretty interested in it.

1:58:59Chris P.:Yeah, dude, like because they were showcasing. I mean, I don't care about Star Wars really at all. I just have no nostalgia at all. I don't I don't really I didn't grow up with it. So it's not this important IP to me, but I remember playing a little bit of the pod racing game on what was it PS one or like in 64 or something like around that time and I remember really liking it and another thing that caught my eye about the trailer was this like they showcased a lot of the crashes and the crashes looked right at a burnout like they had the same kind of camera movements and everything and they were like exploding and so like dude if you if you've got a burnout game underneath this if this is like this is like a sneak burnout game i'll play it tell you i don't give a shit what like the what skin you put over it i'm just i'm hungry for for a burnout kind of game like i used to i loved those brown paradise burnout revenge i was all over them so yeah i wasn't i never i i did play the last burnout a game i want to say that was on ps3 right um maybe yeah probably played at the office

2:00:03Dustin Furman:but yeah I'm not I'm not really outside of a few like even like a pot pot racers on 64 and some of this other stuff like I just um back in the day it's like I I was very selective about the racing games I played for some reason and I I said like I was really in a need for speed for some reason

2:00:16Chris P.:I just didn't care about anything else dude I used to I used to play more racing games than I played like shooters like I was all over it like and especially in that era where I really only played like Call of Duty and Halo it was like later on that I started fucking around with like more stuff but like yeah like i was playing blur and like there was an atv racer called pure that i really liked and um just like yeah i i love burnout and the violence in it is ridiculous you could it was so satisfying that that that crash mechanic and it looks like it's here uh in in the frame of star wars i don't care if like flop nubis is in it or whatever like i don't know like there was they like zoomed in on some fucking ugly guy dude that's ben quadranaro yeah

2:01:05Colin Moriarty:that's what i'm seeing in the comments everyone's like yo it's my boy ben i'm like shut the fuck up

2:01:10Chris P.:you don't know that guy yeah that's so insane like whatever i i don't care i don't care about

2:01:18Colin Moriarty:that but looks solid in my opinion cool yeah i am excited i'm excited for this uh in particular because when i grew up i remember i played the star wars episode one racer on pc in particular a lot it's a very vivid memory for me because it was one of those games i played right before and right after we got a brand new pc and that was like one of the core memories of realizing what frame rate was i knew it ran not good on the first pc and then seeing it on the new pc i was like wow it's so smooth that's funny and that game rocked so this game too chris is totally right the burnout crashes in it i am excited that the ending it showed that there's going to be pod racing in it as well as as much as we shit on episode one and as much as I know it is a bad movie it is a nostalgic movie for me in a lot of ways and the pod racing is it's pretty oh

2:02:22Dustin Furman:my god it must be like maximally nostalgic for you you were like six yeah you know oh yeah Like I was wearing Darth Maul t-shirts as a teenager. I was I should have gotten stuffed in a fucking dumpster. All right. Number 20 is 007 First Light. We know that's coming May 27. I don't think we really need to discuss that in any length. It looks excellent. I mean, I'll say that. IO Interactive. We all know. Yeah. Nothing to say, right? Dustin, you're good too? No. Chris, you're good. Then we'll move to number 21. That's the Metal Gear Solid Collection Volume 2. This primarily brings Metal Gear Solid 4 and Peace Walker together, although Ghost Babel, as Dustin noted, shown at the end, is also being released.

2:03:04Dustin Furman:This will come out August 27th. A lot of excitement around this as Metal Gear Solid 4 specifically has been trapped on PlayStation 3 pretty much exclusively forever. And so there it is. And the PSP version of Peace Walker looks like it's so this is the PS3 version, I think. remember there was a there was a ps3 version of the game that came later so i think that's the ps3 version and in fact it must be it looks way too good to be the psb version um plus they authorized it and of course metal gear ghost babble the original game boy game will be available that's from the year 2000 as well bonus content of course galore few metal games still missing primarily as we were noting twin snakes plus of course um phantom pain and ground zeros which i assume will be released in the future we'll see what happens so again August 27th.

2:03:57Dustin Furman:Chris, you must be stoked.

2:03:59Chris P.:Yeah, I mean, I'm just happy just from like the perspective of just finally having these games not locked on, you know, older hardware and having ostensibly like the main beating hearts of this series now playable on modern machines. Like that's really cool. I'm really happy to see it. I'm really curious about Metal Gear Solid 4. I don't really remember much about it. I remember when I initially played it at a friend's house, I kind of hated it. but that was also before I really had any real experience with metal gear is before I had played really even a lick of it. So, and as like, I would imagine like as an inaugural game, it's probably the worst one.

2:04:37Chris P.:So I'm hoping that that's the case, but I'm, I'm really curious. I'm really looking forward to checking it out. Just feels like a long time coming,

2:04:46Dustin Furman:you know, it's a, it is, it is nice to close the loop, remove PS3 from the equation. and now because of course the msx games are playable in the first collection so this is really everything almost uh and and when you include the fact that like ground zeros and um and phantom pain can be played on your ps5 and you're kind of all there right yeah dusty boy

2:05:06Colin Moriarty:what are you thinking yeah i played middle gear solid five or four for the first time all the way through i think it was either last year or the year before and i emulated it and it was really annoying to do so to have this available uh is pretty neat and what's interesting to me is just that this particularly metal gear solid 4 is probably the most extensive work they've had to do for the masters master collection project because as you noted for peace walker uh along with pretty much everything in the in the first volume these are all on the groundwork of what blue point did for the HD collections.

2:05:50Colin Moriarty:And so Metal Gear Solid 4, they actually probably needed to go in and do a significant amount of work in order to port that over, get it off the cell processor of the PlayStation 3. So pretty cool. I probably, I will eventually play this. Probably not when it comes out just because it's a little recent for me. I was rage baiting a little bit on the stream because I was saying how Metal Gear Solid 4 is not as good as people remember it is so i'm i'm very curious now that this game is going to get its moment of re-evaluation what people are going to think about it because for me it's a bit it's too much it's it's like the maximal metal gear solid game in terms of story and saying we are going to try to wrap up every loose end that we've ever that the series has ever touched on all in one game, almost all of them.

2:06:49Colin Moriarty:So I'm curious what people will say.

2:06:52Dustin Furman:Yeah, I'm curious. It's cool. I'm excited about this. I want to. I've noted because the a la carte nature of some of the earlier Metal Gear games, and I wonder if they'll do the same. Obviously, with this, we'll find out, as we've said, but just playing those MSX games are really interesting to me because I've replayed two and three and one I haven't. I've replayed two and three many times at this point. One, I just really haven't. I'm a twin snakes guy, but regardless, August 27. Now, Metal Gear brings us into the surprise Konami segment of the showcase where we had four different games from them.

2:07:26Dustin Furman:Next up is Darwin's Paradox. We've seen this game before. There is no press release anywhere for this either, but they did, I think, put a release date on it. What was it? Fuck. I closed the window. Oh, well, doesn't matter. This comes from ZDT Studio. Yo, Konami picked this game up as part of them trying to, I think, flex more into the third party and find things that are useful. And there is some integration with Metal Gear, it seems like. I don't really know exactly what they're doing with it, but it's described as this, quote, dive into the adventure with Darwin, an octopus as endearing as he is ingenious, torn from the ocean and trapped in a vast and mysterious industrial complex.

2:08:00Dustin Furman:Harnesses unique talents and abilities to help him overcome the many dangers and traps in this captivating platformer and adventure game. Let's see. Darwin Paradox release date inked in. what is it April 2nd for Darwin's Paradox by the way there's a demo too right

2:08:19Colin Moriarty:I'm sorry it's out now

2:08:20Dustin Furman:there's a demo there is a demo and it is out now I don't know if I'll check it out but it looks cool

2:08:26Colin Moriarty:this is a game that I need a demo for I want to play it and see how it feels and it's cool that there's like a Metal Gear portion I think that's part of the demo so I'm going to check out the demo maybe I can report in on that next week

2:08:41Dustin Furman:next up is a big one for me castlevania belmont's curse which is coming 2026 this is coming via motion twin and um konami obviously working together and motion twin i guess actually spurned into another studio right and this is technically then what the fuck are they called yeah why can't i remember anything at this point let me see if i can see oh yeah evil empire that's right. So this is a French Castlevania game taking place in France, not unlike Castlevania Nocturne, which took place in France. Castlevania typically takes place in Eastern Europe and then kind of segues to Central Europe a little bit.

2:09:17Dustin Furman:And now it's getting all the way into Western Europe. The setting of the game is 1499. So during the events of the original Castlevania trilogy or around there, and it's set in Paris where they say, quote, the city has been attacked by monstrous creatures suddenly emerging from the shadows, armed with the legendary holy whip, the vampire killer trevor belmont's successor ventures into the burning streets and looming castle to hunt down the beasts um it looks excellent it's 2.5d technically but it doesn't look like cheap 2.5d in any regard and i always felt like motion twin slash evil empire was the perfect studio to work for i think i would have even selected a couple other teams before them but that they proved their worth in the Castlevania universe with that expansion for Dead Cells was that brought me back to Dead Cells after years of not playing it.

2:10:06Dustin Furman:It was very well done and I'm like, yes, it's so obvious. It's sitting right in front of you and the stylized nature of it I think kind of fits a little bit with the anime to be honest. So they seem to be... Now I want a 3D AAA Castlevania game and I wouldn't mind something a little more traditional. I think Castlevania has three directions to go in. These three directions have always existed. The traditional Castlevania games, like Castlevania 1, 2, and 3, Super Castlevania, Castlevania Bloodlines, etc. The Metroidvania games that begin with Symphony of the Night go on to GBA and DS. And then the 3D games that began on the PS2 or really on the N64, but then on the PS2.

2:10:45Dustin Furman:There's three lanes, so explore them. And this is them exploring the Metroidvania lane. So now I want to see 3D exploration, which I think we're going to get. and I would love to see something more traditional. Having just played Rondo of Blood, it's like, yeah, make something really hardcore and short. And there are teams like Inti Creates that would do a great job or WayForward that would do a great job on that as well. I am all over this. I love the image of the castle. I was staring at it. I watched the trailer. It's the only trailer I watched again when we were preparing our notes and getting ready to do this.

2:11:15Dustin Furman:I just love the, I'll put this in the chat for you guys. We want to see, but just the key art is just so good and the castle is just so supernatural and awesome and it just looks excellent so what do and by the way they're not saying who the character is i guess it looks like it's a female it says belmont's successor simon belmont trevor belmont is simon's dad i think and so i don't know what i don't know where this is all going but i don't think it's i don't think it's a familiar belmont yeah yeah

2:11:53Colin Moriarty:it's worth pointing out i saw wario tweeted that konami posted a message about castlevania's uh 40th anniversary and towards the end it says this is the beginning of numerous new products

2:12:07Dustin Furman:around castlevania yeah let's get it going you may get your wish colin i hope so i mean there's so much juice to squeeze out of Castlevania. I mean this with no sense of irony that Castlevania could be Konami's biggest product, bigger than Metal Gear. Like it's got the potential because it's not super hardcore and vague. It's very, it's also kind of female in a way. Like I think it's a way to spread the field a little bit. Women love vampires. They love the super, they're into that. Like, you know, you think about the supernaturalism of it. This all goes all the way back to Victorian England. I mean, the big readers of a lot of that shit were women.

2:12:47Dustin Furman:And I think, uh, there's a little bit of sexuality to it. There's a little bit of style to it. There's a little bit of intelligence to it. It's a way for them. I want them to look. So this is not going to be the game that does it, but there could be a game that cracks, that cracks it open. Yeah. I'm so excited about this guys. Like I'm finally, I bitch soul. I don't want anything else. Like of course there's many things I'm looking forward to but I wanted a new Mega Man game and I wanted a new Castlevania game and it was so long between especially with Castlevania it's been fucking forever and I'm kind of satiated now I mean there I would love to see Wild Arms come back or something like that but like this is this is within the reason the realm of reason and I've been satiated so yeah very very excited are either of you gonna mess with Belmont's curse

2:13:31Chris P.:when it comes out oh absolutely like it's the Dead Cells I was super into man like I played a shit weirdly enough I played a shit ton of it on switch um it's the only game that I think I put like a a genuinely like long amount of time into on switch except for maybe I think probably breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom those are probably two two of the other longer ones but like dead cells was up there man I loved dead cells and I think they make games that play really really well and yeah like you said it's just a no-brainer fit for castlevania so I'm definitely

2:14:03Dustin Furman:looking forward to it the framing of the castlevania logo I think is really cool too like the way that It says Castlevania Belmont's curse. That's a very old school. That's really like a hearkening to maybe Castlevania three. But for me, it looks more even like the Game Boy games and it like the, and even Belmont's curse is a, is a mixture of Dracula's curse with Belmont's revenge. Belmont's revenge, of course, being an early Game Boy game. So, and, and Dracula's curse being the third Castlevania game. So there's some, there's some, Oh, I want to know more. I'm, I'm very excited about where this fits into the lore and all.

2:14:37Dustin Furman:rest okay this brings us to number 24 which is silent hill townfall um people are obviously very excited about this now i don't know much about this because they right after the the state of play ended they promised that they were going to do a video the one thing that i learned about was that it's i don't know if you guys saw this it's a playstation exclusive oh like console exclusive yeah so like silent hill but um like silent hill 2 remake but unlike silent hill f which was on everything at the same time and i guess um everyone both sides felt like it was worth their while i mean silent hill 2 remake did pretty well on ps5 so yeah nice there now um i don't know too much about it apparently the game focuses i didn't want to read too much and be rude but the game seems to focus on a CR the CRT that the guy carries around and it comes out this year apparently on PlayStation 5 I'll definitely play it I don't know if there's anything else really you guys want to say about it at this point yeah I feel like

2:15:42Colin Moriarty:I want to watch the the Silent Hill Direct or whatever they did but I think it's cool it's in first person horror games to me are way more scary in first person than third person and i'm i'm just continually curious about how they expand silent hill into areas that aren't called silent hill and how that wall look and work so this trailer looked pretty promising i love the shot there's a shot that's shown in the playstation blog that has the the little crt in like a red room and uh it's pretty pretty freaky

2:16:24Dustin Furman:let's see here there is a little bit of a blur Push Square found this it says quote Simon Ordell is called back to the island of St. Amelia to put things right encountering a town lying quiet beneath a heavy fog seemingly abandoned but not at rest venturing deeper and driven to understand his connection to the place and its inhabitants Simon begins to discover fragments of a past rising to the surface so really a lot of nothing there but Chris I assume you're looking forward to this as well

2:16:48Chris P.:yeah I mean I'm open to it I don't I don't love Silent Hill as much as a lot of people do like i i enjoy like i enjoy it but i've never been that i'm not that big of a strictly horror guy but i like silent hill 2 remake a lot i thought that was like exceptionally well done and um yeah this first person feel looks right at home i just want to i want to know more about it i think i would like to see some more but i'm it's on my it's on my list it's that

2:17:20Dustin Furman:it's got my attention. The final of five Konami games is a new game. The JRPG Rev Noir which we were saying looked a little bit Timu Tales kind of. Maybe the most Japanese stuff that they shoot anyone showed throughout the entire state of play. I think it looks I'm a sucker for this kind of shit in single player form. If it's a gotcha or something like that, it's obviously going to turn me off, but it looks fine. I don't think we know very much about it. And let's see. There is a little bit of information. This comes from Silicon. Actually, I think they got they pulled this from some sort of maybe Japanese press release.

2:17:58It says, quote, in Revenoir,

2:18:01Dustin Furman:a phenomenon called the light fall affects the world. And our goal in the JRPG seems to be to mitigate or end it. Things start with us seeing its damage in action with the lead character asks allies hurt and killed and places damage because of the light. The message I refuse to accept an ending like this then appears. Everything then rewinds and we see Ask just starting his journey with a young woman. We then see a number of allies and enemies. Things close out with a note when hope sparks catastrophe. The video doesn't indicate if it will be turn-based or active. It looked active to me, but you never really know because there are games like Trails of Cold Steel that read as active and they're really not.

2:18:35Dustin Furman:Even Tales games in some way. So Dustin, I'm sure Chris is not interested in this. Dustin, I assume this is sloppish for you.

2:18:43Colin Moriarty:It does. It feels generic. like it feels like I've seen games that look exactly like this numerous times but maybe when we see the gameplay or you know get a story trailer that isn't quite as vague maybe I'd be more interested in it but yeah this one didn't impress me too much but I'm not closing the door

2:19:04Dustin Furman:on it either all right so we're out of the Konami space by the way and uh there are a bunch of sales on Konami games right now in case you guys are curious I think Silent Hill F is 40 % off Silent Hill 2 remake is 50 % off. Metal Gear Volume 1, I think, is 30 % off. And a few others. So you might want to check that out if you're curious. Next game is a John Wick game announced for PlayStation 5. This is being developed by Saber Interactive, which is pretty interesting, although not a huge surprise. They're massive and they have been doing licensed stuff for a while. So I think they have a pretty good pedigree with it.

2:19:40Dustin Furman:They write in part, quote, we are working closely with Chad Stileski. Keanu Reeves and Lionsgate to produce a highly anticipated adrenaline fueled experience that fits into the world of John Wick. This game takes place during a specific period within the John Wick timeline and contributes to the expensive and rich lore of the franchise. It says the story is being collated in collaboration with the writers Lionsgate and Chad Selesky original gameplay narrative that addresses a significant time in John Wick's life including well known and iconic characters as well as compelling new characters specifically created for this production.

2:20:10Dustin Furman:There are signature elements from the John Wick movies that are also present in the game incorporated to enhance the overall interactive experience. Things like the unique use of camera work, the notable bold and cinematic environments and of course the extremely distinctive gun fu action and intense driving experiences. This looks really great. Again, I was saying on the stream I've only seen the first John Wick movie, but I really, really liked it a lot. I thought it was exceptional actually and I don't know why I'm not, I'm not compelled to fucking watch anything anymore, but I think all three of us were and Brad too because he was on the stream.

2:20:39Dustin Furman:I think we were all pretty into this. So Sabre is delivering this apparently it will come out in 2026 I'm not entirely sure if they'll make that any comments Chris?

2:20:47Chris P.:No I mean I think John Wick lends itself well to a game I think it makes a lot of sense I don't really have much to say about this though we really didn't see much we saw some story we saw some cinematics and we saw some early examples of in-engine kind of gameplay happening but it was pretty quick snippets of executions and stuff so it looks promising I'm looking forward to it but there's not really much to say

2:21:11Colin Moriarty:the number one thing that a john wick game needs to get right is or at least maybe not the number one but one of the main things is the the feeling of the impact because that's so important in the movies where you're you know each kill whether he's like you know pulling out a guy's arm out of his socket or stabbing him in the face or shooting him in the face and the little bit of engine stuff that we saw at the end definitely had that whether that translate well to the gameplay who knows but it seems like it's it's on the right they they understand uh at least some of the core

2:21:48Dustin Furman:aspects saber interactive is uh is churning um obviously they're outside of embracer now but they have a lot of shit in development i was looking um they have i mean this is in all of them but space marine 3 turok origins an avatar game kotor remake jurassic park survival the hell Razor game which is the most recent license game that I was thinking about coming from them that comes out sometime this year uh Toxic Commando comes out soon and then last year they released Roadcraft the Tomb Raider four through six remasters Mud Runner A Quiet Place the Warhammer Space Marine 2 game they're doing a lot of shit man they're busy man yeah they really are and they have a bunch of teams around the world they're they're big I don't know if I have a do I have a account of how many employees they have.

2:22:34Dustin Furman:Yeah, they have 2 ,600 people working for them, it seems like. By the way, there is a John Wick game. I don't know if you guys ever played it. I never played it. John Wick Hex. Oh, I heard about that.

2:22:44Chris P.:That was made by Mike Bithell.

2:22:46Dustin Furman:Yeah.

2:22:46Chris P.:Was that isometric or 2D or something? Yeah, there was something.

2:22:51Dustin Furman:I don't want to say it was a card game, but it was something I thought more mobile. I think it was tactical. Yeah, maybe that's what it was. Yeah, it was a tactics game, I think. so that but I think that might have been taken down like I don't think it might even be up anymore alright so the John Wick game date unknown but looks pretty good yeah alright 20 now we're getting into the now we're going to get into all first and second party stuff from here so 27 is Marathon we know that Marathon is coming out March 5th we already knew that but there's going to be a stress test that's going to seem to invite everyone from February 26th to March 2nd I think this will be a great way for people to play the game again I'm very curious to see what you both think obviously especially you Chris but um just as an outsider who's not going to play it I think it looks really fun and really um quite visually unique as well what are your thoughts here as

2:23:38Chris P.:we're getting closer and closer yeah I'm looking forward to it this one this trailer seemed to highlight a lot of the uh a lot of the voice acting they they showcased their stacked cast a couple weeks ago and presumably it's going to be for these like audio log style vignettes that seem to be discoverable on the map which i think is an awesome way to get around telling a story in a game like this um you know it's it actually seems like a no-brainer in a lot of ways the bioshock style you know uh audio log thing and as long as there's like a an easy way to navigate through that like maybe like a codex of some kind like an in-game menu where you can kind of sift through these and figure out the story for yourself i think that'd be very exciting but Like, yeah, I'm looking forward to Marathon.

2:24:24Chris P.:I think it looks great. I think the visual identity is very striking and unique. From what I had played already, I just know the gunplay is there. And I'm just, I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going to be all over that stress test. There are people streaming it right now. It's like, it's up early for like some streamers or like there's some kind of thing going on right now. Like I'm not exactly sure who else. I know Burn Peanut. Not really. There's, I have so much to do. Like I, I'm looking forward to it. I'm good. I want to play when everybody else is. You know, be a part of it, especially that early wave when like people kind of don't know what the fuck's going on.

2:25:03Chris P.:But yeah, I'm looking forward to it. All right.

2:25:08Colin Moriarty:Anything you want to add? I'm excited. I'm so excited for the server slam because I just haven't been able to play at all. Is that a term? That's the term they used for arc writers also okay i've never heard that until now i so i'm sure it's other teams have as well but i think

2:25:27Chris P.:i think people are like getting savvy or like maybe like developers are like this isn't like there's no term for this i guess yeah like stress test is the old term and it's boring yeah but there's like a beta too but like it's not really a beta it is a beta in some ways because it's a beta test of the servers but that's not really what a beta is so like server slam has been more common as of late but yeah yeah i think it's appropriate so i'm i'm excited because i

2:25:52Colin Moriarty:haven't been i mean the the the boys have not been together at least not they've been playing overwatch but no i'm not i'm not playing overwatch but i haven't played any games with the boys recently and this is the game that we're all going to be playing so uh excited for the service

2:26:09Dustin Furman:slam i think it looks awesome marathon again march 5th server slam server slam sounds like summer slam comes february 26th to march 2nd number 28 is a first party game saros another first party game uh in terms of saros we already know all about saros i april 30th i don't need to i actually it's one the one thing during that i didn't watch i peaked a little bit but i didn't watch too much um i have nothing else to say about it really i'm i'm in don't overexpose it i wonder if they'll do like a dedicated state of play closer or something like that which i hope they don't but they might feel the need to do it it might be good for the game you can avoid it do we have any comments on sarah so we've said we've said it all about this game at this point no yeah i'm playing it all right then number 29 second party game token has a release date August 6th from Arc System Works.

2:27:04Dustin Furman:Of course, Marvel Token Fighting Souls is coming to both PS5 and PC on that day. They also revealed two new fighters. There'll be 20 total fighters. I think this brings us to what, 12? 10? I think it might be 10. So we've learned, we already knew about, we see the X-Men team now. We knew about Wolverine and we knew about Storm, right? But we didn't know about Magic and we didn't know about Danger, two characters I've never even heard of. my entire life not that I'm a huge X-Men fan but I like I especially like that character danger I thought that was a really cool it seems like it's like their test dummy at like the at the X-Men Academy or whatever and I think that's kind of a neat idea you can get I think you can be still sign up if you go to the PlayStation blog there's information about the release date the special editions and all the rest you can start pre-ordering them and so on and so forth but I maybe there are they aren't accepting new beta feedback at this point but I'm sure they're gonna have more that game will be all over the place the fighting game community feels like it needs some juice from the outside because street fighters a little long in the tooth mortal kombat's getting a little long in the tooth and I don't mean the series I mean the most recent iterations of those games arc system games never really penetrate smash is ever present um so a little juice would be good that's my that's my perspective are either I'm not going to play this game though are either of you going to play it it's not for me no oh no i'll

2:28:29Chris P.:definitely i'll definitely play it because i know a lot of people who are into fighting games i don't know if i'll buy it but i'm definitely i'm definitely going to find myself at a house or at an apartment where it's where it's there and people are playing it i'll report back when when that happens but you know i know i know my skills and myself well enough to know that i should not I shouldn't be spending 60, 70, 80 dollars on a fighting game. I can't do it.

2:28:55Dustin Furman:Well, this brings us to our finale, number 30 and number 31. Very unexpected, although very exciting. The God of War trilogy from PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 is being fully remade from the ground up. They won't have much more information about this for a while. And in fact, they don't really share very much information. If you go to the PlayStation blog, there is a really cool, like they do, what's the actor's name? him i can't remember the voice actor the original tc carson right it's cool to see him there you're saying you choose the scenery which is totally true um and i'm a little i wonder who's making this i wonder if santa monica is doing it themselves because they do have their logo pop up in the beginning but it does seem like a questionable use of their time in my opinion if i'm being honest this is something that could very easily be done by an external team or blue point should you have utilized them the way you might might have wanted to utilize them like they wanted to work on god of war well here you go but the the greek saga jaffe's greek saga that began back in 2005 on ps2 continued in 2007 and then in 2010 on ps3 um is being fully remade from the ground up and they ask that they for people's patience as it's very early i imagine that means 28 29 something like that probably maybe even later than that i don't know exactly why you would say it now that that's my one if i'm if i'm i love you learning about things that are coming out being excited about things but at the same time i'm like i don't know that you even really needed this especially because of what comes after it i feel like it almost gets lost in the mix and you could have just used this later on get a couple of these games out like get saros behind you get tokan behind you maybe when wolverine's kind of coming out then you have intergalactic ahead and all these other things maybe maybe that's when you get to it i don't know but i'm very excited about this chris i assume and dustin too i mean we're all pretty amped about this the original god of war games are excellent yeah i don't have a lot of experience

2:30:45Chris P.:I don't have a lot of experience with them like these were PS2 early PS3 I missed kind of a lot of key games in that area like I've played them to like some level of completion at like friends houses and stuff like that and I think I borrowed God of War 2 for a little bit and I remember when my friend got God of War 3 I was over at his house and I watched a fuck ton of it but yeah it's I don't know man it's cool to see these brought forward this is another example of just like games that are just stuck you know on um or not to the same degree but like because you could stream i guess the first god of war and god of war 2 but like who the fuck wants to do that so yeah it's and to know that it's a proper remake and not just like a an upres is very cool it's a lot more love and care than i thought would go into something like this i thought if it were up to me i probably would have just been like let's up let's up res the original games and bring them forward like why that's what i thought

2:31:38Dustin Furman:they were going to announce when they were showing those logos i'm like oh it's time it's cool good good good good but ground yeah even better yeah dope i'm looking forward to it tc carson

2:31:47Chris P.:awesome kratos uh curious to see how that's going to translate i wonder like how they're going to fold it in and how it's going to be like i wonder how much of it's going to be the same like i wonder if they're going to remake them in the style of modern god of war if they're going to be more faithful like i'm really excited to see what they do with it the sex stuff i want to

2:32:04Dustin Furman:see if they keep you have a quick time events yeah i'm curious yeah because that's going to what people look for and how prudish do you want to be you were cool with it originally it's not like this was a game that was published by someone else you made it you know like some of the most sexually explicit shit that was going on on playstation was coming from santa monica yeah dustin anything you want to add about the god of war trilogy remake yeah i know that man

2:32:27Colin Moriarty:people are going to be so excited about this i don't have a lot of experience with these og god of war games so i'm i'm curious about it i think you're right though it is really funny it's like you had blue point had apparently has experience working on god of war not successfully but it's

2:32:48Dustin Furman:like it does seem like a weird use of time you can't make it up you can't even make it up it's like oh you want to work at a god of war how about a multiplayer game cool cool guys yeah

2:32:58Colin Moriarty:fucking waste so between um you know this we have the god of war tv show and the next announcement we're going to talk about god of war still very much alive and kicking even though

2:33:14Dustin Furman:it's been a few years since the last oh i've been stabbing with a spear if any if god of war sons of sparta is any indication a game long rumored and uh from megacat studios in dustin's neck of the woods they're out of pittsburgh one of the very few gaming entities in pittsburgh and i was told so i can say now because i've told the guys this a long time ago it's like i i learned about this game a long time ago um and who was making it that's why when we were streaming you're like are you sure i'm like yeah i'm sure like it's it's them um and uh this look i didn't know quite the nature i never saw it one of the things i really like about it is how small everything is yeah like zooming out in these games this is what i i've i've remarked on this a million times but in the late 4-3 era with like snes games where sprites became chunky they really needed this and this gives you space it gives the the world a breadth that otherwise isn't there everything feels tight and constrained that's why i don't like super metroid um and so obviously the 16-9 and aspect ratio is going to fix a lot of that too for people but um i liked how zoomed out it was and i love that it's pixel art i'm just so i'm so amped about it it look i i gotta admit because i never saw it i never really asked for details about it i just know a couple people that knew about it and um it's a lot better than i thought it was going to be and it's not because anyone told me that it wasn't it was just like in my mind i'm like this is going to be like that prince of persia game which was good but that's that it had a very generic visual it was cheap this isn't cheap so uh dustin let's go to you first god of war sons of sparta you are a son of the pittsburgh area you are on megacatch studios putting this out there and it's out now i actually went downstairs and bought it when we were on break it's 30 bucks um so a little a little steep but maybe not i mean i don't want to say that because i don't know i don't know what it

2:35:10Colin Moriarty:even is yeah but i'll play it tonight what do you think yeah i was just looking so i mean some of the audience may know i i drive to pittsburgh every tuesday for a therapy appointment that i take holly to and i realized uh their studio is one mile away from the hospital that i'm at so i don't think i've ever driven by it but it is very unique to have a developer in pittsburgh i think it's like them and shell games if you remember them they did i expect you to die oh vr the VR game I don't know what they've been up to recently but very cool nonetheless to have some Pittsburgh devs working on a a god of war game and it's as you were saying it looks really cool it looks Megacat I don't know a lot about their games the games that I have seen a lot of them if I remember correctly are games that run on modern platforms but also run you can like play them on a Sega Genesis like they make

2:36:15Dustin Furman:cartridges yeah I'm looking at their stuff now like they have a bunch of NES games Genesis games Super Nintendo games right and so they're making true that's so cool because that's really hard it's hard to make the games we make at Lilliumo but we can make we don't have to make them within the confines of the NES you know we could just make it look like we did to actually do that is incredible

2:36:39Colin Moriarty:yeah and so that's why like that was kind of in the realm of what I thought this might look like but it's as you were saying Colin it looks really nice um so I'm I'm really curious about it if I wasn't I'm like you know so deep into Dragon Quest maybe I don't know maybe I'll just pick it up anyway I want to respect it though like I don't want to pick it up and play for an hour and then be like okay well I got to get back to Dragon Quest like I should I'll probably wait a little bit but I do want to check it out because it looks pretty cool. I like the angle, the prequel, you know, the very

2:37:13Dustin Furman:early prequel. Yeah, it's a nice idea of Kratos. It's a nice idea. What do you think? Anything you want to say about this, Chris, before we go?

2:37:21Chris P.:No, I mean, I agree. I think it's a dope shadow drop. I will say that. Really cool, really great way to end a state of play.

2:37:31Dustin Furman:Looking at this here, I'm looking at their website. They do a lot of stuff. They don't have anything. like they did a five night at five nights at Freddy's game. They did the angry video game nerds game. They have the backyard baseball license. Oh, weird. So there and yeah, they have all these like Mega Drive games and or Genesis games and

2:37:54Colin Moriarty:did they NES games? I wonder if they did those new ports of backyard baseball.

2:38:01Dustin Furman:They like the all like the oh one oh two ports. I think they did. At least that's so interesting. Yeah.

2:38:08Colin Moriarty:When I was in Los Angeles for the persona show in Hollywood, we walked past a place that was having a backyard baseball event that was exclusive. So maybe the guys were, yeah, that must be it. We're there. And I was going to the persona show.

2:38:27Dustin Furman:What's a bit. Nope. Sorry. I'm muted. That must've been it. All right. Well, that's it. I mean, that's, we've reflected on the show already. We're tired. We've been going all day today, but we still have a little bit more to do, but any last reflections on the show, Chris, I, again, I think it's an a easy, I don't even know what you could possibly want and the, where are the games? People are just hurting at this point. Yeah,

2:38:50Chris P.:no, I, I agree. I think it's an a, I think it's an a show. Um, debatable S I could see people arguing. I could see arguments for or against, but I just think like shadow dropping a God of war game and, you know, ending with the trilogy announcement and starting with the, you know, kind of too which is like a nice sequel and you know throw in a bunch of i think it's just like a really strong showcase and castlevania coming back is huge and nice to see more from marathon for me but like uh yeah i don't know man i think this was like one of the it's the most consistently engaged that i've felt in one of these in probably ever i do i would have to maybe look a little bit deeper into previous state of plays but i feel pretty comfortable saying that this is probably the most I've enjoyed one.

2:39:32Dustin Furman:My buddy Mike Patelli just texted me my G.I. Joe Consigliere who's in Philly. He said, dude, the high res 69 update for MGS is dope, but with a picture of it. Looks like he's playing on his portal.

2:39:44Colin Moriarty:Nice. The MGS. Man, I saw some of the pictures of the high res for Metal Gear Solid. I kind of think it looks grody. I just think you got to be careful

2:39:50Dustin Furman:with that shit. Yeah, that's all. The games were not meant to look this high res.

2:39:55Colin Moriarty:Yeah. I think the only thing that would make this show an s is if there was some kind of new first party announcement i'm looking like we got a lot of great updates i mean god of war trilogy is technically new it's

2:40:14Chris P.:just so early you know yeah you're right that is that is first that fits the the bill you're right

2:40:21Dustin Furman:though like a big first party new reveal like new ip something like that would have absolutely sealed

2:40:25Colin Moriarty:it yeah or like intergalactic which i wasn't expecting it but let's just say like something

2:40:31Dustin Furman:yeah or uncharted coming back actually yeah you know like god please please or judas judas

2:40:38Colin Moriarty:i know it's not first party but i'm just saying judas would have made it oh my god judas would have probably made it and ask for me literally everything else could have been shit it could have been all anime china slop but judas release date yeah that would have been sweet man so so oh yeah but yeah really really great show entertaining all the way through um the bar is set they will never pass it again so next next state of play i feel bad for any game that's going to be in that one because the expectations are going to be like that's what i was saying in

2:41:11Dustin Furman:the short term they did themselves a great benefit they surpassed any expectation they didn't label it in a way that people would have out of control expectations and yet moving forward now we don't know quite what we're going to get which is what why i wonder if they're going to start saying how long everything is more acutely right they typically do do that they didn't do that with the uh the showcases though and the showcases might even been a little longer than this but i felt like this was a very tightly paced high quality stream easy a for me like no doubt about it no doubt i mean just going down the list it's like kenna yote death stranding 2 on pc for loop pragmata resident evil legacy of kane brigandine dead or alive control resonant crimson moon beast of reincarnation rayman mean to the hollow or neva yakko project windless galactic racers 007 metal gear solid collection darwin's paradox castlevania silent hill rev noir john wick marathon saros tokon god of war trilogy god of war sons of sparta that's a lot of shit well it's good stuff come on no complaints all right well let's get back to the news

2:42:16Dustin Furman:whoa judas has a release date nathan drake is back resistance is coming to ps5 this is nuts wow can't believe how good that was very very exciting times but let's get into the smaller pieces of news now that accompany the state of play this week the biggest piece of news happened just yesterday for one of a recording wild light entertainment the developer of the imperiled high Skyguard on PlayStation 5 and elsewhere announced that they have made reductions on their team. This reduction sound fairly steep, although they don't make it sound like that in their own statement. They tweeted out, quote, Today we made an incredibly difficult decision to part ways with a number of our team members while keeping a core group of developers to continue innovating on and supporting the game.

2:43:01Dustin Furman:We're proud of the team, talent, and the product we've created together. We're also grateful for players who gave the game a shot and those who continue to be part of our community. End quote. That's all we have. But this statement was released on the back of a bunch of LinkedIn statements and tweets and Facebook posts or whatever from people that have been from basically every rung of wildlife been laid off from producers to designers to animators and so on and so forth. So the game is obviously in a death spiral at this point. Not a huge surprise, but yet this game has attracted an enormous amount of attention, not only because of its game awards appearance, which we'll talk about, but because people are just not just wildly unimpressed with not only this game, but I think everything that's coming out in this space or not everything.

2:43:45Dustin Furman:That's not true. Arc Raiders is a game as a service. Hell Divers is a game as a service. I mean, there are success stories there, but most of what's coming out in the space is coming and going. Dustin, I'll start with you. How are you feeling about this news? Sad, obviously, on a personal level, but perhaps not surprising.

2:43:59Colin Moriarty:yeah it is it's not surprising and it is surprising to me just in that it's interesting that it's kind of a half measure it feels like where it's not getting the concord treatment where it's getting completely shut down immediately uh it seems like there is some intention to keep it going for the time being but how successful that is i mean who knows I'm also surprised that just is this quick that there wasn't any kind of like, well, let's we have a lot of info and a lot of insight. And so maybe we can give this time and figure it out. But being that this is, you know, there isn't like some kind of huge publisher behind us.

2:44:50Colin Moriarty:It might simply just not have the money to keep these people around, but they want to continue to give it a shot. So I'm just surprised that this early on, they're like, it's not happening. I'm looking at the player counts right now, though. For specifically Steam, and this is just a slice of it because there's also console, of course, 3000 people in the last 24 hours. And just the point of comparison that I brought up, a live service game that very few you don't hear about in the news cycle very often at all. the finals one of my favorites had 14 000 and that's healthy and that's healthy so it shows

2:45:28Dustin Furman:you it shows you that you don't need that many concurrent players yeah arguably like maybe like 20 like 15 to 20 000 is enough to justify the existence of a lot of a lot of live service

2:45:42Chris P.:games like that it's fine so would you say that the steam count was for high guard like 2000

2:45:46Colin Moriarty:and something the 24 hour peak was 3 000 it currently has about um 1400 yeah playing currently

2:45:55Dustin Furman:that's crazy man yeah it's going down every day yeah there's going to be a trophy rush on this eventually um people are going to try to get the platinum no doubt to uh before they shut it down uh well chris let's get you on the record what are you what are you thinking about this this is obviously a well-worn topic at this point but now we have some more information about the

2:46:13Chris P.:yeah the death spiral of this game i think yeah it's kind of crazy that they that they made the decision this quickly because it kind of implies that they just didn't have a lot of runway um which begs the question why even undertake something like this like i don't know it's it is kind of you'd assume that they'd be able to if they're taking a risk like this the live service the live service game is um inherently very um risky and very competitive so i just would have figured like even if initial reactions were soft and initial numbers were soft I kind of figured they would still have like some level of runway to operate in that interim where they can maybe operate on uh on catching up to people's expectations or like making the necessary fixes or whatever but it doesn't seem like that's the case um yeah I don't know I'm not really necessarily super surprised it's an interesting game it's a really unique gameplay look it demands a lot from the people playing.

2:47:10Chris P.:It demands a lot of patience. It's very slow to get going. And the ingredients of what I think is a compelling mode, the individual facets of that mode are just not really that deep and not particularly interesting. Outside of the gunplay being pretty okay and pretty solid, there's not a lot there. So I'm not necessarily surprised to see the steep fall off. I uninstalled it a while ago. So not surprising, but I am a little surprised at how quickly they've just decided to just like, all right, everybody gone. Right. Everybody, but like so many, you know. Yeah. I thought they would. I thought they would have at least like maybe like just at least like a, you know, two, three months, you know, of like trying to figure out and work through it and adjust accordingly.

2:47:59Chris P.:Because I think the five V five mode people tended to like and that was met with like a positive response because it was like oh look at this look at this quick and timely response to you know audience feedback and even i think on the steam player charts like on the reviews it went from like overwhelmingly negative to like mixed so like there was kind of an indication that the more people played it and got into it the more people ended up kind of liking it um but ultimately i i think the final say really is is something that we've said often on this show which is you know good isn't good enough high guard's good but yeah in a different era it would have done better you know yeah it really reminds me a lot of shadow run like for the 360 where it's just like and i understand people are like it's not like shadow run at all it's like it's the spirit of like what that game was it's like this very offbeat kind of like lower budget like alternative in in the multiplayer space that really was not effectively competing with something like halo 3 or quality 4 or anything but it was there um and it had like a weird kind of vibe to it i don't know it's it's a different it's a different world now it is it is my my my assumption about

2:49:16Dustin Furman:i mean there's a lot to say about it my assumption about high guard it reminds me of that i brought this up before in a different context uh i love that show barry on hbo and there's like an it's really a spoiler there's an arc where like they do a show for in the in the show they do a show for like a streaming service and one of the characters in the show launches and then is immediately canceled like right like within 15 minutes i think of the launch of the of the show or whatever because like the algorithm just doesn't like it and they already know that it's just not going to connect so they're like yeah the show's canceled it's over like there's nothing there's no fanfare it's just done and uh i what my suspicion is is is that they realize that there is no turning it around like the you guys would know a lot better than me is there an example of a game as a service that came out floundered completely and then became big uh like hmm i just i just feel like games find a baseline and work off of that baseline i'm sure that exists i don't know what it is but i'm sure that that's like a thing well it's gotta be let's assume that it does exist because you're probably right it's got to be somewhat of a rarity because i think they just look at the trajectory of it and they're just like we aren't going to save this game like why put more money into this you know um we've lost already it's over yeah i feel like that's probably what they figured out yeah i guess floundered is

2:50:44Chris P.:somewhat subjective too because you could argue that you could argue that that's true of like um like vanilla destiny you know or something like that like we're just like kind of critically was but destiny was always successful like a lot of people and you paid for it didn't you pay for destiny originally as well yeah destiny was not free right so years and years and years right so

2:51:04Dustin Furman:so yeah yeah it's just in other words it strikes me as like we talked about it and i've actually seen people bring it up that internally they were kind of i think i think it was for this game people were saying or relaying it's like you know maybe we'll have a turnaround story like a cyberpunk or no man's sky and i'm like i don't think so people wanted to like those games that that's a that's that's a big difference like no man's sky didn't reach its it's no man's sky is the craziest turnaround in games history in my opinion because everyone was shitting on that game but like they loved the idea they were in it was unique and novel cyberpunk was there it just didn't work but they fixed it and then they added a bunch of things to it too obviously but But so I think like why abandon it now?

2:51:51Dustin Furman:I think there's multiple ways to have gone about this. I think they could have pulled a Concord and said like, and I don't even know if they could have done this through Steam and the other storefronts. It might not even really been possible. Like is to say like we're forced refunding everyone. Sony got away with that because it's their game and they can do that on their platform. And then Steam obviously allows, you know, facilitates that much easier. But you could see them just writing this down and just saying like, this is a total loss. but the idea that they're keeping people around says the opposite to me, which is that we're going to keep this game alive just long enough to justify having charged you anything for anything so that when it goes away, you can't really expect that you're going to get anything back from it.

2:52:32Dustin Furman:And that's kind of the way it reads to me. Don't know if that's true or not, but like, in other words, we can't pull the plug on this so quickly. We need people to kind of keep it going for a minute, but this game is dead. I would assume.

2:52:44Colin Moriarty:I mean, the only game, I don't even know if this counts like Fallout 76

2:52:49Dustin Furman:yeah sure I mean that's kind of but again that was also you paid for that too didn't you

2:52:54Chris P.:yeah I guess free to play is different than there are live service games that are not free to play so I guess that's kind of the distinction right yeah you're saying free to play games that are live service that yeah I guess

2:53:05Dustin Furman:and I want to be clear to the audience the reason why I'm asking if these games are paid or remembering that they're paid is because like you've already you have an inclination towards being it being good you've already invested in it like the money's gone yeah you know um in this it's easier to be fickle because you didn't most of you didn't spend anything to begin with but there is a lot more to say but i i'm going to be fascinated about this game for a long time to come i really can't wait to hear more we ended up now i i've spoken to people that know a lot about concord but the reporting around concord is surprisingly thin outside of some of the stuff we've done and because i was assuming I mean, I'm like, oh, we'll know everything about this game in a year or two.

2:53:43Dustin Furman:And we don't know anything about it. It could theoretically go the same way with High Guard, but I suspect this nut's going to get cracked. And we'll learn more about it. But I would assume that this is basically a total loss. Whoever invested in the studio. And we'll get into some of this. Let's go. We got a lot of inquiries about this. Well, I selected three of them. Yeah. To give us a little guidance. Ryan Taylor wrote in and said, hey, fellas. the developers of high guard have apparently already laid off most of their team according to a post on linkedin this has since been confirmed i'm not trying to dunk on the studio people's livelihoods are on the line but what honestly did the studio expect from this game why are we seeing so many games now follow this trend of releasing completely hollow bland games and wondering why the players aren't biting is this a fad like battle royale that will inevitably pass or are we witnessing console gaming developing into the ios app store where a couple of apps thrive and everything else is just absolute trash i would you're almost saying the same you're almost saying opposite things in a way in that like battle royale hasn't passed pub g made more money than ever last quarter you know um yeah i think it's about finding which is which is by the way kind of pub g itself is kind of crazy because i thought that game was dying you know and craft on was kind of in trouble and then they kind of figured it out i don't know

2:55:06Chris P.:what they did it's it's dying relative to like you know the the meteoric like unprecedented success stories in its or you know the other contemporaries in its place but a failure in the you know billionaire space is not bankruptcy right right you know like you're you're just not doing as well as the other guy but you're you're in a good space um but i don't know man

2:55:34Dustin Furman:it's yeah yeah no i was gonna say the bigger question i think chris is who are the investors like putting their money into this stuff and like what are their expectations because one of the big things you're hearing out of dice right now in regards to investment because people are like why are people keep why are people putting their money in the games like this is what ryan is asking and And the answer apparently is they're not like behind the scenes. This is done, you know, like and there's like a gun shyness now about investing in games. And if anything, it's it's actually very hard now to get investment in games.

2:56:05Dustin Furman:So like everything's washing through the system now. But I don't think we're going to I think you'll be surprised by how few things probably come out and fail in the next four or five years comparable to where we've been, because I think people have learned their lesson. and there's just there's no fluidity anymore in the money being made and money being spent and big players make all the money so i think that it like what ryan's saying here is interesting in that console gaming has already devolved into the ios app store it did it years ago we complain about it all the time and there are going to be it has all the trappings of the ios store by the like fake games trick games games that like uh what what's the what's that game schedule one or whatever the hell it's called or and and it's like first schedule oh yeah like there's all that shit and it's bad so yeah there are going to be a few winners and a lot of losers that we've i've said this ad nauseum at this point and certainly the games as a service space is just a encapsulation of that but I think the bigger thing for me is just the time economy I just I'm so I'm so fascinated by the time economy and you have to have a real intention it can't be just about like I saw someone say it for they used to make games in the 90s I it was like from micro pros or something saying like it used to be I think what they said was like it used to be so easy because all the game had to do was be good that was it and it's what you were saying earlier what we said many times and what strasselnik said about good games and great games and it's complex like there's just so much out of your control now and um i don't think it's helped by there being a group of people in the industry in every industry that revel in the destruction of products so it makes it seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy sometimes you see it a lot in TV like I know that that's everyone's like digging on that Star Trek show right now that just came out and hating it you know and it's like there's a certain revelry to be had the thing that you don't like failing even if you're not really interested in it so there's a lot of components to this conversation which makes it so

2:58:20Colin Moriarty:yeah go ahead there's an element to and I'm not sure exactly where this goes completely but it's worth bringing up because he's saying like what did they expect I think it's clear that there is still room for new huge live service games because we just got one with Arc Raiders. And I think that you could have a lot of the right like, oh, this studio already made a live service game that is healthy, but didn't light the world on fire. And here they are making another live service game that's an extraction shooter, which is, to be fair, a newer idea. Or there's more to tap in terms of potential with extraction shooters.

2:59:09Colin Moriarty:And it sold. There was just stats on it the other day. It was like 7 million copies or something. Something insane for our graders. So to say there's no room left for a new live service game, I don't think is true. But I think it is true that it needs to be very good.

2:59:28Dustin Furman:It's 12 million, by the way. I thought that number was 12 million. Just because that number seemed low for being like the best selling game. It's like there's got to be more than that. So, yeah, it's 12.

2:59:38Colin Moriarty:So High Guard, I just think simply I think it had the Concord problem that it wasn't cool and the art design wasn't great wasn't bad i would say from i haven't played high guard but from seeing a little bit of concord and high guard it's better than concord maybe not by much but it's not actively uh repulsive i from my my it's just it's just

3:00:05Chris P.:bland and forget it's just bland it's not actively it's not actively ugly like concord was and it seemed like it was doing something new and interesting but not necessarily

3:00:16Colin Moriarty:well developed based on how quickly they changed the core format of 3v3 to 5v5 like there's they needed to figure out more what that was and again i'm not i haven't played it chris probably could

3:00:32Chris P.:speak to that more but people were swearing that they're like oh they the 5v5s oh this is this is where it's at i'm like brother this this ruins like i get i get what they what they're doing and i get why but like this this kind of fucks the game like you can't five yeah it does because because the end of it like it's for people who haven't played high guard it's very odd because like the beginning of it in 3v3 it's clearly balanced for it that's why it launched that way it launched with 3v3 in mind um and so you spend a lot of time kind of gearing up for that last base assault and that last area is so small that it's really only big enough for 3v3 and when you have 5v5 in there it's like it's more interesting earlier on but like once it gets to the end it's just a complete like it's it's a fucking mess and it's not balanced for it it's it's more fun more quickly in 5v5 because it's like you get into fights more more often and earlier but like it kind of takes something away from it which is like what is satisfying about the end of it so it's like there's really no pleasing like the it's a drawing board issue with high guard like you need something in that open world when you're like before you get to the end like that needs to be addressed the loot pool needs to be um fixed the the base fortification stuff needs to be more more deep than it is like a lot of it is just kind of it's not poorly conceived it's just poorly executed outside of the gunplay, which I think is actually pretty good.

3:02:03But you need more than that, man.

3:02:06Chris P.:A lot of games play great. But you need a more compelling hook.

3:02:12Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's too bad just for the individuals that are losing their jobs, especially at a time like this. On the Ubisoft conversation I was having with Hogue that's going to go live on Sacred Plus this weekend, I was saying that I'm surprised by the level of employee agitation at Ubisoft considering how bad it is on the market for games and that there are just no new jobs to find and there's just going to be fewer and fewer jobs because there's going to be less and less investment or the investment is going to be much, much safer. Like if you have a job at Larian or CD Projekt or something like that, you better hold on man because those are safe places you want to be as opposed to dripping down and fucking, what's that game where you drop the the pachinko right and it bounces off all the different things yeah you're gonna be fucking bloodied and battered and bruised by the time you fall out of that tree dude you know um and you probably won't fall out of the tree with another job but that to me there's a there's a conflict at the center of all this that i think well let me read this next inquiry and i think it'll allow us to get into it better big already wrote in said hey cdc i don't write in often but i had to after hearing about the most most of the high guard team being let go i'm a total fps mark and decided to jump into the game this week and honestly i think it's great do you think high guard might have fared better if jeff had never talked about it publicly or was the way it was framed and revealed always going to hurt it no matter what i remember the day apex legend shadow dropped and took the world by storm and i can't help but wonder if high guard could have found more success with a similar approach i wonder this too although I just think there's There's so much risk now.

3:03:54Dustin Furman:When Apex Legends came out, it was just different. And I just wonder... The Jeff thing's unknowable, how much that hurt it. But I feel like it's kind of lame for a game to fail because of that. Like, if that's the reason you're mad about it, then I think that that's kind of weird. Like, you're easy to propagandize because...

3:04:19Chris P.:Yeah.

3:04:20Dustin Furman:it's like who ultimately we love a good showcase we love a good showing and we'll remember when a game was shown and it was so impressive and all of that but like did it at the end of the day does it really matter we talked about No Man's Sky No Man's Sky had amazing showings and like lots of promises and claims about it but when it came out it didn't really matter if the game didn't deliver and I feel like the blaming Jeff thing is interesting there's a component to that that I feel like is relevant and important no doubt but I also feel like it's a cop out who really cares if the game was good or they are bad it should kind of rest on its own being last at the game awards has some i guess reputation with it and yet who cares how it translates to the real world i just feel like the game has to stand on its own and so we're looking for reasons of why it failed

3:05:04Chris P.:as opposed to looking at more obvious things yeah if there wasn't like an algorithm kind of content farm to go along with it i think it wouldn't matter but it yeah i don't know ultimately like a game is good a good game is good regardless of like how it was shown and um you know so ultimately it doesn't it doesn't matter as far as the quality of the game goes but i think it does matter to constructing people's biases going in um i don't know it's weird like i don't think it's as clear cut of a choice where it's just like if if they were given the choice it's like okay so do you launch your live service game in this climate do you shadow drop it or do you get it on the biggest stage um i don't know if there's necessarily like an obvious answer to that like i really do think because there's a reality where they shadow drop this game right and it didn't really get a lot of attention and it maybe got a little bit of a few people playing it and those people ended up kind of liking it and maybe there's like there's less negativity around it so it has a higher opportunity to maybe grow and become kind of interesting and become kind of cool um by starting from a smaller baseline and slowly working its way up that's possible um but it's also possible that they got into the game awards and a lot of people were really curious about it because of that and played it and loved it also like that could have that could have been the strategy as well and so i just don't really know if it's as clear as like you know um oh they should have shadow dropped it and maybe maybe they would have been better off it's like maybe um maybe not though it's it's it's hard to say i will say like it didn't benefit like the worst thing a game can be really is uncool yeah and that that is kind of the narrative that it got stuck with and i don't know if that would have been the narrative if it wasn't in that space in the Game Awards which is a that's a shame because it is a competent like game it's you know but

3:07:12Dustin Furman:I don't know yeah I wonder I mean like what Dustin what do you think about Jeff's culpability or lack thereof I wonder he really because he doubled down on it and yeah I wonder what that's all about he probably felt bad yeah you know probably I just but I just don't know like and maybe it says something about his taste but I think everyone even if you feel like you have good taste like you miss

3:07:40Colin Moriarty:so where are you on this I think that there are a lot of valid ways to look at it I think when I look at it and there were so many people checking out high guard the day it came out that the servers were not working. And from what I've observed about gamers is that they are very easily, I don't want to say easily swayed, but someone could shit on Highguard for a month straight and then play it. And if they have a good time, then they're going to keep playing it. Like I always think this maybe isn't one-to-one, but I think of that image of this, Uh, this, when model warfare two, the original wasn't going to have dedicated servers.

3:08:29Colin Moriarty:And there was like a steam group that was like boycott call of duty until they do dedicated servers. And on launch day, most of the people in that group were playing, uh, modern warfare two. It's a classic story. I think that it comes down to the fact that the game simply is just not, it may be good as we've been saying, it may be good, but it just wasn't enough to hook people because Because I think if it was an awesome game, that people could have been hating on it and checking it out on launch day in a spiteful way and then played it and be like, oh, this is actually awesome. I was wrong. Maybe they wouldn't say they were wrong online, but they would have kept playing it.

3:09:11Chris P.:Yeah.

3:09:12Colin Moriarty:So I kind of am in the thought of that. It really, I don't think it, I don't want to say it didn't hurt it though. Because it's as Chris was saying, It's like, I think that high guard at a shadow drop may have been viewed as uncool, but that month lead up gave people really time to. Oh my God, it killed them. Yeah.

3:09:36Dustin Furman:I think if you could go back again, you would just, they know like there's always going to be a what if with those people because they admitted that they were going to do it. And in terms of shadow dropping it and that they were convinced not to. And they're always going to be like, maybe if we just did that, but I. I don't think it would have made a difference. Yeah, I think that why I think it ultimately would have ended the same. Yeah, I think what would have. Yeah, I just don't think they they they miscalculated. There's something to learn about, like game marketing here, because. I think.

3:10:09Dustin Furman:You can't. It's tough to reveal. They had a plan, obviously, like reveal the game and then go dark. And that requires a level of excitement, like they probably said, like, oh, people are going to be on the forums trying to figure out like what's going on and all this and like there's a reality where that happened but because the game was such a dud the silence was a mistake they should have a debt and maybe they did adapt on the side maybe they did the exact opposite because they were in trouble but like whoever told them that that's what they should have done it's a cool idea if your game has a has a mystique if your game has like the anti mystique then you have to do more than that and i also think by the way that they just the 5v5 thing is interesting because they obviously are responding in a in a in a major i was thinking let me back up i was thinking that when it was 3v3 and everyone had a problem like there must be a reason right and chris just kind of went through it it's like there's something about the end game that gets fucked up when you have too many people on the map and all the rest and things are kind of unbalanced they respond to that by doing the 5v5 because they know they're in trouble and this would have all just washed out i think if they just did a beta right you know um and i have no doubt that they play tested the game and everything but it just feels like they should have just done things a little differently and maybe it would have salvaged it but ultimately i think it's the aesthetic and people's just jaded nature with these kinds of games and i don't blame people being jaded i just i do think that there is something to be said though about how cool it was to hate on the game how that becomes a runaway story and a stone collecting snow as it rolls down the fucking hill and it becomes this massive thing a big boulder the size of a small boulder as the saying goes and um to me i just think that that did play a role yeah like the i i just want to reiterate it.

3:12:12Dustin Furman:The review situation for the game is unfair on Steam. I think that one of the things that people are like, what if the game's broken? What if this? I'm like, I don't know, dude. And I know that it shows how much you played and all that, but all your numbers count the same. And a lot of you, and I'm not saying you, I'm using the Royal U. It's like a lot of people out there downloaded the game to play it to be able to have that.1 or.2 hours to leave a bad review. Period. And that did matter. How much it mattered, I don't know. But let's not pretend that there wasn't a mean-spiritedness around this game, because there was.

3:12:49Dustin Furman:Come on, man. I've been in the games industry for 24 years. I'm not fucking stupid. I've seen a lot of games come out, and I know how it goes. You know, like, there are some games that just get targeted and have no prayer. And this is one of those games. So we can pretend that that didn't happen to it, but it did. the only question is whether it would have mattered or not and i think ultimately what i was describing as something that was more deliberate would have just died more slowly obviously there's no pop here the reality is i mean it is true that if you have hundreds of thousands of people downloading your game and it was actually super compelling they actually would have stuck with it so right you can't say the game didn't churn through hands a lot of people played it and if you can't retain more than 10 or 5 even 5 now of your of your max player base after just a month or a few weeks i don't know i don't think that's gonna work for you so i think there's just a lot of ingredients but it i kind of get i it kind of bumps me out when i taste the stew and i taste a certain something in it they're like no that ingredient's not in there i'm like of course it is you know like don't don't let's let's get it real let's keep it real for a minute wombat dances wrote in and said hey boys do hardcore gamers hate triple a publishers right now i feel like every time a studio announces the next big thing the vibes are awful especially in the live service space concord high guard hunters gathering all got shit on while arc raiders helldivers 2 and peak are really the only live service games to break through over the last few years all of which were big surprises maybe hardcore gamers just really despise trend chasing in such a competitive market it feels inauthentic sony in particular is getting the worst of it as they try to transition into the live service space but ubisoft and square enix have also been roasted over the last few years with x defiant foam stars i think isn't foam star still going and changing directions with final fantasy 16 nintendo even got way more criticism than usual for that talkative character in metroid prime 4 that was interesting because no one ever hates on nintendo anymore i just get the impression that the triple a space has retreated to very specific and profitable corners of the market and there is a very vocal group that is extremely sick of their shit thoughts i think that there is a vocal group of people that are extremely sick of their shit, but I also feel like the, it's trend chasing is obviously going to create diminishing returns.

3:15:07Dustin Furman:If everyone's going after the same trend, there are only so many bodies that can occupy those spaces. I think the reason Ark Raiders, Helldivers 2 and Peak really shone through in a way was because they are unique in their own way. You know, all of them. So, I don't know. And I also don't do gamers hate AAA publishers right now? I think they hate the inclinations of AAA publishers. Big bites for big rewards. Lots of risk. That's not going to be tenable for much longer in the live service space. But again, I don't think it's because any of these games are necessarily bad. I just think there's a time.

3:15:44Dustin Furman:It goes back to the time economy and the relative strategy around convincing someone not to play something else. And without those investments, and this is why Destiny was important and why it's important that there is an importance to Sony making people buy Helldivers. Sometimes it blows up in your face, but it keeps people there because they paid more benefit of the doubt. Maybe.

3:16:08I don't know.

3:16:09Chris P.:I don't know. I don't know. I think people try to distill the reasons why games succeed in ways that are too. I don't know, too surface level, because ultimately there is there are various it factors to certain games that can't really be quantified. and in a lot of cases aren't even necessarily intentional you know like it can come down to something as simple as like how the lighting engine ends up making the game look you know what i mean like it's very like very video games are big houses of cards you know they're they're held together in a lot of cases with like strings and duct tape i was watching a video recently about like how like even like fall new vegas like the guns don't make sounds it's the character like shouting oh the character shouts the sounds because like the engine just works in these in these weird ways and it results in like certain quirks like like there are reasons like halo 2 is really special to me for reasons that they did not intend like it's all like a bunch of fucking oh that shouldn't work that way but it does how cool and interesting and that captures people's attention and you know what i mean it there's a lot of things that you can't necessarily design around or can't even quantify or can't predict that are key reasons as to why certain games stick around like hell divers 2 like i think about hell divers 2 a lot as an example because i'm like this is a version of a game that I've played before.

3:17:29Chris P.:This is Horde mode from the 360. This is kind of... I get what's going on here, but even if something as simple as the ragdoll shit in that game made it endlessly replayable to me. And it's just like, is that a decision or was that just something that they didn't bother to fix? I don't know. I think when people look at something like Ark Raiders or something, it's like Ark Raiders is successful for a number of reasons. But I'm sure a couple of them are reasons that they didn't even anticipate. So you just kind of have to hit the... It really is the luck of the draw situation. You have to have a solid product with a solid vision and a solid framework and everything.

3:18:07Chris P.:But you also have to hit at the right time. You have to release at the right time. You have to fulfill a need that isn't being met. With arc raters, I'm convinced that it's the third-person extraction genre. That's not really a thing. As far as I know, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure every extraction shooter that exists, that's of any consequences first person you know and so arc raiders kind of playing to that casual you know third person almost sony-esque kind of presentation in you know the world design and the camera placement that helps but it could have but that game was originally supposed to be a looter shooter you know they just pivoted for no reason at a certain point and it was a fucking amazing call because that looter shooter would not have done well that would have that would have probably been another um outriders and it's not to say that the game would have been bad or whatever it's just like it would not have hit in the same way yeah because it would have hit a genre that

3:19:00Dustin Furman:was not it was over service so i don't know poor precious outriders you are missed by me yeah um yeah i don't know i guess we leave i mean we'll see what happens with high guard i also think the numbers are incomplete like i wonder if it's doing okay on console better on console i mean obviously it's not doing very well on console or they wouldn't have laid everyone off but this gets back into i will say that the what's going on with this game reminds me of this whole idea that i think games should be made like movies and really with high guard everyone's jobs were kind of done there's this assumption it's like oh you keep your designers on and you need a producer and all this kind of and all the rest because you want to keep supporting it and obviously it's a game service you're going to need to do that but there's a lot of assumptions about that then people's like whole livelihood gets caught up into it instead of kind of being under a contract or ever saying like we're going to deliver this game and we'll see what happens in the meantime you can go get another job or figure something else out get line up your next gig and if this all works out which it usually doesn't i mean i don't know how many times people have to hit their heads against the wall for this i just feel like there should be a different approach to making games that's more sustainable and makes things like this seem so much less silly when you see it's like, oh, the game's out.

3:20:20Dustin Furman:And again, it goes back to the Barry example. It's like canceled. It's like, cool, man. Very good. And yet, why would you assume, make any assumptions, price out the creation of the game and then price out your hopes and dreams should the game come out and do well? And I think a lot of people would, that's less security and long, that's less short-term security. And I think the ability to navigate in the long term more reasonably between projects if you have talent um there are some people that worked on on concord and then this game which i think is funny so oh yeah i don't know how you're gonna how you come back from that but yeah you're gonna go for the hat trick yeah exactly we need one more

3:21:03Chris P.:from you just one more i'm moving i'm moving on to uh fair games fair game i'm curious about that

3:21:12Dustin Furman:man that's that's gonna be an interesting one i don't know man i saw someone it was paul tassi i think from forbes that tweeted out like they can't release fair games and there is some there is something there is something to that it's like you can't do it like what do you think is going to happen to you yeah unless they really think they have something special and cool and i think the idea is cool but again these games are not for me really that's another thing is i kind of speak from a place where i'm like i'm agnostic i'm like i don't really give a shit anyway i all of these games could disappear and I wouldn't give a fuck.

3:21:44Dustin Furman:In fact, I think that would be awesome because then everyone would pay more attention to the games I want you to pay attention to. But alas. RIP and peace high guard? Not yet. One foot in the grave. Alright, a few more pieces of news to get through. This comes from Kotaku. We don't source very often, but we gotta pay the price when they have a good story and they write here. Sources don't expect Horizon Zero Dawn 3 anytime soon. I don't know why you're calling it Horizon Zero Dawn 3, but okay. They write, quote, Last week, Guerrilla Games revealed the multiplayer game it's been working on. The project is called Horizon Hunters Gathering, and it's a tactical co-op action game that looks like someone repainted the Horizon universe with a Fortnite brush.

3:22:25Dustin Furman:I don't think that's true. It's the third Horizon game that's been announced since Horizon Forbidden West released, and fans are beginning to wonder what's going on with the next mainline sequel in the open-world RPG series. Sources tell Kotaku it's still a ways off and then not the studio's top focus right now. While Horizon Hunters Gathering might seem like just another side project It's actually the main game many at the Dutch studio are working on right now. Two sources familiar with the state of the franchise told us. According to one source, many of the staff working on Horizon Zero Dawn 3 were pulled over to help with Horizon Hunters Gathering, which Sony is committed to making a multiplayer success.

3:22:55Dustin Furman:Another source suggested fans might not see the next true Aloy adventure for three to five years, which would make it a PlayStation 6 game, though it could still appear on PS5 as a cross-gen release. That would be interesting because Horizon 2 was a cross-gen release as well. so this isn't a huge surprise I think the bigger thing that's a bummer is that people getting dragged off of the existing Horizon project for the third game to make Hunter's Gathering but I don't know that I'm mega surprised that it's their main project simply because they always wanted to do this and that we know that it was greenlit or at least in pre-production and they were exploring it right after Zero Dawn came out so by 2018 team.

3:23:38Dustin Furman:Nonetheless, I think that they're dropping the ball here just from one perspective, which is that I think the strongest thing Horizon has going for it is its story. If you're into it, because it gets so strange. And I'm very curious to see how it all wraps up. Yet, I think they might look at it as when we get that third game out, that's the capstone and Horizon's over. I think at that point, or at least this chapter, we'll put it back on the shelf. And so we want to get other things out first and foremost, and then wrap it up with the third game. But listen, I'm a huge Horizon stan. I love Horizon and I want that third game.

3:24:16Dustin Furman:I guess we'll have to be patient for it. Three to five years. I mean, that puts it in the 2030 range, which will be eight years between mainline Horizon games. And that would be disappointing. Listen, the response to Hunter's Gathering is not good. And if Gorilla is going all in on this they better be very careful with what they're doing um because they're you're in danger if you stay down this path any thoughts here about horizon three why are we

3:24:45Chris P.:calling it horizon zero yeah i i i'm reading that in the headline and what comes to mind is that uh that inglorious bastards like oh yeah yeah yeah i'm like do you do you play games yeah it's like come on why would you write this but um no i mean i don't know like i i'm conflicted because i actually i i think it i think it looks kind of cool you know like so i don't really know i'm a multiplayer guy though and and like my the strength in horizon that i've always felt was that it was it was gameplay primarily like the gameplay horizon is great i i you know i it's the it's the story that kind of gets in the way for me so like i think this is kind of a no-brainer like making something that kind of focuses on that um although it is different stylistically and there's undoubtedly going to be differences between the main game and whatever whatever this ends up being um so i i don't know i i we'll see how it goes i i don't think it has i don't think it's in as much danger just because horizon is a big ip um it's clearly big enough for them to dedicate a lot of resources to it it doesn't have the it doesn't have the danger of falling off like a high guard which is just like this kind of unproven ip that doesn't really have a baked in audience it's a similar thing with marathon right it's like there's an audience there's going to be a baked in audience

3:25:59Dustin Furman:for marathon regardless right that by the way that's why everyone's like oh you know you see the grim reaper thing where people are like knocking on the marathon door and i'm like you're crazy i i don't i don't know that marathon is going to be like this biggest thing or whatever but if you think it's going to be concord you're you're completely detached from reality it's it's

3:26:12Chris P.:got a higher chance of becoming massive in like china or something than it has of like failing outright like i just it's that's insane but yeah i don't know i i'm curious about it i'm looking forward to it um i want to get my hands on it just to if for no if for no other reason than curiosity but if it takes them eight years to make the next horizon game that is pretty crazy but it's not that unpredictable considering how how these things have been going like how development times have increased over the last like a couple generations at this point it was only a matter of time before we hit the eight year you know the eight year between between sequels and lord knows how long it's going to end up like i wonder i wonder if we're gonna end up reaching 10 that's gonna be the big one um that'll be all 10 years between i mean i guess outside of just like putting things on the shelf you know what i mean which is normal like what they're doing with uncharted and that cassie drake game that all that doesn't exist and also does exist i i don't know what's going on with that but eight years is crazy yeah it's just it's

3:27:17Colin Moriarty:i don't know what what do you think doesn't i kind of always expected that the next horizon game would not appear during we'll say during the playstation 5 life cycle i agree that it could very well be a cross-gen game when playstation 6 comes out but it is certainly longer you know if this rumor is true that certainly will be a longer dev cycle between them um partially because it seems like of hunters gathering that's the that's kind of the question i have it's like i'm not surprised at all that if a studio has a side project that's been being built in the background for years and then they're getting close to launch that it's going to be all hands on deck for a little bit to push the game over the finish line that's not surprising to me at all i guess the question just is how much is taking everyone off horizon how is that's the cause that's like oh this is now going to be way longer than we expected uh because we're now having to all work on this live service game I don't really know the answer but I can kind of see Gorilla which I know that Forbidden West is a cross-chain game but I could see them even wanting to be able to like the next Horizon game the premier way to play it is on next generation hardware because we want it to be a step above the previous game

3:28:52Dustin Furman:and then they'll be able to get Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West on the PS6

3:28:58Colin Moriarty:right the complete edition the complete complete edition the most complete edition was it called complete edition?

3:29:06Dustin Furman:something like that yeah Horizon Zero Dawn completed yeah the even more complete edition the final the truly final edition

3:29:19Dustin Furman:I am I don't like I don't understand how first party studios were in empowered to this degree to make these games um i think hunters gathering looks fun and looks cool gorilla is a big team of between four and five hundred people my assumption was that there were two teams there probably are two teams but obviously they're pulling people now because they need more work done on the game that is more that is sooner than everyone will go back to the other game probably except for those that support hunters gathering over the long term and if there is a long term for that game and uh it just makes me it goes back to the the detective from from uh dexter and and that's me staring at herman holst and it's not just about horizon although i think we all kind of agree right that there's a little bias towards horizon maybe yeah just based on the amount of love it gets from everything.

3:30:22Dustin Furman:And I mean, it gets a VR game, it gets the MMO, it gets a multiplayer game, it gets a Lego game, it gets, and then you look at Herman Hulse and you're like, okay, he's the old studio head of Guerrilla. He's got a soft spot for this franchise. But then you look at the numbers that the game sells and you're like, okay, well, the numbers certainly justify you pursuing it like this. But I think it's more about the presumed mismanagement that we saw of the first party studios with allowing them to pursue all these games that they shouldn't have pursuing there are survivors of that call and this is one of those games like we saw the london studio gets shut down and then that game is still coming out under a different name with like you know a piece of the studio as we we went over a few weeks ago and it's like yeah i can see why you canceled this game uh the ben studio we're not going to go into it here but ben studio like some animations and shit leaked i don't know if you guys saw that and there was rumors that it took place in the siphon filter universe well which is interesting um but that it was like a game as a service and it looked like some sort of kind of like pacific northwest game that's built on the bones of days gone so it's like why didn't you just make days gone too of course blue point i think it's the most egregious example of this yeah absolutely nuts that you would let that happen but yet so i guess what i'm saying is that even though we called and there have been heads rolled and the fucking mobile studio shut down and jim ryan's gone and and a lot of these games have been cut and lucid is not making twisted metal and still there's still going to be things that exist and i and i guess i bring this up only because i wonder if there's listen you can't really you can't really use their internal judgment as a barometer of quality because they clearly have no idea what they're doing in a lot of ways right with with these games but that this game survived I'm like maybe there's really truly something special about it comparable to the other games but then again you have to play into like the some sort of presumed gorilla and horizon bias and then you have to look at games that we know were good like the last of us online that didn't even make it and you're like yeah what is what is going on here you know um but I'm I'm disappointed so I'm not disappointed gorilla's making the game they want to make like I know that I know again I know they want to do this it's what we said about spider-man like they always wanted multiplayer Spider-Man.

3:32:38Dustin Furman:So when they were making a multiplayer Spider-Man game, that wasn't a huge surprise. And again, that was another game that I called. So I don't mind them pursuing what they're always, always going to be their vision anyway from the, from zero dawn. I just don't want it to take away from the other stuff. And I thought that they were big enough to do that. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but it sounds like it's nowhere close.

3:32:57Chris P.:That Spider-Man one is weird to me because like, do you, do you, Colin, do you, do you think that like, my assumption is the licensing fee would have been crazy right yeah like that's why because i feel like that would would have been a surefire like that would have made that would have made a lot

3:33:12Dustin Furman:of money yeah you would assume so like i that's the thing about the cancellations that i'd like to know more about chris is like the two games that seemed like the biggest slam dunks in spider-man the great web or whatever it was going to be called and the last of us online is like why didn't you follow through with these and cancel fucking concord yeah and we're gonna have more by the way like dark outlaw is making something i kind of have confidence in them i don't know if i should those are x deviation people maybe they had something cooking there obviously jason blundell's no no fool but they better hope that that game's fucking tip top i I mean, and I brought up last week for loop like no, everyone already forgot that game even existed.

3:33:57Dustin Furman:No one brings that game up. Oh, yeah, that's the the left for dead kind of guy doing doing a second party game via bad robot or whatever. So, yeah, I will see what happens. We'll see what happens. But a boy, we love you. You're very special. Very special. All right. there's word out of um dice so dice is going on right now uh we have some people there i think is um cogs there i think right cogs there yeah um and of course this is through the academy of interactive arts and sciences the dice awards are kind of prestigious they go back to the early 90s i think not only for um well the academy of interactive arts and sciences is games but it's kind of like the, I don't know, kind of like an Academy Award for games.

3:34:50Dustin Furman:Not obviously that prestigious, of course, but they're trying and they have a large membership. They do a summit each year and they have different speakers and, um, and so on and so forth. But they had a little thing there. I guess it was a panel at the Dice Summit, um, specifically a keynote address. And it was called remembering a Titan. And it was kind of an ode to Vincent Pella, who, as we know, died tragically in a car accident back around Christmas in California. He is, of course, the co-founder of Infinity Ward, the co-founder of Respawn, major player in Call of Duty, and other things as well.

3:35:28Dustin Furman:And he passed away very young. Did you guys get a chance to read any of this? Because there is some interesting stuff in there, but about the way people feel about him and the way people talked about him. But one thing that I really wanted to note, and this comes from Gamefile, which is Stephen Tattillo's publication, is that there was word. So people came up like Todd Howard came up and spoke a little bit about his, you know, Jeff Keighley, about his relationship and so on and so forth. But one of the people that was speaking about his relationship apparently was Kojima with Zampella. And he talks about that.

3:36:01Dustin Furman:And there's not much known here about this because disappointingly in the Gamefile write up, It's not the specific quote, but that there was word from there was word from Kojima that he and Zampella when Respawn was first founded. So when they left Activision under duress or whatever, that perhaps they would work on a Metal Gear shooter.

3:36:25Chris, does that sound interesting to you?

3:36:28Chris P.:Yeah, of course. No, absolutely. I mean, I would be curious as to what it would be. um my my assumption well so here's the interesting thing like what would i guess it doesn't exist and it never existed so we'll never know and as far as i know there was never really any real design work done it seems to be just like a pitch right like or just yeah it seemed like

3:36:48Dustin Furman:there was multiple conversations that they had about it yeah yeah it's hard to imagine what

3:36:52Chris P.:that would have been if it would have been more like a bombastic kind of uh ball to the wall action fps quick paste in the universe of metal gear which i think could have also been cool but like i i like to imagine that they would have they would have done something a little bit more like in splinter cell there's like a spies versus mercs asymmetric multiplayer kind of component to it where one team plays as like third person stealth and the other team plays as first person kind of like surveyors and they try to find the people right oh that's cool it's fucking awesome like splinter cell's sick that's an interesting idea but but i like to imagine that it would have been like that not necessarily the multiplayer aspect but like the first person version of whatever that that would be like a first person splinter cell with you know or metal gear i guess like with all the gadgets and you know the stealth mechanics i think it would have been that could be sick that could have been cool um it's a bummer that nothing happened but then also like maybe not maybe things progressed the way that they should because then we got titanfall out of it and that was obviously huge and you know titanfall 2 which is very very well respected so ultimately the way things went is pretty pretty cool too so not necessarily a huge loss but i would be curious to see like what a what a studio like prime respawn would have been able to do with metal your solid is like a world and like a like an ip that would have been kind of interesting to see it is interesting to think about just that

3:38:15Dustin Furman:yeah a butterfly effect from that point because when they left infinity war or when they left infinity war and then they got all wrapped up in this legal battle and then ea kind of came in and scooped them up and then they got in a legal battle with activision and there was payouts and all this kind of shit. It's like there's a butterfly effect where they just went and worked with Konami. And I wonder what that would have been good for them, I don't think ultimately, but it might have brought them on a different path where they still would have been prominent in different ways because Jason West like ends up leaving pretty early.

3:38:43Dustin Furman:I think he's over at Epic now or something like that. And yeah, but specifically, Dustin, as we go to you to get your thoughts here, here's what Stephen Totillo writes on GameFile. Quote, in recorded marks delivered in Japanese, game developer Hideo Kojima marveled over the impact of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. He said Zampella had offered him valuable advice when Kojima, in a spot similar to Zampella, split from his longtime employer, in his case Konami, to form a new studio. Kojima said, quote, he gave me a lot of support and advice. He showed me his studio and I incorporated some of the good aspects into our own studio, end quote.

3:39:14Dustin Furman:And then parenthetically, Totillo writes, Kojima also shared that he had preliminary talks with Zampella prior to his departure from Konami about creating a Metal Gear first-person shooter, but the project never came to be. What are your thoughts?

3:39:25Colin Moriarty:yeah it's interesting that kojima was definitely opening up more for uh i think he wanted to expand metal gear as a whole specifically in that like metal gear solid 4 had the online mode that was also in metal gear solid 5 i didn't play that but uh most interestingly metal gear solid rising from platinum games which i've never played but i would like to because just seems completely crazy so yeah there's there's a lot of potential in the metal gear world so what i always think is funny about like metal gear survive as as offensive as it was remember when i bought that physically yeah it was it was like on your desk for like months yeah i never opened i never played it i as as offensive and i get it that you know konami made a metal gear game after kojima had gone and i could see why that would be unsavory but the thought of a metal gear zombie game i'm like dude like kojima probably would have done that something I could see Kojima doing something like that and doing something weird with the world.

3:40:43Colin Moriarty:So what a first person respawn developed Metal Gear game would be like, though, man, I have no idea what that would look like. But I check it out. I'll check out pretty much anything Metal Gear.

3:40:57Dustin Furman:Hell yes. I would have loved to see it, too, just because I would have loved to see the feel of it. Like the what would it have been? What where in the timeline? who are the characters could you do something as silly and zany yet as grounded and meaningful and impactful in first person with more and and first person necessarily suggests in my opinion less cover less stealth you can't really see your you can't obviously see yourself at all like i would have even been snake would it have been some other like crazy mercenary that is like more like the punisher where he like is fucking popping everyone every left right and center it's just a totally different feel it's kind of interesting to think about that because it is tactical espionage action right um god it would have been funny like i almost see the graphic like you see the old metal gear thing and then it says tactical espionage action underneath it and then the camera zooms in on the action you know yeah and and there's like some sort of thing or whatever about like it would be kind of interesting it'd be cool man like i think uh

3:42:02Chris P.:it's it's you say that i i i i can visualize like all sorts of versions of like what that

3:42:07Dustin Furman:would have been and all of it is interesting you know what would have been cool is a fantasy is like three metal gear games announced where they zoom in on each of them so like tactical maybe they release like a turret like a grid-based role-playing game which would be kind of sick and then espionage is like metal gear whatever like the real kind of and then like you know action like an FPS or whatever.

3:42:29Chris P.:That's a very Shovel Knight kind of or what is it? The what was it? Is it Shovel Knight or the other studio that was like, we want to make this SNES and then PS. Oh, no, that's shovel.

3:42:40Dustin Furman:That's what the Yacht Club wanted to make. And yeah, that's ultimately what they're doing.

3:42:44Chris P.:It's a very cute. It's a very cute idea.

3:42:45Dustin Furman:Yeah. Like tactical espionage action, all three of them. But that's too good of an idea. So Konami would never do that. Although they seem to be coming back pretty strong, slowly and quietly. but strong rooting for them. We won't linger too much on this next story, but I got to say this. Did you read this? Did you guys read the story? It's really interesting. It's so over at games industry, games industry up is there's a story. People should look this up. It's called can build a rocket boy, save itself. It's by Alex Forbes, Calvin, who wrote a really lengthy story about build a rocket boy, the studio behind mine's eye.

3:43:19Dustin Furman:And the reason I wanted to bring people's attention to it is that they are kind of doubling down on this idea, including through a statement that they provided the games initiative is that there are saboteurs that we're trying. They believe we're trying to destroy the game. People can go read the story, but the basic run of the basic gist of the story is that a few months ago, people at Build a Rocket Boy realized that there was spyware on all of their computers that was installed at some point late, late last year. Like, I don't know if it's a like a keystroke thing or whatever, but they're spying what everyone's doing what everyone's doing and then in an all hands meeting apparently they admit that this stuff has been uploaded and it's to try to catch the saboteurs amongst them that are trying to apparently ruin the reputation of Mind's Eye and build a Rocket Boy the story's a little sad because there's a little bit of a level of delusion about this game internally I think where like I'm a little surprised because they speak to people you know anonymously that worked on the game and there's like we didn't there seems to be this idea that like they didn't really know was going to be so bad.

3:44:22Dustin Furman:And I'm like, I don't know how you didn't know. And I guess what they're blaming it on is like, especially with Leslie Benzies is that he apparently, Njira had his own category where he would, like any suggestions he had in the pipeline would be immediately prioritized no matter what, up until a month before the game went gold. So they were adding a shit ton of things to the game. So it's possible that people in the different silos just never played the final product and had no idea. But ultimately what they say is that money from the United States over a million dollars, they say was funneled into this thing called the Ritual Network, which is like this platform for creators where apparently they claim that like they were directed to and then they deny it and all the rest.

3:45:09Dustin Furman:So it's a lot. People should, it's almost worth doing a Sacred Civilist Plus about this at some point.

3:45:14Colin Moriarty:Sounds like an Alex Jones. He's like, there's a million dollars uploaded to the Ritual Network.

3:45:24very good impression although

3:45:29Dustin Furman:alex jones is right about some things ultimately right and so is he ultimately going to be right about the ritual network the ritual i mean

3:45:37Colin Moriarty:the ritual network the ritual the rituals

3:45:42Chris P.:that's so crazy that's this is all so interesting um how do you even say about this you know what i mean like i so here's the only thing that i would say about this is like okay let's say hypothetically okay your uh your game was sabotaged by i don't know the ritual network or something uh okay um okay you still the game you put out was still ultimately bad and you did pretend like it wasn't because as far as i remember like a lot of the the commentary around this game from from the developers themselves or for i guess from lindsey leslie benzes and whoever was um up there uh wasn't that the game was bad because it was sabotage it was it was that people are trying to sabotage the game before you know ever anybody has a chance to play it or like you know there's there's people shitting all over it and we have a great thing actually but you didn't so like what what's the sabotage yeah that's you know what i mean like i agree i agree i i don't know the ritual network's here that's great i love the ritual network is such an awesome like what is that oh the games industry up is peace writes

3:47:03Dustin Furman:and or reads in part in an impromptu all hands video call in the last week of january seen by games industry app is. So that's really interesting. They have this whole video call. Co-CEO Mark Gerhard describes Terramind. So Terramind is the programming they put on their own employees' computers. As enhanced cybersecurity software, he said that while management trusts most of its staff, quote unquote, it's the 1 % that is the problem. Echoing earlier comments from co-CEO Leslie Benzies about saboteurs inside the company, Gerhard said that Barb, which is Bill the Rocket Boy, hoped to remove the tech within three months with the caveat that that was directly linked to Mind's Eye's success.

3:47:41Dustin Furman:On the same call, Gerhard claimed without evidence that, quote unquote, a very big American company had spent over 1 million euros in 2025, quote, committing criminal activity against Barb, unquote. This, he claimed, took the form of paying UK influencer agency Ritual Network, as well as three unnamed journalists and some Barb employees to damage the company. All these parties, Gerhard said, were set to receive in-person criminal complaints shortly. and like I said there's so this is where things get interesting the Build-A-Rocket Boy spokesperson said quote sadly when asked about games industry from games industry about what's going on quote sadly we do have evidence that there has been a coordinated campaign to purposely and maliciously damage Build-A-Rocket Boy's reputation and undermine confidence in mind's eye we are working with our legal team and taking steps to address this end quote Ritual Network denies the accusations I'll be very if this goes to to court there's gonna be discovery and all sorts of things this is gonna get big and bad I agree with what you're saying Chris where it's like there's nothing even here with a game that would be well received like you're they write in here how they kind of hope internally that this will be like a no man's sky situation and I'm like I don't think so

3:48:56Dustin Furman:anything anyone wants to add here before we move on Alex do you want to say anything

3:49:02Colin Moriarty:it's so funny because it's called the ritual network i looked it up it's just like a youtube marketing agency and yeah yeah it's i mean it's what chris said that even let's say there was a conspiracy from from the ritual network over a million dollars

3:49:20Dustin Furman:let's say there was make of the frogs it doesn't change the fact that the game was actually ass

3:49:26Colin Moriarty:so yeah i don't think it didn't need to be sabotaged we tried to build impressive drone

3:49:33Dustin Furman:missions for you guys and you didn't like it it's crazy it was perfect um definitely go read the article if you're interested in the imaginations of the industry because it's really fascinating stuff about the development of mind's eye in there and how hands-on leslie benzie's and others were and how the game was just just bogged down with bullshit and of course it all tracks back to everything the mmo like that's right everywhere right or everywhere that's what it was everywhere i'm sorry everywhere where mine's eye like what they say in the article was really interesting is that i think everywhere was shown in 2022 and no one gave a fuck like they thought there was going to be like a bigger boost behind it so they had a pivot and they're like well mine's eye will be the thing that gets people to pay attention to the platform and the platform is supposed to be this kind of like make your own kind of thing mmo and it so they they tried to feed it backwards and that didn't work either um because i think the reason that you can they can kind of really continue to update mind's eye and i don't know if there's any demand for them to really be doing this but like because it's built on this engine of create creativity and creation and because they even get you into those missions if you play the game they bring you and try to show you some of these things it's like i guess there's hope for you to do something to it but it's just not very good that's the like i am predisposed to liking those kind not not ucg games but just open world action shooter driving game like i want to like that stuff and it was just shit and i don't feel that way about very many and i don't like games like that don't come out anymore there used to be a lot more shitty games that would get people's attention because there were fewer games and thus you would see everything games like that it's very weird for a game like that to bubble up to the top and so i think it got the treatment it kind of deserved from my perspective but um yeah we'll see i'm curious to see it go to court i i would i would

3:51:23Chris P.:love to see that actually see what uh what ends up happening if if there's anything there if there's nothing there that would be even funnier um if there is stuff there it would it would actually be hysterical but i don't really know what to make of this it all sounds kind of it all sounds kind of like there's demons trying to sabotage my mmo they breathe sulfur like I don't know like okay

3:51:48Dustin Furman:case dismissed by the way there's a little bit of stuff in here about Leslie Benzies being in the Epstein files too and that he's taking a leave of absence from Build a Rocket Boy it is worth noting and Chris and I have talked about this a lot on the show is that like there's just going to be a lot of people's names brought up like just because they're in there in some passing way or there's been an accusation or whatever I don't even know what's going on with Leslie Benzies but there's a lot gonna be a lot of drama around a lot of people in there especially as they start to unredact more and more of it and i forgot to tell you guys this and this is unbelievable i know someone in the epstein files i'm not gonna say i'm not gonna say who it is i don't even want to give an indication the person didn't do anything wrong but oh so they're just they're just named

3:52:27Chris P.:and they're email with with jeffrey wait they oh they like a direct correspondence yeah so all right

3:52:35Dustin Furman:i don't i don't want to get because so sure yeah my high school friends it's like being to discuss with my high school friends because it's someone that we went to high school with and it's just so interesting because i was like like i got the message from one of my friends and i'm like what like i think i said it aloud because it was like dude dude xyz is in the epstein files and i'm like what so he sent me the links and then i went and looked and i'm like holy shit these emails are from him it's they're totally anodyne the guy didn't do anything wrong we just it's about like something they were like some project or whatever but um i was like dude i actually know someone like I actually know someone that's in them, you know, which is so strange.

3:53:11Dustin Furman:So funny.

3:53:12Chris P.:That is that's that is wild. Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you guys offline who it is.

3:53:16Dustin Furman:I just like, sure, sure.

3:53:18Chris P.:Yeah, it's direct correspondence is pretty wild. Like that to me is like a little bit more like not that he did anything, whatever. But like I like there's a lot of people are saying like, oh, this person's brought up however many times like you have it like, what does that mean? You know what I mean? Like John Stewart's in there because they were looking for like they were talking about like an award show and they were like we want somebody like Jon Stewart to host. Right, right. And so I would imagine there's a lot of people like that. At a certain point though, if you're mentioned thousands of times.

3:53:47Chris P.:Yeah, right. Maybe there's, you know, not saying there's always smoke where there's fire, but like, yeah.

3:53:55Dustin Furman:Do you see the Clintons want to testify like live on camera? They obviously want to destroy Trump, which was like whatever to me, I don't care. But to me, I'm like, yes yeah someone's got to do it like kamikaze you know yeah bill clinton's there like my my bones are dust anyway right exactly dude i was listening to take it along for the team

3:54:17Chris P.:tim dylan he's gonna vanish he's gonna vanish like luke skywalker when it's all done he's gonna just like his clothes are gonna i did it collapse to the ground i did he's gonna be sitting on a

3:54:26Dustin Furman:stone dude it's so funny i gotta send it to you tim dylan did a thing about just about that where he's like bill clinton's gonna go up there and be like we we fucked those babies me and you and hillary like all of that like we and we threw them in the shark pit together don't you remember like that kind of thing like we blended them up we blended them up you were there

3:54:43Chris P.:i was playing i was playing saxophone and you were tapping your feet i gotta send you that it's like so funny i'm all for it whatever go ahead um oh yeah i don't care

3:54:54Dustin Furman:whoever's guilty i could give a fuck like yeah i i totally agree i also just don't give a fuck about any of these people ultimately like i've said before there's only one living politician that i actually truly love and it's ron paul like other than that you're just you're just a walking suit of ideas that i want to support so next it's like i don't give like i don't give a fuck about your about like what happens to you if you're a bad person bye hopefully that happens i saw that

3:55:23Chris P.:there was like some pushback obviously well yeah because it's gonna be that i mean everyone knows what that's all about but i think it would be awesome yeah i was i was gonna tweet i was gonna tweet something where i was just like i but i was like uh maybe i won't but i was like i never thought i would say this but we have to keep bill clinton alive as long as possible i know

3:55:43Dustin Furman:protect bill clinton he knows everything protect bill clinton he knows about the shark pit that picture did you guys see that picture of like i didn't see the picture they have like a picture that's like unredacted picture in the Epstein files of like a hatch that leads to just the water.

3:56:01Chris P.:Oh, yeah. The ocean. Did you see that? They bought like thousands of gallons of like sulfuric acid. It's so great. Whatever. We're getting way off topic now.

3:56:11Dustin Furman:It's so good. Like how people are just like, it's like, everyone's like, what? Like, what is going on? Oh, and the other thing and Mike, I've been talking about this with him is like, I believe he's alive after seeing those pictures in Israel. I don't know if those are true, but if those are real pictures, I think I saw that that was a, I, okay. Okay. Well, God, we're already getting tricked by it. I've already been tricked by AI a million times at this point.

3:56:36Chris P.:I'll, I'll, I'll say this. I don't, I don't think he's alive. If it came out tomorrow that he was, I would not be surprised. I was like, he's in Tel Aviv. Come on, man. He's in Tel Aviv playing Fortnite. Playing Fortnite.

3:56:50Dustin Furman:I love that. I still want to know what he again I'll reiterate what I said last week because his email address is known people at Microsoft and Sony can go and look at his account yeah and I would love to know what he bought what he did why he got banned all oh my god it'd be so good do you know that guy

3:57:10Chris P.:who was running for I think he was running for Congress or something in New York a couple years SNL did a bit about it but it was a real

3:57:23Dustin Furman:I saw a skit about it I didn't even know that was based on a real person it was John Mulaney played him

3:57:27Chris P.:and he was like I'm like it's like this name things a bit of an albatross but it's good stuff

3:57:35Dustin Furman:that was a real Jewish affect or whatever it's so funny you know like it's like

3:57:39Chris P.:I think they were interviewing people they were like everybody deserves a second chance and he goes like I'm still on my first chance every now and again SNL really like they get a hit in there you know 10 % of the time yeah keep throwing off against the wall you'll hit just something will

3:57:56Dustin Furman:stick final piece of news is uh from Deadline the movie and tv publication because Helldiver's video game not only has a release window but has a star in the form of Jason Momoa um the movie is we already know being directed by Justin Lin who is most famous I guess for what uh the Fast and of furious stuff and then um the movie has a release date of when november 10 2027 so this doesn't do anything i mean i don't really know anything about jason momo i know he's a big action star these days but we don't know any of the characters in hell divers yeah so i don't i don't have any opinion on it to be honest i'm a little i hope they understand what they're doing

3:58:44Chris P.:i'll say that yeah um i don't know if they do yeah i don't really i don't really have an opinion either like i've seen a little bit of jason but not enough to even really i'm sure it's fine i'm sure it's fine like i could see him as like a like a you know military bro yeah if they you know what i mean so like that that works but like i don't i don't know enough about him as a performer i know far more about like um because he used to am i incorrect or did he used to be like a like a wrestler or something or am i thinking of somebody else because like he strikes me

3:59:15Dustin Furman:i'm not that you're mixing him up with the rock but that you may i don't know but like he's like

3:59:19Chris P.:there's like john cena and like dave batista how they like like these are like athletes that have done a turn like was he one of those because he strikes me as i don't think so i'm looking at his wikipedia page and i don't see anything so fucking huge like i'm like how are you not and how are you

3:59:31Colin Moriarty:not an athlete before this yeah he was that carl drogo yeah that i know oh okay yeah it's called Carl Droga. Carl Droga.

3:59:42Chris P.:That's Game of Thrones, right?

3:59:43Dustin Furman:That's all I know him from, but he was Aquaman, right?

3:59:46Chris P.:Yes. Yeah, and I didn't see that either, so I don't know.

3:59:50Dustin Furman:He actually doesn't have a huge filmography. I'm looking at it now. He's in Minecraft. Minecraft, that's later. Oh, he was Conan the Barbarian in the Conan, that reimagining of Conan from 2011. I guess that was his first big role. And yeah, Minecraft, The Flash. Oh, he's in Dune, I guess.

4:00:11Colin Moriarty:Oh, he's Duncan Idaho. His name's Duncan Idaho? Yeah. Really? I always... Dude, it's from the book. His name's Duncan Idaho, dude.

4:00:25Chris P.:That's almost a Star Wars name, you know what I mean? Like, not quite, but it's... Duncan Idaho. Duncan Idaho.

4:00:30Dustin Furman:He was in the... That's interesting. he was in Baywatch like at the end of Baywatch's run was like revived to Baywatch Hawaii when they started losing all their cast members and he was a main cast member on Baywatch Hawaii 99 in 2001 on TV that was like his first role and then he did a lot of TV he did another he was on a main role on a one season sitcom called North Shore in 2004 oh he's in Stargate Atlantis I never saw that so he's got some it wasn't until Game of Thrones that he really became known, but he did a lot of TV before that because he did 73 episodes of Stargate. Wow. So he's got a little bit of nerd.

4:01:11Dustin Furman:I mean, he obviously has nerd credential because he's done all the DC stuff as well. Plus, he's in Street Fighter. Right? Oh, that's right. He's Blanca. Well, we'll wish that. I mean, I'm definitely going to see the Helldivers film. So, yeah. Let's see. Oh, fat and nasty Mike Tyson wrote in said hey gents colin hope your mom is doing okay and sorry your family had to go through that scare thank you jason momoa is set to star in the hell divers movie so i have to ask how long until jack black makes his way into this movie do you think there will be a line where a character says time to dive into hell or something similar i just hope this movie is a fun is fun bad and not boring bad um jack black and hell divers do you think they'll do something like that i don't see

4:01:53Chris P.:rid it to do i'm diving like he'll do like he's got to do a song yeah i don't know uh he doesn't fit i don't think like i like jack black actually but like i don't i just don't i don't think he works in that like hell divers is silly but it's not that genre of silly if that makes sense i like

4:02:13Dustin Furman:that people see jack black just randomly walking around all the time and he's like he looks like a neurodivergent like you know man child basically with like big headphones on sloppy dress i met

4:02:26Chris P.:him but it's jack black you have met him oh yeah i mean in passing it's not like a real meet like you know what i mean but like he's seems very nice every time i've interacted with him which is only like twice but only twice that's above average time amount of time to meet jack black

4:02:45Colin Moriarty:That is true.

4:02:46Chris P.:But it's but those two that's like a combined like a combined 20 seconds. Sure. You know what I mean?

4:02:51Dustin Furman:Yes. Friends. It's time for us to get into what we're playing. Chris, I'm eager to start with you. It says here you're playing Resident Evil 5, an interesting selection.

4:03:01Chris P.:Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why. I'm still playing Jak and Daxter and like Splinter's all that stuff. Like whenever I have like some free moments in the day, but on like a whim. And maybe it's just because Resident Evil 9 is so close and I'm kind of like I'm in the mood to play resident evil but every modern resident evil is like i kind of finished it already or i just know that i i'm not that into like resident evil 7 i tried initially like that's the biohazard right that's the one in the house i tried with that and i'm just like years ago i played that game and i didn't really get into it and i tried it again it's like oh enough time has passed maybe i'll be more receptive to it and i i just kind of wasn't i just i think they the first person in that game feels weird and it's like it feels slow and like i get why i understand that it's survival horror or whatever but i just feel like village did a better job at like making that feel a little bit more um polished and i i didn't just didn't have nearly as much friction and it was just like i'm just i'm not into this one and that's that's fine i guess uh but i was still in the resident evil mode four i played too recently two i wasn't exactly in the in the mood for three I didn't really like three but five it's been a long time since I played five I barely remember it I remember like key moments of it I played the demo a lot as a kid and so I was like you know what this is kind of the one that I haven't this is the one outside of maybe Resident Evil 1 which I don't remember much of because I was chickened out of playing it when I was a child because yeah you were the cut scene in the very beginning of that game looked exactly like the mezzanine in my apartment building growing up so I just like I just that's interesting yeah it me up dude it was it was like because it's so funny looking back on it because like back i remember it looking so real when it just like it looks i mean it looks impressive still to this day if you if technically if you think about like what the ps1 was doing at that time but like you know it's it's trivial now but so i still haven't really played resident evil one i know what happens in it i've you know watched countless videos about it but outside of one like five is the only one that i ever actually finished front to back um or that i have like the least memory of i didn't remember exactly what it was about or who was in it or how the game went and so you know what i was like yeah let me see if i can play it and it was like i think it was like some i think it was like six bucks or something on steam and i was like yeah okay that's fine and i've been playing it on my steam deck um and uh yeah it's i don't know version of five's weird because like i i'm having quite a bit of fun with it i think it's a very fun video game it's definitely of the era it's like there's like a piss filter oh yeah as the as the audience has lovingly dubbed it um you know it's very golden uh it's very action-oriented but i think it's really good actually like it's a it's a really competent video game it's enjoyable it's co-op it's built around co-op and you can kind of feel that a little bit sometimes like sheva is just i'm at a point right now i don't know how deep into the i don't know how many chapters are in the game or how many levels per chapter there are but i think i'm like i'm like meaningfully pretty far into it and i'm fighting this this this creature in like a in like a like really claustrophobic kind of room with a bunch of walkways and the gimmick of the fight is that you have to there's like a flamethrower on the wall that like you have to refuel and you have to grab it and you pop all of its like glowy bits and then you shoot it with a flamethrower and then you kind of weaken it and sheva keeps dying and i just don't know how to i don't know how to help her at this point which is kind of a it's a little infuriating you know having your progress muted because the ai sucks it's like that's always been kind of like a a pet peeve of mine it's why i always hated like escort missions and um that kind of thing but outside of that uh the ai issues that sort of in my experience plague the later half of the game the beginning is fairly trivial i'm having a good time with it like i think it's fun like getting getting headshots is really satisfying in resident evil 5 like i like uh chris's uh absurd like he just he's throwing these haymakers and shit it's like it's absurd and it's awesome it's fun uh there's there have been a couple of occasions though where i guess i guess modern games have protections for this that I took for granted, but I keep accidentally skipping cut scenes because I don't know, like I'm like moving the controller or whatever.

4:07:26Chris P.:And so and so they'll be like, I think now it's usually like you have to hold skip or something. Like now that's kind of like the modern thing where it's like if there's a cut scene, they'll let you skip it, but you have to like actively do it. Now it's like in these games, it's kind of you can just accidentally do it. So I had this one fight or this one cut scene where a guy's like monologuing and then I accidentally like flashed immediately into like oh now he's a giant fish and i have no context for why it is um i'm trying to catch up on some of that stuff so i've been watching on youtube like what i miss and stuff but cool it's a good game actually like i'm having a fair bit of fun with it i think it's it it's definitely more resident evil 4 than resident evil 2 it's definitely like this is although i will say this is as far into action as i think resident evil should go like i think like this is kind of like i'm okay with it i'm good with it it's it's good like i like it but it does feel like if they do this more if they try to make this crazier i think i could see it getting not very good and lo and behold that's kind of like the that's kind of what six is from what i've heard i still have not played six i just six is the only one i've never played i have no interest in it really like at all and from what i understand it's not really even that relevant so like people don't even really care yeah it's like the vignette

4:08:46Dustin Furman:style right where it's like about a bunch of different characters I was put off by it so badly about the way it was being because you know obviously I was at IGN at that time and we had early access to all these games and people just didn't like it internally and that really I was like oh I'm not playing this because I agree with you about five five began to lose was the game that began to lose its way but I did spend a lot I wrote the strategy guide at IGN for five and I beat the game like four or five times probably and I it's a very good horror-driven third-person shooter. It doesn't feel like a Resident Evil game.

4:09:17Dustin Furman:And I think they went more in that direction with RE6 even. And then I was reading just recently because RE6 is like the height of Crapcom. And they were like really worried about RE6 internally because I think RE6 is like one of the best-selling Resident Evil games, but they knew that something was wrong like internally. That's why there was such a huge gap between the games because they were like, we can't do this anymore. We have to do something different. And I think that's why seven was what it was. And seven is awesome.

4:09:45Chris P.:I wonder if they had telemetry that showed them that people just didn't replay it. You know, maybe comparison like, or like there's not really that much engagement with this because there's evil five. I can tell even though, even as like, this is my first time really going through it. I'm playing it and I'm like, this is a very replayable game. Like I'm kind of like, I like it feels good. It's in this weird middle ground where like stopping, you know how like in, in, in these Resident Evil games, you have to stop aim and shoot yep it's kind of at that point where like that feels kind of clunky still but it actually doesn't it feels relatively modern despite it feeling clunky like i actually don't know what a resident evil 5 remake would really do much to make it more playable because i think it's fairly it's fairly well done it feels really good i can see myself like maybe replaying this in a in like in a co-op setting um it reminds me a lot of um by the way not in like pure design or anything but it reminds me of how a lot of people felt about um dead space 3 where it's just like everybody kind of like the way that a lot of people feel about that game is like it's a very good co-op game but like it's not that good of a dead space game and i think it's resident evil's resident evil 5 is a better resident evil game than dead space 3 is a dead space game but i could see that kind of like this is a very different vibe this is fun this is action it's definitely schlocky um like i i know that there's a boulder punching scene coming up

4:11:09Dustin Furman:and i'm excited yeah i forgot about that um wes wesker yeah i've never experienced it like

4:11:14Chris P.:like i've seen it like referenced like many many times but yeah i'm enjoying my time with resident evil 5 let me i don't i don't know i never looked up how many chapters are in it i'm just trying to enjoy it on like a blind kind of level um do you know that resident evil 5 is the best-selling Resident Evil, which is so interesting. I could see the co-op, I would imagine, has a lot to do with that. I could see a lot of people being like, let's jump into a game together and Resident Evil 5 is the choice. I could see it. The Resident Evil

4:11:44Dustin Furman:VG sales Resident Evil wiki has it at 17.1 million units across all of its releases. Resident Evil 6, 16.5, which is pretty crazy, including 9.9 million on PS3 and 360. so grossing almost 600 million dollars at that time so it's interesting that they knew something was wrong even though the game was selling um and like it's like you said i think it was the way people were interacting with it you don't you don't want short-term sales you want to protect the series long term and they did that obviously with biohazard which was exceptional i i gotta get to six at some point and i think i gotta replay five at some point it has been i did beat it many times that's why i just have never got back to it i've just beaten the shit out of that game but i actually remember it surprisingly well considering how long ago it was just because i I played it so much.

4:12:30Dustin Furman:Like I remember that opening village scene. Yeah. Cause I was looking for shit in it like for so long, like for so, so well. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe one day I'll get back to those.

4:12:39Chris P.:There is part of it where I'm like, like, cause I remember the, the, the big conversation back in the day. It was like, it was racist, right. That you were like, you know, cause it's just like, it's all black sound. I mean, they're like, you're in Africa. I mean, obviously it's like, you're killing Spaniards in, in Resident Evil four or whatever. But I will say I did, I did get, I did get to a level where I'm like, okay, this is kind of crazy. They got like a Hudson. They're like throwing spears and stuff. And I'm like,

4:13:10Dustin Furman:all right.

4:13:13Chris P.:I still, I don't think I agree ultimately with that criticism, but like I see this and I'm like, you might want to rework this a little bit. Because it is jarring and it kind of comes out of nowhere. what's crazy about it is like it's not even like chris redfield goes out of his way to put himself in that like it's not really like it's kind of off the beaten path so from the from the perspective of like the game holistically it's just chris redfield running into like a like an untapped tribe of africans and just killing them indiscriminately yeah and it's it is kind of wild they're like an uncontacted tribe it feels that way i mean like so it is kind of wild it's a fun game though man i i am i'm enjoying myself way more than i thought i would because i thought i would kind of like put a couple hours into it and kind of like i don't know maybe fall off but i'm i think i'm i think i'm in chapter four out of six so i'm pretty pretty deep into the game at this point and i think it's it's become kind of like a nightly thing for me um and so i'll probably i'll probably polish that off in the in the coming days but i'm liking it so far

4:14:20Dustin Furman:all right dustin we move on to you then dragon quest 7 reimagined yes i have been playing this

4:14:27Colin Moriarty:since uh last thursday when we recorded and i love it it's awesome i have tried dragon quest games before specifically 11 and i was trying to remember if like i i don't have anything negative to say about my time with that game. I don't know if just something else came out that drew me away from it. And then I never went back, but playing Dragon Quest seven, I am very, very hooked into it. The, the main thing that is just really, every time I sit down to play, I'm like, yes, is awesome is the way the game looks, the art direction of this game. it has a little bit of a like diorama feel to it that and the characters too which i know we joked on the stream when it was revealed about uh mad damon and keifer but i all that kind of faded away from me where dude i love keifer now is awesome he's a great character uh as everyone knows it's super traditional being a dragon quest game, but I'm surprised as I'm getting really deep into it.

4:15:40Colin Moriarty:Now it takes a long time before you unlock the job system in this game. I'm sure it's nowhere near as long as the original version. I'm sure it's 50 hours in the original for you unlock jobs, but I, in the last like day or two, I unlocked the job system and it's been really fun figuring out the different jobs there's certain jobs that like when you when you master two different jobs then you unlock another job that's like more specialized that you can do and the story is really fun and light-hearted it's about going back in time and solving the problem like different islands problems and so they're each kind of like it's very anime in a way where each island feels like its own little mini arc in the story that kind of has a setup and a, you know, conflict and a conclusion resolution at the end that all kind of lead to what's happening in the main story.

4:16:40Colin Moriarty:And it's really nice. It feels very digestible in that way that you're kind of going back to each island. And it takes a little bit for it to kind of. For you to realize like what the main story actually is it kind of just starts and it's like oh well we can go back in time and and help these people till you realize there's something more going on so yeah overall dragon quest 7 i i guess i'm just surprised i i knew i would like it based on the demo that i played but i am absolutely loving it to the point where i am very much i don't know when but i want to play dry i want to play Dragon Quest 11 again.

4:17:21Colin Moriarty:Like I want to give another shot. And I really hope that they move forward with some of the Dragon Quest remakes they've been doing because as I've been playing and tweeting about this game and stuff like that, people are like, oh man, wait till you play 8. Just wait till you play 8. Yeah, people love 8.

4:17:40Dustin Furman:That's level 5.

4:17:41Colin Moriarty:Yeah, level 5. I think Dragon Quest 8 is Brad's favorite Dragon Quest game as well. And so I really hope they do it because the quality of this as, you know, this remake has been awesome. I know there has been a lot of criticism from hardcore Dragon Quest fans specifically about what they cut. And I think there's like less, a lot less monsters or variety in the game. And that's kind of the blessing of the situation is that I have no idea what I'm missing. And so I think those complaints very well could be valid, but they don't affect me.

4:18:17Dustin Furman:yeah I wouldn't it's been so long that I wouldn't even remember at this point it's like what I said when I went back and played Wild Arms 2 which I gave my fucking adored and I'm like I don't remember any of this like I had memories of remembering it if that makes any sense because I was like I'm like oh I don't remember a fucking thing about this game so it'll be the same thing when I play that well I'm glad you're liking it do you have the courage to play Dragon Quest 11 that's the big question I hope you do the courage yeah the courage because it's so dauntingly long yeah

4:18:45Colin Moriarty:it is very long long it's so long oh my god i think that when i play it i'm i think as much as i would want to play it on playstation because i think having the trophies would be nice but i think i'm gonna have to buy it on pc just so i have the the flexibility of steam deck and why are you gay you know being able to take it on the go playstation doesn't i mean there's the portal but you need internet yeah so i might need to do that okay what you got to do do what makes do what it feels good i mean it's not happening anytime soon because this game is already going to take i think i think my playstation says i'm like 45 done with the game and i'm like if that's true uh yeah it's still it's still a very long rpg even if it's severely cut down so with resident evil coming at the end of the month.

4:19:37Colin Moriarty:You've got time. I have time to beat this, but I don't have time for Dragon Quest XI.

4:19:43Dustin Furman:Definitely not. Cool, ma 'am. Well, I'm happy that you're enjoying it. I'm happy you're both having a good time with your games. I'm over here playing a few things I'm eager to tell you about. Less eager to tell you about Turok 2, Seeds of Evil. I'm messing around with this game here and there. I'm getting through it. I'm like a little more than halfway through it. I really like it. Contrasting it to the original Turok, which is just completely devoid of any sort of story character anything at all it's so funny how much they overcompensate with tarot too but they they made it in about 18 months which is a pretty long dev cycle for the time and you can tell that they like were figuring things out i will say the one thing about tarot too that's bought it's bad in tarot as well and it's bad in this game is and it's a little annoying because this is a remaster or remake really of it or a remaster it's not a remake but they've done little things to it to kind of fix some quality of life stuff um the game is very obtuse i'm like running around in circles all the time.

4:20:33Dustin Furman:Like I have, there are maps in game maps, but I'm like, I don't know what you want me to do. Like, where do I go? What am I missing? And then you, I think I said it last week when you like get to a warp to like leave a stage, but you don't have everything. They will not let you leave. So you have to figure it out. And I'm like, I'm just sick of like, I'm like, I got to look at a guide, I guess. And then I don't know where I am. Everything looks the same because it's a fucking N64 game. So it's good. It's a nice little piece of nostalgia. The game I really want to tell you about is this next one though.

4:21:01Dustin Furman:Michael Buffal wrote in and said, what's up, gents? Colin, what a charming game Lovish is. I love the bite-sized levels and the humorous random events after each level. Happy to see games like this still being made, and hopefully the developers find success with this game. By the way, you were a few spots quicker than me on the Platinum List on PSM Profiles. Gotta get good. Scrub. Dude, this game Lovish is fucking excellent. Excellent. I really want people to go and check this game out if you can, especially if you love old school games like me. L O V I S H. Lovish is by a studio named labs works.

4:21:38Dustin Furman:They did a game called Astell on tears of the earth, which I will talk about in a minute. Cause I've gone back and played it now. It came out February 5th. I think I bought it the night we were recording or something last week. So like, I never really got to play it. And dude, this game is, is incredible. I'm not even, I'm like, I love it. It's so part of the bun. it's so funny and cute and charming and playable it's basically about a role-playing game like a role-playing party of a knight a wizard an archer and like a monk the knight's kind of a dickhead though and they're like trying to like the the story's like how they're going and trying to save this princess but then he gets afraid that the princess might fall in love with one of them instead of him so he abandons them and it's about how he's like trying to go and rescue her by himself and it's set up on a series of like i don't know 70 or 80 like individuals usually but not always one screen stages um and they're like it's like kind of like you're trying to like get to a door or open a door and get to it and there are enemies and you earn these in-game crowns for doing things a certain way so like getting through a stage quickly getting through a stage without killing anything getting and so like you're earning these crowns as currency to unlock new things.

4:22:53Dustin Furman:There's a different kind of coin currency used to buy items. And then there's this whole WarioWare component to it, where after you succeed or fail at a stage, something happens. There might be a funny cut scene, or there might be a mini game, or an unlock, or something like that. And it's just so fucking silly and so well-written. I laugh out loud funny over and over again in my opinion i kept michael was in the living room i was playing and i kept showing i'm like look at how funny and stupid this is like it's just it's a shame because it doesn't seem like anyone's really playing it um but i gotta i gotta recommend this game heartily like it's it's it's a it's in my opinion like a must play you gotta check it out it's it and i think it's 15 bucks i think it might even be 13 49 right now on ps ps plus so platinum that that was platinum 201 but um and i don't want to say too too much about it because i don't want to spoil it but yeah man what a special game and uh that led me to astel on tears of the earth so i was talking to the lily mo guys obviously we all have an old school pedigree over there and i was like guys have you seen this game love ish and no one had seen it except for one of the guys one of our artists was like oh dude i worked with the dude that made that game he made a game called astel on tears of the earth and i was like oh this looks kind of cool i went and checked it out i had bought it i guess at some point because i already owned it like i went to buy it on psn and it's like you own this and i was like oh okay so i must have seen it and just forgotten like never even played it it's a uh so i'm like a few hours into astlan astlan is like a metroidvania with this quirk of you have three different characters you have like a mage a thief or like an archer really like a rogue and then a knight and each of them do different things so you have to like go back to a campfire and there and you might encounter like some weeds that only the knight can cut down with his sword so you have to go back to the campfire get the knight and then go to that area and then there might be like a puzzle that only the mage can really do or whatever and like the the uh the rogue can like wall kick so she can like get higher and all the rest it's good but it is vague.

4:25:04Dustin Furman:Like, I am a little annoyed by it because it's there's a few problems, I think, with it. One is that I just think it's a kind of a vague game. Like, it doesn't really tell you what to do. Good Metroidvanias drive you forward. But this game is more like Rogue Legacy in that when you die, you start from the beginning again and you go and upgrade your character, but you can, like, jump around to just where you were. And I just feel like there's not enough currency to make your characters appreciably stronger. so like you really have to grind a lot in the game to like get anywhere but i'm still early in it the one thing i noticed about astelon is that it has a very high platinum rate considering the kind of game that it is it's like eight and a half percent meaning that people really if you stick with it it seems like they like it and um so i'm gonna i'm gonna stick with it and i do like it i just think it's uh it's not of the quality i mean it's not surprised their last game of lovish is just dude I'm telling you man wonderful game so highly recommend it alright we're back we're recording this all out of order

4:26:05Colin Moriarty:it's a Frankenstein episode it is for you

4:26:08Dustin Furman:especially I'm sorry it's gonna be annoying it's all good won't be too annoying but it'll be a little annoying I can see it on the timeline now I haven't eaten in almost 24 hours so I'm getting delirious this is like when I did the TJ smash show remember that that's the that's the funniest piece of lore about that is that I didn't sleep or eat for like a day because I had so much gas.

4:26:28Colin Moriarty:I was trying to remember what it was.

4:26:30Dustin Furman:Like I couldn't even fucking lay down. I was like, because Michael brought me like this new fiber for me to take, which I appreciate, but it just didn't agree with me at all. And it fucked me up. So I was firing on all cylinders out of every orifice on my body at some point. All right. Well, we've been doing this show for a while. We're very tired. We've been going all day. So I usually don't like the bitch about that. But we'll try to go quick through these inquiries. I don't want to ignore you, of course. But we'll go through. We'll go through somewhat quick. quicker than usual. Maybe we'll see.

4:26:55Dustin Furman:We'll see what you guys have to say. Alex Porto wrote into us first. And remember, you can write in to us on Patreon, patreon.com slash last day media. Use the threads in the news feed that are there each and every week. Threads for sacred symbols go live Wednesdays and are deleted Thursdays. Alex Porto says, hey, CDC, I agree with you about the current wave of online negativity. It's predictable, boring, and often pure grifting. However, I think the backlash to PlayStation's strategic shift is justified. Hear me out. Avid PlayStation fans gravitate to the platform for its single player games.

4:27:24Dustin Furman:When Sony moves away or outright hinders what made the brand resonate, people will voice dissatisfaction. If live services were all handled by new studios, I wouldn't have issues yet. Studios like Naughty Dog, Bluepoint, Ben and Gorilla shouldn't have been pulled into this. And they were and still are. Because of Hunter's Gathering, Horizon 3 is reportedly years away. We talked about that earlier. A game that could have launched in 2027 may now slip to beyond 2029. I don't know about you, but I want my The Last of Us Part 3 before 2035. this frustration feels much more justified than gratuitous online negativity what say you

4:27:54Colin Moriarty:dustin yes i can agree to this that i understand the frustration and the anger about that i just think and i know that last week's episode was very controversial in our youtube comments oh was it i didn't even read the well i saw some of it and i was like okay that's i kind of expected that but i don't know we're always just gonna be honest with what we think about things uh sometimes people will agree with that sometimes they won't i think the thing for me is despite some of these you know we the playstation's direction the way they've handled live service has not been very good and has wasted a lot of time it has wasted a lot of money I still want to try to be objective not objective but open I guess is the right word to the games that they do produce and not just hate them because I hate the direction so fair games I know we haven't seen the gameplay of that game fair game fair games I not into yeah i don't like the way i don't like what was already presented i don't like what colin reported about it and you know and that's it's not even that i hate live service games just everything about that game doesn't sound very promising to me yeah i also think i told you

4:29:25Dustin Furman:guys a little more than i said publicly about it as well so you have a little bit more going

4:29:28Colin Moriarty:probably right yeah yeah so the uh but the thing with like horizon hunters got hunters gather gathering i can't what it's fucking called the name the name's not good i think it i genuinely like think that it looks fun i don't love everything about it i don't necessarily like the art direction of the characters but as a fan of monster hunter games and a fan of horizons combat in particular it looks fun and i just i think that it's okay too i'm not saying that everyone that dislikes that game or his voice dissatisfaction is being unfair because i think that's you know if you're not into it but you're into horizon i get that but i think there are some people that are just like live service bad i don't want live service live service bad it's like

4:30:20Dustin Furman:let's just it's ease up a little bit yeah live service uh essential if you want sony to survive um chris what are your thoughts here is there is there something to what alex bordo was saying it seems like Dustin agreed with him um I would agree if I thought that more people were as

4:30:39Chris P.:educated about the games industry to even know that this was even happening you know what I mean like I just like how often do we see like takes online where it's just like clear like oh these people don't even know how the industry works on like a bare minimum level so like if if the majority of the outrage over horizon hunters gathering was this is taking valuable development time away from horizon three i would be like yeah that's a valuable that's i mean i could see that and that makes sense but that's not i think we all know that that's not where the majority of criticism is coming from the majority of criticism is coming from the fact that it's a live service game at all yeah and that i guess presumably it's using an art style that is not um entire entirely

4:31:29Chris P.:the same as the core games in the franchise. That's the main critique. Or that it looks like shit or whatever. That's I just I don't believe that the broader public is educated enough to even come at this game from the critical perspective of this is taking development time away from other projects. I just don't believe that.

4:31:51Dustin Furman:I've touched on this so many times. I think that The only thing I'll say to add to this, Alex, is. The because I reached out because I think I said this last week, I reached out to Sammy over at Push Square because he was saying that, like, he feels like Sony's audience is like almost holding them hostage at this point. And I kind of feel a similar way simply because it's hard to know. It's hard to know in which direction to go when your hardcore fan base is saying something, but the numbers say something else. And you really only have a finite amount of resources and time to get things done. And they've made an enormous number of bad choices.

4:32:31Dustin Furman:Like there's no there's just no doubt that they've they miss. it's what you were saying, Dustin, is like they mismanaged their stuff and wasted an enormous amount of time and money. And they're very lucky that the going is so good for them because they were able to absorb that. The only thing I would say is that this idea that Sony should make more first party games, do all this, like we had this generation, it was called the PS3. It was the only generation Sony lost money. And I know people get bummed out when I say it, because I know it's not everyone. And I know it's not all of you, but for a lot of people, it's like where were you you want kill zone well where were you you want a resistance where were you like and when people say like well you say you were there and we were there too and it's like yeah but we were there by the 1.5 or 2 million like people are talking about these games like they really mattered and then they really didn't and i think it's hard to balance that shit with the feedback that they're getting it's a matter of survival like i'm just telling you there's more to survival than the games as a service and obviously they need to do single player games and keep their platform going steadily and whatnot but just look at the numbers man like the 50 % from 10 games as a service of 50 50 % of the revenue comes from those games it's just it speaks for itself that means that before any other game available on PlayStation gets its bite of the pie half the pie is gone and then everyone else kills for the last half of the pie it's dangerous you can see all sides of it but I don't blame them for taking the big swings I just think that they've mismanaged their resources yeah Jonathan Turner wrote in and said hello squad with it being Black History Month I've been thinking about the history of black characters in video games as a 35 year old who's been gaming for a long time and black even longer I can honestly say I've never really felt a strong desire to see myself represented in games it just wasn't something I ever actively looked for what I did start to notice especially in my teenage and early adult years was how well black characters were written when they did show up characters like Lee and Clementine from The Walking Dead, Alex from Half-Life and Sergeant Avery Johnson from Halo really stood out to me.

4:34:31Dustin Furman:And I've got to give a half shout out to Miles Morales too. So Colin, as the lone black voice on the world's biggest PlayStation podcast, what are your thoughts on the state of black characters in games today? Has it evolved in a meaningful way? Who are some of your favorite black characters from years past? Would also love to hear Dustin and Chris's general thoughts on the matter. I went and looked because I want to make sure I didn't ignore any. And I don't think these are all the greatest characters in the world, but the memorable black characters for me, the first memorable black character for me is probably Balrog, who's really, who's really, you know, modeled after Mike Tyson and was supposed to be M.

4:35:06Dustin Furman:Bison. I mean, everyone knows all that. I don't need to go through all this. But I love that character. Barrett, obviously. Final Fantasy VII, another great character. I wrote my notes to Lee from The Walking Dead because I thought he was really good as well. Riley from The Last of Us is a good black character. CJ, obviously from San Andreas. Nadine played by a white woman but she was black in the games and uncharted here's a couple here's three though that I really like a lot Lincoln Riley I'm sorry Lincoln Riley Lincoln Riley's a coach Lincoln Clay from Mafia 3 Colt Vaughn from Deathloop thought he was great and Silence from Horizon who we will never see again probably I know Lentz Reddick or they'll have to revoice him or something I don't know what they're gonna do so that's where I stand on this it's surprising that there aren't more like Coltrane I guess from Gears there's like a few but not many and I'm especially surprised by that because video games are very black like in my experience growing up like the black kids really loved video games growing up around me more per capita than the white kids.

4:36:26Dustin Furman:When I went to college, I bonded with some of the black kids. There just seems to be, I talk about this with Cogs sometimes as well. So you'd think there would be a little bit more, but that's where I am. Chris, anything for you come to mind?

4:36:38Chris P.:Yeah, Coltrane came to mind. Johnson came to mind. CJ came to mind from Grand Theft Auto. Little Jacob from Grand Theft Auto 4 in particular. He's one of my favorites. I love Little Jacob and his a Jamaican accent in the patois but like I uh yeah I don't know one of a weird one that I I really quite like a lot is Lewis from um Left 4 Dead they're not really characters arguably but like there's there's like a lot of banter in um in both of those games and and Lewis always struck me as like there was something really funny about him because he was like of the three of them he was like and it's been a while since I played so maybe I'm misremembering but he struck me as like the nerdiest one like the most like out of his element one like he just like he's like an office worker he has no fucking clue and he's got this like grizzled like bill was like the veteran and zoe was like um just some random lady and then you had like a biker guy just like it's i i really liked lewis a lot his his barks in the game were really funny but yeah i'm surprised they're not more either like i had the same feeling dustin happy black history month to you anything you'd

4:37:50Colin Moriarty:like that thank you uh i think you guys named all the characters that i would name but like you know chris mentioned coltrane which is just an awesome character i always loved that he was like he was a pro football player right beforehand and so it's like now he's you know in this war and he's a soldier and stuff i always thought that was neat barrett from final fantasy of course uh it's funny too thinking wasn't there like some backlash to final fantasy 13s black character oh yeah the guy

4:38:20Dustin Furman:because he had like the he had like an afro and it was like a chocobo in his hair hair right yeah what was his name i don't even remember god yeah i don't know i haven't played final fantasy 13 in

4:38:29Chris P.:a minute oh dude anderson from mass effect also sergeant oh sure oh yeah keep david

4:38:37Dustin Furman:try to look it up final fantasy 13 cast

4:38:43Dustin Furman:lightning, Vanille, Vanille, Snow, Hope, was it Saaz? Yeah, S-A-Z-H, 40-year-old former human air ship pilot. Anyway, Ryan Cavalli wrote in and said, Hey Colin, I know you're a big Jets fan, so I'm often surprised you don't play Madden or any other sports games anymore. Given how long it's been since you played Madden or an NHL game, what would it take to bring you back? Probably nothing at this point. The things that I'm more interested in personally are the simulations and you can do that stuff within the games and I wouldn't really mind doing that. Like there's something very, I want to be a general manager.

4:39:24Dustin Furman:Just like make decisions in sim games and there are big spreadsheet, like very popular sports spreadsheet style games that do that. Football manager from Sega is probably the biggest. So there's really nothing that will bring me back to Madden or hockey, NHL, because like I'm very busy and the real thing keeps me busy enough. There is something very tantalizing about doing it, but it's just not going to happen. I will say this though is to reiterate, the best way to learn about these sports is to play these games. Madden taught me everything about football when I was a kid. So there is that. But Ryan, it's a good question.

4:39:56Dustin Furman:The answer is I don't think anything. Like I would be more likely probably to go play a sport game like the show for a sport that I don't really pay attention to anymore. Even NBA 2K that I am over the facsimile of the season I'm about to watch in real life. That used to really do it for me when I was a kid. It obviously does it for many millions of people every single year. It's just not for me anymore. I don't have enough time. I feel like people that play sports games play sports games. Yeah. And when I was a kid, that wasn't the way it was. I played a lot of sports games, but I played other things too.

4:40:26Dustin Furman:Nick the Thinker wrote in and said, Hi, guys. Jessica Curry, the composer who used to work for the Chinese room, still wakes the deep, but historically everybody's gone to the rapture. Commented recently on the difficulties of working as a woman in the games industry. As you are all men too, I think. I wondered whether you had conversations with women over the years who work in the industry, which does provide a more built picture of what it's like to be a woman working in the games industry, specifically related to Jessica Curry's experiences. I can't speak to her experiences. I haven't read them personally.

4:40:53Dustin Furman:But one thing I think I brought up in the past is that the most memorable conversation I ever had with a woman in the games industry about being a woman in the games industry was with Amy Hennig, who we brought up earlier when we brought up Legacy of Kane. And she obviously was the director and writer of Uncharted, as everyone knows, at Naughty Dog for many years. And when I interviewed her for the history of Naughty Dog at IGN, I asked her very specifically, like, have you had any problems as a woman in games? And she very explicitly said no. And I remember going over the notes with my editor in chief when I came back from Naughty Dog and we were trying to like, basically the big thing was we're going to have this big piece, which I wrote like a five part piece.

4:41:26Dustin Furman:But like, what are some of the pull, what would be called pull stories or pull quotes from this story that we can write to get picked up to advertise the piece, whatever. And that was one of the things that they wanted to pick up. And I'm like, I'm not writing that. And basically refused to do it because I was like, it's gonna put her in a position. You know, I don't think she realized it was going to be a pull quote, first of all. And second of all, I just I just know better than to put this out in the wild of her saying this. I'm much more comfortable saying it now. She told me this in 2000.

4:41:59Dustin Furman:I mean, it was before she left. I mean, 2012 or something like that. That is the one that sticks out to me the most just because I was surprised to hear that and she is an old school person like she worked in the games and from the early 90s she was an artist she worked on that fucking Michael Jordan in the Windy City platformer game that was like one of her first projects so she's like been around for a minute and that she she said like I just never really was mistreated or had a problem being a woman but I know for a fact that's not true for many like for every woman I want to say many maybe a lot of women feel that way and I have I'm not going to say who but I've talked to other people women that i worked with and women in the industry that have had sets of issues it's never i've never heard of like i've heard of a couple of things that have been pretty crazy actually i'm not even gonna get it close into those i don't want to implicate anyone or get people anyone's dirty laundry but what i will say is nine out of ten times you hear something behind the scenes especially when i was a journalist it's like it's more of a misunderstanding and social awkwardness or just bad timing than anything else.

4:43:03Dustin Furman:In other words, I never heard of someone getting sexually assaulted. I heard of people being cornered by awkward people at a party or a PR person getting the wrong message or whatever. And so I think that that's probably the nature of being a woman in every industry, to be honest. And I have always felt bad for women. like long before the the the uh what time's up thing or whatever is that what that was called me too me too yeah what's time's up time's up or something else i have no idea that might be the same thing actually maybe um me too is what i'm thinking of um even long before that i always was kind of aware that like you just got to be normal right like it's just like just don't put yourself in weird positions don't put other people in weird positions i was very good about doing that never even crossed my mind but i knew some fucking crazy people you know so it is what it is i don't know if you guys have anything you want to add to that book not really you don't really know you

4:44:09Colin Moriarty:really know any women so i don't know any women and i don't know any developers really i know a few

4:44:14Chris P.:they are not women though so yeah i don't know i i it's it's one of those like i've i've i've seen people act like crazy you know what i mean like there's stories where like i would have heard and i would have been like is that that really happened and then you see it in person you're like okay the people are fucking crazy out there but i don't i don't have anything deeper to

4:44:36Dustin Furman:add to it you know well you could imagine like take a jessica chobot or a naomi kyle or like you know one of these like model looking chicks that worked in games or like i worked with or whatever and then put them at an e3 show right and some awkward person is going to do something weird to them probably 100 yeah yeah so i don't know what jessica does anymore uh naomi i think is still bouncing around but jessica i think she's like a mom now and stuff like that i feel bad because I liked Jessica a lot. You know, I worked with her. I sent a snarky email that I didn't realize she was on once that I'd said something about her.

4:45:16Dustin Furman:And it wasn't even that rude. It was like just something. It was just something like snide. And it was like in 2010 or something. And I always felt bad about that. And it made things awkward. And I never really said anything to her about it. And then I saw her at. Like it was like VidCon or something. And she was really sweet to me. she was with her husband at the time and like i think she had a kid at that point or whatever and i i wanted to say like i'm sorry i don't even know if she remembers it's one of those things where you want to apologize we don't even know if the person fucking remembers and then they're and then they'll remember that they're not supposed to like you and they'll remember oh yeah right yeah you were a dickhead that one time yeah and i always wanted to like email her or something at some point be like you know i'm sorry about that all right two more dreamboat wrote in and said hey gang you've discussed the tension sony must feel between lucrative live service games and traditional single player experiences going as far as to entertain the idea of Sony cutting their first party single player efforts entirely.

4:46:09Dustin Furman:Just to be clear, I want to Jeff and I have had that conversation. I said what I said about that was that you could make that argument reasonably. I wouldn't make that argument, but based on how they make their money and where they're and how they're the butter spread on their on the various pieces of bread they're eating and serving, you could make that argument for the first time. Assuming this does not happen and Sony continues to put out high quality experiences that are few and far between. mean should these studios focus even harder on the unkslop audience if they know they aren't going to be huge money makers anyway what's the point in trying to capture a comparatively large single-player audience when even a massive success would pale in comparison to the revenue generated by live service games if i have to wait four to six years between games for studios such as sucker punch naughty dog etc i'd personally rather get a focused experience with primarily unique moments that wow me instead of a checkbox open world game that has me doing the same few activities over and over regardless of how high the quality is i want games that are more last of us and for Sony to leave the ghost of type of games to Ubisoft.

4:47:00Dustin Furman:Thoughts?

4:47:04Dustin Furman:I think games would take even longer if you weren't able to reproduce things that you've already done in prior games. Like Ghost of Yote would have made no sense if it wasn't built on the bones of Ghost of Tsushima, and yet it took five years. So I think you got to be careful what you ask for here. That said, you're going to get more games that are like The Last of Us. And I really do feel like the Ghost and Horizon games are really the only checkbox game Sony does. So I don't know, maybe God of War kind of now, but even with the God of War games that they're doing now and remaking the old ones, those are going to go back to the old style linear action games.

4:47:40Dustin Furman:So guys, the thing about Sony Studios and just the timelines in general is it is what it is. There's no magic that's going to make these games happen quicker. And if Naughty Dog started turning around games in two or three years, you would notice. like there's no way it's going to live up to anything so be careful what you ask for this is why i think spreading the field and having a variety of third party and some second party partners is what makes a lot of sense um dreamboat do you have anything you guys want to say about this otherwise we can move on i know everyone's tired that's why i'm kind of going quick yeah i don't know yeah you know you guys don't know fucking anything you know what i'm gonna stop i'm gonna start with shane bailey is the last one he says it shane bailey wrote in and said good day cdc i'll cut to the chase where are the astrobot spinoffs surely there are millions of playstation players that would trip over themselves for an astrobot kart racer i don't know i don't want to be so sure about that where you can race as different astrobot versions of beloved playstation characters imagine racing through johan johanheim or the rolling hills of tsushima and using clouds buster sword to whack parappa the rapa bot off the track my girlfriend and i boot up lego party whenever we have friends visit and while just a straight ripoff of mario party It's charming, inventive, and a lot of fun every time.

4:48:52Dustin Furman:I can only assume that the budget to contract a second party team like Sumo to build a quality Astropop party game would be about the same as the cost to animate and render Aloy's blackheads foaming in real time. What are forming in real time? Foaming is gross. What say you? Foaming blackheads is crazy. Much love from Down Under. Thank you for writing in Shane Bailey. More Astro Bot is no doubt coming. I don't think you want to overexpose Astro Bot, and I also don't think you want to overestimate how well Astro Bot did. Right. It is a critical darling. But I would be fair. I'm going to look this up, but I would be fairly confident Ghost of Yotei has already outsold Astro Bot.

4:49:25Colin Moriarty:All right, Colin, you and I are thinking on the same wavelength. I was just looking it up, but I was trying to find non-Gemini answers. This is Astro Bot is sold more than 2.3 million copies 10 months ago. Someone on Reddit.

4:49:39Dustin Furman:Yote. Yotei is beyond five, I think, at this point, right?

4:49:45Colin Moriarty:Eight days ago, Ghost of Yotei went on sale October 2nd. this from ign and sold 3.3 million units as of november 2nd yeah and just the sales i mean just

4:49:54Dustin Furman:look at the the the vector of the trajectories and you'll see that one is selling much better than the other i'm not trying to compare them like asher what's a much cheaper game even than ghost which was itself a cheap game by sony standards but it's it's metro like it's the metroid syndrome it's like what it's you're overestimating it you know like and you definitely don't want to overexpose astrobot the next time we should see astro is in a sequel um in my home humble opinion don't fuck around with it it's a good thing you got a good thing going yeah and how big the game was you're gonna be able to attract all sorts of partners too oh yeah easily i would say like do you hey christy what do you think of this master chief bot oh that'd be

4:50:37Colin Moriarty:fucking so cool i think it'll i think it will happen i think it will happen too honestly um

4:50:42Chris P.:man that would be so interesting yeah i don't know man i uh i think i would i would be happy with a new Astro Bot game every three years, like at the same cadence that we used to get games. I think that's a good, that's a good game, but not like, yeah, you don't want to overexpose it. I would love a kart racer, but like, I just, I don't think that's the move personally. Like I wouldn't do that. Yeah, I mean,

4:51:05Dustin Furman:I don't know. Any sort of spinoff, I think is like they've tried twice to do kart racers. I mean, three times if you count like what Polyphony was doing in the beginning, but before Gran Turismo, but really two meaningful pushes with Mod Nation and a little big planet karting and i just don't think yeah they ain't there no more man there could be big kart racers outside of mario but they're they're rare crash was big um sonic was big yeah but i think even sega said that sonic was like disappointing to them i just think people overestimate the power of nintendo as being segway able and i don't right yeah anything you want to add dustin yeah it for the most part sony's just not

4:51:47Colin Moriarty:interested in making smaller amounts of money there are exceptions that we just got this god of war 2d game today uh that was a you know more of a licensed deal that also read like we need something for the 20th anniversary yeah and it was probably going out last year you know yeah so there are a few exceptions but this is just not the sony of even the ps4 generation and i think there is some degrees Colin you mentioned being a critical darling and I think they understand like we need we need to keep it as a prestige piece and we start whoring him out everywhere so we can cart race or golf or play tennis or whatever like Mario

4:52:30Dustin Furman:no one likes those Mario games really like every once in a while something comes along that people really like but like I just saw the Mario what is it a new soccer game or whatever and people like yeah it's fine tennis fever tennis that's what it's like yeah this is fine

4:52:41Colin Moriarty:it's like yeah because it's the 17th

4:52:43Dustin Furman:version of it you know like how many times are you going to do the same thing i liked the baseball game oh what was that one called mario sluggers strikers is the soccer one i think oh yeah sluggers mario sluggers right let's see mario super sluggers yeah oh sluggers yeah um yeah so i i just think i will say astrobots critical reception and its game of the year awards certainly lit a fire under their ass and they know that they got to stick with it. But take your time. They're also a small team. Yeah. And I think they made something really special. I think that it's not as fucking revolutionary as everyone a lot of people feel it is, but I think it was great.

4:53:26Dustin Furman:So I don't think we need more Astro Bot. We need more fucking Nathan Drake at this point. Come on, man. Come on, man.

4:53:30Chris P.:Come on. Come on, man.

4:53:33Dustin Furman:All right. And a new Uncharted will probably sell more copies in pre-order than Astro Bot sold. So you got to keep those things in mind. but money made per person like sobe is probably one of their most valuable teams based on the fact that there's like 50 of them and they're in japan making you know getting paid like an apple and an orange a day or something like that all right that's all we got it's time to go it's good to be here with you guys thank you i know this is a long day we've been together forever i'm sick looking at you guys chris goodbye to you still early-ish by you dinner time yeah gonna go get a

4:54:08Chris P.:bite yeah i need food i'm starving man i'm so hungry but yeah nothing else yeah everyone's

4:54:16Dustin Furman:losing their trajectories i'm sorry i gotta go shower and yeah i'm i gotta i gotta eat something man i'm dying yeah dustin goodbye to you be well or what are you gonna do uh well i'm gonna get

4:54:26Colin Moriarty:this episode together as quick as possible and start rendering and then just gonna play dragon

4:54:33Dustin Furman:quest and then the weekend is here yeah with no plans nice love that so all dragon quest all the

4:54:42Colin Moriarty:time that's about it but yeah it's been a long day thank you to everybody that came to our stream it was what did you call it you say it was like three thousand i thought it was more than four

4:54:52Dustin Furman:thousand more fourth yeah which is awesome yeah i mean that's crap for us that's fucking nuts

4:54:56Colin Moriarty:if you want to go watch that it's available on our YouTube for everybody but uh that's it okay for me

4:55:05Dustin Furman:cool well thank you guys for your patience today it was a great day it was a good day for our show and a good day for PlayStation audience I hope you enjoyed our show hope you enjoy the stream as well enjoy all those games go play God of War let us know what you think we'll see you next time pay what is it patreon.com slash last day media for early free access last day media store for merch yeah now we'll see you next time until then goodbye see ya Take care, guys.

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