#407 | Pleasure Spiked With Pain

35:59He's never written in before because he's still thinking of the perfect question. So I'm taking his first write-in away from him by using this account to ask you to do me a favor. She wrote favor with a U. Let's let him know altogether that Player 3 will be joining our video game family in late 2026. When he hears this, he'll probably be thinking, holy shit, this is awesome, but will I have enough game time? Dustin, please ease his mind for me. How are you planning to juggle being a first-time dad while still getting game time in? would love to see some onesie merch from you all at a toronto live show one day oh and what the fuck is going on with that hassan caramon guy caramon guy did we ever get an updated resolution i i can't i forgot about it i can't i don't know i don't know i don't know but let's focus on the good news yeah congratulations player three cute like that very much congratulations to you guys uh dayo and jess did he did she say his real name my name is jess and my husband and i are longtime listeners no no no no no no name so can't go beyond that so i'm lifting right now we're feeling good right right very exciting um dustin any advice for how are you gonna do you better figure this out by the way because your job's on the line buddy oh if you're not going

37:14Colin Moriarty:to be keeping up with your video games oh no no i'm not worried about that um now first of all i I got to address how funny it would be if Deo is a timestamp user and he just completely skips it. Yeah. Yeah. That is, that is, that would be, I'm sure his wife will, you know, well, they'll listen to it together and very cute. Yeah. So, well, congratulations. The fact that you're finding, like, is my impression correct that she said, let's let him know all together. Right. So he's like, I'm hearing about this for the first time. here on sacred symbols i know that we've never done that before we were we've we've few divorces have circulated around we've had a few other issues but never this never this rare to get good news interesting well congratulations it's tough i can't give any advice because i don't know yet i certainly have to make time for video games but i'm in a very blessed and fortunate situation where I have to make that a priority for my job or else I will not be good at my job and I feel bad because like if you got a nine to five and you're coming home you gotta be a dad after that gotta you know see your wife and then there's a little bit of time for gaming in there hopefully so um I think you'll figure it out and especially people keep telling me during these first few months the babies just sleep a lot so focus in get all the gaming in that yeah game as much as you can now yeah who knows what will play through all of final fantasy 14 i would just i would imagine just like the types of games you play just kind of shift for a little bit right like you probably like lean into like maybe like balatros and stuff um or those types of things yeah for the brief period where you like can't get a lot of like I don't know.

39:07Colin Moriarty:I've seen too many parents able to game and parent at the same time to think it's really that big of a deal. I think a lot of the stress of early parenthood is largely overstated. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sure it's difficult, but I mean, this idea is like, oh, my God, you're going to want to kill yourself and you're not going to have time to fucking do anything. It's like, ah, surely there's time to do things like it's a baby. Yeah, just leave it. Just leave it. Just leave it alone. don't crush it you know don't don't roll over on it in the middle of your sleep and you're fine just let it be to learn to take care of itself yeah now here's another uplifting one timothy bryant wrote in that said hello cdc hope you guys are doing well i've been struggling with my weight and doing nothing to change it for the better part of a decade the final straw finally came when i bent down to tie my shoes and the only way i could do it is if i held my breath since my stomach was in the way which quite honestly pissed me off i decided right then and there to do something about it.

40:04On January 30th, I decided to make these changes. Only eat between the hours of noon and eight. No fast food whatsoever. I only drink water, no candy or cakes, smaller portions and working out at least four times a week. On January 30th, I was at 285 pounds. As of March 30th, I am down to 264 pounds. And I could feel every bit of that weight gone. I could tell weight was being lost because my wedding ring now spins off my finger and my hand even more slightly. I'm I'm sorry. Spins off my finger if my hand even moves slightly and I get take off my Apple watch without unlatching it. I just want to thank you personally, Colin, for always being so honest about being responsible for your weight loss, because I think about that every time it's gym day and it pushes me to keep going.

40:42I don't know if you will read this on the show. If not, just know I appreciate you for always being real. If you do read it on the show, for anyone out there who is also struggling with their weight, just start. Doesn't have to be as extreme as what I'm doing. You don't have to see immediate results. Just start and try to maintain a consistent habit of being more healthy. It's worth it. Timothy, good for you. Congratulations. And it's a reminder to me, you know, I'm getting a little lax. I'm in the 185 to 195 range pretty much always, you know, the last like five years of my life, but that's way heavier than I used to be.

41:13And I feel like I'm trying to like maintain a higher and higher weight. Like I'm trying to maintain a weight and it used to be like, I'm trying to maintain 180 or 175 or 170. And that was like, I'm trying to wait one eight. And I understand I'm, I'm more muscular than I've ever been in my life so there is some weight to that but i need to but it's not all of it i've been and i'm getting older it's one of the major reasons why i'm trying to just totally get off alexa pro because i'm convinced that it's making me it's making weight stick to me um i mean it definitely does it's just a matter of it's gonna matter when i get off of it so little things it's very good i wanted to congratulate you timothy that's a big deal 20 pounds in two months is a lot yeah and uh you know you don't have to the big thing for me with this is i i don't believe in making like these hard and fast rules unless you're like abusing something like you're an alcoholic or something like that then you really can't drink anymore right but to me it's like eat enjoy yourself every once in a while just make concessions that's all you have to do like i'm never going to cut anything out i'm always going to have pizza and i'm always going to eat burgers and I was going to do these things.

42:14And I know it comes with this deficit of being like, well, you can't outrun your, as they say, you can't outrun your diet and all this. But I'm like, I'm just trying to be healthier. I'm not trying to like be svelte. And I'm also not trying to like ruin the few things that I enjoy like eating. So I think it's all about balance. And now that we're in the spring and summer, like yesterday, I did a hard run on the elliptical and then I went in the backyard and I smoked a joint and I drank a beer so it's that time of year where it's like I'm going to be drinking more I gotta be very careful watch everything a little bit yeah so I just wanted to throw it out Timothy good for you yeah it's a big deal

42:58Colin Moriarty:it's hard to do that stuff it's hard for me especially because I don't know the health kick stuff is always difficult for me to stick with because my metabolism is so high that I don't have an obvious reason you know i feel like a lot of people like they gained they gained a little bit of weight and they're like oh man i don't fit in my clothes anymore ah i gotta i gotta do something and it kind of kicks them into gear i don't have that i have i have like the problem the inside of me probably looks like a really deeply unhealthy 14 year old boy you know just like oh yeah i'll have it's 3 a.m i think doritos are good for right now that sounds wonderful it's i totally it's no because i feel horrible i still feel terrible but like there's but then like oh oh you know what i'll do i'll eat a salad for breakfast and work out and then immediately feel awful as well so it's i don't know man it's just life i'm yeah got you down it's weird it's like it's a gift and a curse i guess but but congratulations that's a lot of weight i really miss i mean i don't think there are actually any around here but um in my old neighborhood i used to eat sweet green we went to sweet green i think yeah a few times but i used to go there all the time and i missed the shit out of that place because that place was so good and it was like i would i would actually get two salads and put them in a big pyrex bowl i remember yeah you remember that yeah and uh and that's all i would eat for a day but it would be like i don't know i i like eating good like good healthy natural food and mike cooks really really great food and um but it's an it's it's tough to make the proper dressing and do all these kinds of things.

44:40I don't know. It sucks because I have no aversion to healthy food. I like tofu. I like vegetables. I like all this shit, but I just don't I don't eat it. I'm the same. All right. Everyone's feeling too good now. Caleb Greer wrote in and said, greetings, gentlemen. Sorry to bring the mood down, but I wanted to give a special shout out and RIP to my dog, Juno, who passed away Monday after 13 years. I adopted her from a shelter when she was about one year old and putting her to sleep after her battle with cancer was the hardest thing I'd ever have to do I was not prepared for the utter grief and emptiness of losing my best friend but your shows have kept me going through the week thanks for your service truly and everyone give your pups an extra hug today our hearts are with you Caleb I'm sorry to hear this the worst the absolute worst I still live in fear every day of my dogs dying it's really great it's wonderful wonderful thing to feel because they always say it's like you sign up for the best and worst day of your life or whatever when you yeah but um i didn't i wanted to read that because i felt weird to ignore it but also i didn't want everyone to feel too good sure yeah that makes sense 13 years good good life r.i.p and peace you know of course be well jaffe's dog just passed away um yeah i saw that as well i talked to him privately about that uh i texted him actually And then he emailed me back and emailed me a picture of him with the dog in the room or whatever.

46:05You know, like when you're when they do it and you kind of hang out with it.

46:09Colin Moriarty:And I was like, it's so because. I've yet to be in this position, but I know that they're they say, like, some people just can't be in the room. And they and they say, like, you got to be in the room, dude. You know, like, yeah, you have to do it. And yeah, but what a what a what a your last moments with your dog or whatever. It's like, what the fuck? Yeah. you know um it's my parents with uh Neko also RIP and peace uh they had a relationship me and Neko had a relationship yeah you had a little thing yeah uh they had someone come to their house to do it which I thought was really nice because he was always so afraid of going to the vet and it's like you don't want to take him there for his like him be afraid for his final you know and he was not doing well either so that's an option as well but yeah i can't even imagine and i am uh i mean i've had other dogs pass away when i was younger and it was uh traumatizing my one dog specifically died from a heart attack when he was not very old and so it was a huge trauma for a whole family but yeah when i mean colin you mentioned about you know russian treble it's like with frisk like it's like i'm i always say you know i told holly your joke i was like colin always says he hopes he dies before rush yeah that's honestly i mean And I have a kid coming, so I really can't say that anymore.

47:33Colin Moriarty:But I get it. I get it. It's it's it's terrible, dude. Like, it's I think it's the main reason I don't have an animal right now. I'm just like. That stresses me. I'm just going to I'm neurotic already. Yeah. You know, I don't I don't another thing. And then I used to freak. I used to freak the fuck out. Like when my we would let the dog out and she would like run and she'd go a little too far. And I'm like, a deer is going to run out of nowhere and trample this fucking bitch. I'm going to lose this dog to some psycho deer. I hate deer so deeply. Oh yeah, they suck. I know people who've had their dogs trampled to death by deer, like straight up, like multiple.

48:11More than one. We should go to Long Island during a hunting season where you can indiscriminately kill as many deer as you want for X amount of time, like whatever it is, the X amount of weeks. I would absolutely do that. That's a thing on Long Island, if people don't know, is that like deer are so destructive on Long Island that every year they and we invite people can come from anywhere but it's mostly people from upstate and it's like just come and fuck them up yeah and they do it's it's it's quite great it's

48:43Colin Moriarty:it's so funny hearing like talking about this and then like there's there's everybody who's not native to like the northeast it's always like oh it's so it's so cruel yeah it's it's it's cruel until you hit three in a year in your car or something like that and you're like jesus price how are there so many it's crazy how many deer there are everyone everyone on the long island hates deer my dad has he takes a it's not a real it's not like one of his real guns but he has a bb gun and like they go and eat shit around his yard he just goes and shoots the shoots at them they get them to go away like you're like pop yeah my dad too he has like it's like they used to they ate all of our shit yeah they fuck everything they have no regard for anything i hate i yeah they suck they can jump over fences like big fences yeah oh my god yeah only in the northeast do you have any like it doesn't seem like anyone even knows or gives a shit but like yeah they'll fuck everything up they'll eat everything in your yard they think they think they're cute everywhere else like they think you're they think you're an animal for like wanting them to die and it's like no man no they gotta go i saw i have this video that uh well i don't have it but like me and my friends uh every now and every now and again we'll share this video in a group chat we have it it's it's really fucking morbid but it's hysterical to me because i hate deer where it's just like a bunch of them jumping off of a fucking highway because they're too stupid to understand what a highway is so they just plummet and die there's like a there's like there's like six dead deer on the highway i'm like ah warms my fucking heart i have to say can't stand them it's sorry yeah no they gotta go they gotta go no no i've seen so many deer carcasses in my life in my like neighborhood from people just hitting them with their cars like hundreds growing up.

50:23It's never enough. After a while you realize like yeah something's fucking going on here. Plus we're an island. Where are they coming from? Yeah.

50:31Colin Moriarty:They're crossing the bridge. Yeah like some shallow bullshit somewhere. I don't even. It's like what are you doing? There's like a really like just out of there's like a land bridge. Right. Like it's like a really thin so stupid. Oh god. Oh fucking dear. What were we talking? Oh, yeah. So the dog, the dog situation. Very sad, Caleb. I remember talking to this. I think I brought this up in the past. Ryan McCaffrey from IGN, old buddy of mine. He's always had boxers. They don't live tremendously long, unfortunately. Some of these bigger dogs. And I remember when I wanted his dog. I think it was Maggie was her name.

51:12I want to say she died and then he really struggled to like he was the guy that talked to me about like Like he like would go to almost like. I don't even know what to call it, like your animal died anonymous or whatever. I don't know what you would call that. Right. Dog loss anonymous or whatever it was. And and right. And he was the one he was telling me is like some people I never really thought about it. And it's obvious when you think about it, it's like some people like get a dog immediately. Some people like never get over it. Some people like can never get past it or whatever. And I'm like, to me, I feel like you got to sit with it and then you got to move on.

51:52You got to get back on and get another one, in my opinion, at some point and keep it going. Like whatever breed you like or, you know, male or female dog, whatever it might be. And you'll probably fall in love immediately with that dog, too. That's usually what you. So, you know, give yourself space, but then be open to.

52:10Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I think it's actually I think it is healthy. not and not to immediately move on because i think you're not really addressing things but like i think because i think uh when when my dog my first dog well the first dog that i remember growing there was dogs like when i was like two that passed away that i don't really remember that much but when my dog that i had during communion when i got my communion passed away when i went to like i think after college so she was like 19 or something this is a long ass time yeah and i remember like my parents i think they waited about about a year before somebody offered like hey we have this puppy and they were like you want it and they're like yeah all right and they love that dog now it's like it's the same thing but you need some time but i think it's healthy to keep it going it allows you to just form a new connection and like why not like it's not it's not replacing i kind of i'm annoyed when people say it's like oh you're replacing the dog it's like it's a completely different it's a completely different it's it's like saying like oh i had you had another kid what are you replacing your kids like no what are you talking about it's insane the one thing i talk to micah about sometimes because i know that this is it's theoretically possible and i think you'll be able to do it if you can't already do it do it short order is like basically cloning your dog but like and you could do some pretty interesting scientific studies on nature versus nurture like you like if i got if i rush is a very as all dogs are very specific dog with very specific personality mega neurotic and weird and funny would he be exactly the same or would you have some fucking false facsimile of him you know um where he'd look the same he'd grow the same and all the rest but the the thing that i'm i'm fixated on right now i don't know if you guys have seen it is like the dog the the medicine for the for um dogs in their older age and it gives them a couple years or a few more years um yeah of life apparently yeah and apparently did you read about it Dustin about like what it is it's really interesting like what it does apparently if you have an older dog and you just cut back on its food it it makes its life longer like if you stop if you stop if you slowly feeding an old dog less and you like remove the volume of food and I don't know what it would be to like two thirds or something or half or whatever.

54:30The dog's life is actually extended and that makes some sense because you know, metabolisms are slowing down or whatever. But apparently what this does is it does that without you having to cut off your dog's food or whatever.

54:41Colin Moriarty:It's like Ozempic. Right, exactly. The dog, it makes him want to eat less. Interesting. So, yeah, so that's like what it is, I guess. And but apparently you get it's going to pass the FDA get FDA approval apparently or it's in some sort of I feel like that's cool but at the same time like at least like with Neko he had other medical problems that it was like you didn't want to extend his life as as you know callous as that sounds but like he was his condition in the end I mean that's why you decide to put a dog down is that it's like he his quality of life is not good anymore so i hope that if people like i wonder like i guess it depends on how early you get on it and if there's any other conditions involved the other thing is that i'm glad you brought the putting you know a lot of people put their dogs down which is a necessary thing unfortunately but i don't i don't i tell mike at this i'm like i don't think i can do it like it is my hope that the dog the dogs live a really long life and die naturally that might be unrealistic my cat died naturally my cat chun li who was 17 when she died um no i had her from 93 to 2009 she she we just found her and she was dead so um i don't want to say i hope that happens because i don't want that to happen right now of course no but you know at some point distant from now yeah god i told you guys i was gonna to fuck you up.

56:14But let's lift everyone back up now. And it's not really for you guys because you wouldn't really care, but I do. Colin Powerwashing the Lolita Express and not saying a fucking word to anyone wrote in. A job's a job, dude. It's not my business. What's going on at the temple? And all the other things. Colin, at this point, is there anything that could bring you back to PSVR to perhaps a port of Powerwash Simulator VR? We're not going to talk about any of that. But we are going to talk about this also. So can the Buffalo Sabres get a shout out? This is what's important. We just broke a 14-year playoff drought, and I've been as hard as a rock ever since.

56:51I do want to congratulate you. What an exciting thing. Buffalo Sabres are a hockey team. They have not made the playoffs since 2011. So long. And they've made the playoffs this year. The Islanders didn't make the playoffs. They missed because they swooned at the end of the year, unfortunately. But I will be pulling for you, Buffalo Sabres. What an exciting thing for you and your fan base. and as a diehard hockey fan, as we all know, hockey is very equitable with playoff positioning. Half the teams make it. So to go all those years without making the playoffs is very much like the Jets. It's like that's a horrible thing.

57:22And now the Jets are the uncontested team in North American professional sports with the longest playoff drought of 15 years. So wanted to throw that out there. Congratulations, Buffalo Sabres. Congratulations to all the Buffalo Sabre fans. I see you. Very exciting news for you. And finally, I want to do it now we're going to segue this is kind of like the missing link between topics of discussion and the game news because I want to talk specifically about a game I promise you know I like to reflect as games are coming out we'll do this with sorrow soon kind of final thoughts as the game is about to come out mouse we're going to talk about in a little while as well but pragmata Zach Dalton wrote in and said hey sacred boys pragmata is upon us and it is getting rave reviews from critics myself included are you a who are you a critic for Zach and it's my game of the year so far.

58:11You seem sounds like you've played it. However, I want to hear your opinion on the discourse online that Capcom made the game to appeal to pedophiles because of Diana's appearance. The subreddit was banned due to creeps and it seems like people are running with that saying because of her outfit and the fact that she's barefoot that it was intentional by Capcom to draw in those kinds of people. I've even seen some people say that if you like the game, then you must be a pedophile and reviewers should have been up in arms about it calling Capcom out in their reviews. Seriously, what the fuck? Are people just too terminally online that they can't even play a game with a little robot girl without sexualizing her in some way oh my god i i think this is it's important to say this because i've been seeing a few things about pragmata like just people and i'm like you're telling on yourself yeah if you look at pragmata and that's where your mind goes i understand what is it called rule uh rule 34 rule 34 have some discretion okay Okay.

59:06Please, like, please. So when I see that, when I see complaints like this, Zach, I'm not saying you're complaining, you're not, you're relaying the complaints. There are some freaks in the world. There's no doubt. We're all on the Internet. We all see it. But yeah, I don't think that that's what anyone's trying to do. And I think that if that's the way you interpret that character. The worst thing about that character is her name is Diana. that's it that's only you there are only dianas that are over 50 you know um so it's you're not the older dianas are not i don't know if you guys know this they're not named diana when they're younger they have a different name and then and then at some point you're like oh this is diana it's like being named gertrude right right right i see what you're saying

59:55Colin Moriarty:diana's a way better name than gertrude though yeah it is it is a way better name but it's like it's a little unfair but

1:00:04Colin Moriarty:yeah I don't know man like I look I I understand that this world is is really fucking bleak and uh I understand why this is like in the public consciousness like at a fever pitch like I get it but like I don't know man the character design of the of Diana and Pragmana is unsettling to me not for that reason but because it just reminds me of those like it reminds me of those like porcelain kind of like dolls like I'm bothered by her like genuinely like I think it would be difficult for me to form a connection with that character at all because it just reminds me so it reminds me of like child Aloy a little bit I'm just like there's something a little there's something a little off about this person but yeah I wasn't I wasn't thinking about it in this way and now you are now yeah unfortunately what bothers me about it is that like man there are there's always going to be sickos you can't really help that but like I don't think they built that game with the intention to appeal like that I think is a bridge too far I think I have no you know I have no insider I just call it a hunch that they didn't they didn't go into a boardroom and said, hey, say, hey, there's an untapped market of child predators that we could really capitalize on here at Capcom.

1:01:42Colin Moriarty:Like, I don't. That's funny, man. Dude, here's what I'm thinking. Yeah. He writes here that saying that because of her outfit and the fact that she's barefoot. Now. In this modern Internet era, people have started to lose some degree of shame. Yeah. OK. I've noticed that. That is true. And if you I mean, if you have a reasonable kink like feet. OK. I don't relate to it. but there's plenty of people that have that i mean quentin tarantino puts it up front and center sure but with all these kinks coming out and people finding places to gather they've begotten they've become more bold yeah yeah and up front about it and now that's mixing into everything else where it's like oh a child's barefoot that's sexualized and it's like you gotta calm down it's too much you gotta calm down you need hosed off retreat to your subreddit you know collect yourself collect yourself go to your subreddit and discuss your like i said reasonable kinks and because obviously with this discussion we're talking about people that have unreasonable kinks uh illegal kinks is that even a kink at that point i'm not well versed in it yeah i don't know It's a mental illness.

1:03:14Colin Moriarty:We'll call it that. Sure. For sure. That's a nice way of putting it. So. Yes. Calm down and stand down, really. Yeah, stand down. Pragmata. Keep the wood chippers on standby. Yeah, yeah. For the next few weeks. And a few people might out themselves over this time. You want to pay close attention. Pay close attention. i will say that character is a little creepy to me i don't know why she is she is a little creepy but that's like what's so interesting about it like there is a there is a total supernatural weirdness that's a fucking weird it's totally weird no i know but like it's it's like i see it's like oh she's so cute and i'm like no she's she she i don't know about that it's on the razor's edge of like cute to um demonic like uh right there is something weird about her like it's supposed to lull you and oh it's a little girl yeah yeah like a like a like a like a like a goat right that's right you know it's like they're cute but they're also baphomet right that's exactly right i was so glad you said that because i was like oh like that's very demonic yeah right right yeah they're freaky eyes that no other animal has i hate the god you ever see a goat's eye like close up it's really distressing it's like it's it's one of those things where it's just like i don't know about this i'm afraid to google it you should google it right now yeah i guess have you have you actually never seen it i don't know they're really like it's it's really oh it's like a slit it's it's really fucking weird holy moly yeah they don't wonder they thought these things were evil i guess i never really looked into the eyes of a goat holy shit yeah some of them are really yeah they're i don't know man it's it's distressive it's it's it's actually making me nauseous yeah it sucks i hate it yeah it sucks a value judgment of a goat's eyes oh man it sucks so uh but pragmatid more generally speaking i've pre-ordered it um downloaded to my machine so when this goes live this podcast goes live on patreon i think it'll be available for everyone i don't know exactly what i'm going to do first because i'm still messing around with starfield although we all know what's going to happen with that i and then uh mouse is coming out and then the mouse is out this is out by the way i will talk again i keep bringing up mouse we'll bring it up and talk about it more deeply later but i went to buy it at midnight last night and it was not available and then i before i went to bed at like 4 a.m i was like oh maybe i'll just download it and uh and it still wasn't available so i assume it's available now it went live i think an hour before we recorded oh okay it was so annoying because i remember i i was up and i was like oh yay 9 p.m for that's usually like around around uh west coast time when it goes live and it just wasn't i was like oh it's one of these yeah so they kind of screwed me because i was i was kind of hoping to have like a lot of time into it before we recorded today but they screwed me yeah me too specifically they had it they had it out for me for you yeah you know specifically i understand yeah i was like oh i guess i gotta play more starfield oh jesus um so that'll be out and then yeah and then this is out so i don't know exactly and then sarah's obviously so uh dustin what are your what are your final pre-playing we're all gonna play pragmata i assume right so what are your what are your pre-playing thoughts of pragmata i'm so excited man i was seeing that a lot i didn't read any full reviews but i've seen tweets people talking about their reviews and saying it kind of has a ps2 experience feeling to it um and i think that's cool and i loved the demo for this game both when i played at summer game fest and the recent one that came out and i really outside of that demo like i really didn't get any of the story from that and so i'm very intrigued by it looks like a beautiful game as well uh Visually, I mean, the RE engine has been amazing this generation outside of Monster Hunter Wilds.

1:07:20Colin Moriarty:But yeah, so I'm very excited. I will be going and hopefully seeing if I can find a physical copy tomorrow morning. But who knows with stock recently of things. Plus, apparently from that letter, we realize you're going to be dealing with a bunch of freaks. Oh, yeah. If I go to Target to buy it, I'm here for Prong Mana. I'd like to I'd like a physical copy of a physical copy of Fragmata please one physical you gotta emphasize physical when you ask for it it's too bad the amiibo's not out yet oh man you're like oh come on man Chris where are you on this are you gonna pick it up yeah I think so there's a couple games that I'm a little bit more like excited about in the immediate it i i really want to get to mouse and i really want to get to replaced because that's a game that i've been that's a game that i was like i've been looking forward to for a while it's kind of crazy i i almost forgot about it it's been so long but i want to get to those two um then probably prog mod i would imagine that both of those games are fairly i can't imagine that either of those games are particularly you know gruelingly long yeah i think i understand as i understand that They're both short-ish by modern standards.

1:08:37Colin Moriarty:Yeah, so it'll probably be after... Mouse I'm going to get to immediately, then replaced, and then probably Progbata when I'm done with both of those. Mouse apparently has some broken trophies, but I'm sure they'll fix those. The bigger thing is that apparently there's really not a lot of backtracking, and so there's a shit ton of missables in the game. So that's a little bit annoying, but we'll see. PowerPix does have a trophy guide. I might just look at the roadmap and see what I need to do. Keep an eye out on. All right. So we'll have more to say about pragmaton in the weeks to come. And I'm sure we'll do a secret plus episode about it at some point.

1:09:11Cause I imagine Brad's playing it. Probably the Xbox boys are probably playing it. Um, it's Capcom. We should all be playing it. Cause it's awesome.

1:09:18Colin Moriarty:Yeah. All right. Let's get into some other pieces of news. I just wanted to start here. Just an FYI. It seems disingenuous not to bring it up though. We always make fun of the game. Speaking of pedophiles. Speaking. Oh yeah. Love that. Thank you for that. Dustin. That's very clever. An upgraded version of Roblox launches on PS5 today from the PlayStation blog. So Roblox is only available in the PlayStation ecosystem on PS4. And I was doing a little bit of research about this. There is no Xbox series version, but I wonder if that's just because it's so much better established in the Xbox space.

1:09:50Remember, Roblox came to Xbox One in 2015. It didn't come to PS4 until 2023, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. So that was a nice little lockdown exclusive for Microsoft Roll on time. but now it's coming to PS5 natively. It'll have 30 % faster load times because of the SSD and I think use the DualSense in some ways. So just wanted to throw that out there in case you have literally no taste at all. The next piece of news here comes from Matt Piscitella on Blue Sky over at Zircona. We don't have full data yet on the... Wait, why isn't this loading? Is this loading? Mine's not loading either.

1:10:28Uh-oh. Blue Sky down. on. Well, let's see if I can find this. Hold on a second. You might have to go away because blue sky is down the social media network. So I couldn't, uh, it's actually useful. That's actually kind of a, an instructive thing that never really happens to us. But at the same time, it's like, should I be putting these in archives or something and just using them from there? Is it really that important? It's probably not even really that important. We're talking about video games, right? So anyway, I went to our friends at push square. They have the news over there so we can use theirs.

1:10:58They write, US PS5 hardware sales hit a 2026 high prior to huge price increase. This is not a huge surprise, I suppose. They write, unsurprisingly, US consumers flocked to the stores to pick up PS5 hardware prior to the console's enormous price increase earlier this month. Zircana analyst Matt Piscitella reveals that Sony's console enjoyed its highest sales of 2026 so far during the week ending April 4th. The system's price increase officially went into effect on April 2nd, but the news was announced a few days earlier on March 27th, giving up consumers the opportunity to act. Piscitella says the system achieved calendar year highs for both unit and dollar sales and quote us spending on video game hardware for the week nearly doubled when compared to the same week a year ago.

1:11:41So not a huge surprise. The PS five digital edition is$600. It's$200 more than it launched at. So now I wanted to bring this up for multiple reasons. Number one, I think that's just interesting news and it, I want to get into with you guys and get your take on price tolerance. Because I wonder if even at these new prices, PS5 is still not beyond price tolerance for the average gaming consumer. So we'll get into that in a minute. Mason Mitchell wrote in, though, on Patreon. He says, greetings, boys. Matt Piscitella reporting the small surge in sales before the PS price hike. And Tom from Moore's Law is dead, explaining how the PS6 will be in the$600 range.

1:12:20Makes me struggle to see how PlayStation sells much at all from now until next year. I know GTA is imminent, but it's an end of year deal. And if you don't already have a console, I really just don't see this, the game selling$700 consoles without a discount. You think they need a GTA six bundle? I wonder where your guys heads are at with this, Chris, let's start with you. The obviously people are, they learned about this price increase, you have to be pretty well connected to have known the price was going up, but everyone activated and they went and bought the console. I wonder if they're still obviously the higher price goes, the more intolerant the market's going to come towards buying it.

1:12:54And yet I wonder if this price increase will really materially matter. This goes into, and I'm not saying it's good. I want people to be really clear. I'm not saying the price increase is good. What I'm saying is by the time we get the Grand Theft Auto 6, that's going to be the price of admission. It is what it is. What do you think about this, about the increase in sales and then the likelihood or unlikelihood, I guess that the PS5 will struggle on sales now that it's$600 at minimum.

1:13:22Colin Moriarty:I think, well, I know, and I'm not surprised by the spike in sales. I know anecdotally from a lot of people who were specifically waiting for the price to go down as expected from every previous generation who were just decided, who just decided, you know what, this is clearly not going down anytime soon. I'll just bite the bullet. I'll get it. I want, and a lot of those people, by the way, jumped on specifically for GTA. Like I think there was no, there was no extreme reason outside of that for them to really jump on. They just didn't want to spend$900 on, on GTA six. So I think it, it doesn't surprise me that it did well or that there was a huge spike because the price hike was so drastic that I would imagine that even for the people who aren't well-connected, like I knew people who were not that well-connected, who who texted me about it like did you hear the playstations go like 900 i was like yes i did it's my job some friend you are but but uh so that doesn't surprise me will it slow like is the question like is it going to slow like momentum of the ps5 going forward like going forward now that they've kind of got a lot of their momentum out of the way uh i think probably a little bit i think ultimately they are still the de facto leader in this space and as we've all noted before on various episodes of the show at this point um this thing will sell regardless it seems like there's i don't know if it's inertia or if it's just like the perception of it being a default and also just the the natural existence of you know people are being activated all the time people are deactivating from the space people are activating from the space um people are aging into the demographic that would be interested and so like i think i think it'll still be selling but it would not surprise me at all if momentum slowed quite a bit maybe not substantially but the next big thing is going to be gta for sure and I think GTA is going to still sell a ton of a ton of consoles so I don't think they have anything to worry about really I'm actually moving things around in our document because I think we'll talk about that next that makes a little more sense also also I don't know if you saw like I'm pretty sure like even what is it the Oculus just raised I think the Quest headsets went up in price too so like this is not going away anytime soon you know these price hikes are either here to stay or going to continue.

1:16:07Yeah, I think I appeared on Broken Silicon, Moore's Law is Dead, Tom's podcast a few days ago and we talked deeply about this stuff. People should listen to it. It's a great episode. I really enjoyed being on the show with Tom as I always do. And we were talking about that, about just, we talked about all this stuff, but the universality of price increases and how there's this kind of theory, at least in some corners, that Sony is trying to kind of like, you know, is picking at the market and taking advantage of things. And I'm like, they don't want to do this, dude. They have, they're winning right now.

1:16:43Like this is not, this is not what they want. This is so bad for them. And they're probably freaking out. He also was saying though, the good news is, and we won't talk about PS6 too much in this episode, but that there are signs that things are softening and that component pricing will be cheaper and that you can even imagine a Sony serendipitously dropping the price of PS5. Again, right around Grand Theft Auto. So, and that this also feeds into why PS6 might be so much cheaper than people think. But anyway, we can get all that at the more appropriate time. Dustin?

1:17:21Colin Moriarty:Yeah. So as far as it, is it too prohibitive for them? I think that obviously for some people, like the PS5, to buy a brand new ps5 may now be out of reach but as we were talking about when the price increase happened there are still options for people to get ps5 at a cheaper price whether you get a refurb one from the playstation direct at least there were a week ago uh some some good options or even locally. Like I saw our friend of the show at Main Level Games. He has PS5s in his shop that are cheaper than GameStop used right now. Not everyone has a local game store, but you got Facebook Marketplace.

1:18:12Colin Moriarty:So there, I'm not saying it's ideal, but I'm just saying there are options to still acquire a PS5. I think that to some degree, I know that right now, economically, Everyone's spending more money to just survive and exist. Everything costs more and it sucks. But I just noticed with these kind of high desire technology products that while there is a lot of complaining about a price, and don't get me wrong, you'll see me complain about the price of things all the time. The desire is still too high. that it's like when gta 6 the previews start coming out the reviews hit it's like some people will put will put it on a credit card they shouldn't they shouldn't go into debt for it but think about like every year there are people that buy the new iphone or they upgrade you know regularly when they don't need to they buy an ipad or whatever uh and again to touch on that could be changing right now with the current economic status.

1:19:17Colin Moriarty:But I just find that people are in in their actions are less price sensitive than they say in terms of what, you know, complaining. That's exactly right. That's where my my head's at with it as well is there is a barrier and a line that will be crossed at which time the price sensitivity will increase. But I think people online yet overestimate people's price tolerance. Gaming has. Yeah. it depends on how you look at gaming. I know gaming is, we say this is very value rich in terms of hours played and go backwards and play things and they become cheaper and virtually free if you wait long enough and all the rest.

1:19:56But the bleeding edge of gaming has always been for people with a little bit of money. And I don't think that that's really changed too much. And your exposure to the market, to the bleeding edge market will change depending, like when I was a kid, I had no money. So even though I had these new consoles, I could only buy a few games and that kind of changes for people over time. But for me, my eyes water when I see the pricing of the consoles now. I'm like, this is just so out of whack. But you have to compare it to everything else, including computers and the component pricing. And then those who can exercise these greater economies of scale will bring the price down.

1:20:36But I wonder if this is about as high as it's going to get. Who knows? it we i think we've thought that over and over again but i also think that this tension is so we all right so we've already i i believe in my opinion the increases over time have already eroded away like inflation right that inflation was a really big deal 2020 2021 right so that's kind of bit now we're back to like normal inflation two three percent so that's kind of baked in then And the tariffs, right? That was a huge global shock. And then that kind of got baked in and the tariffs have been flat, right? So there's nothing new to evolve towards.

1:21:20This only leaves component pricing. And thus, if the component pricing is relieved and you see this, right? We were talking about this. Dustin, you might have seen this. I don't know if you did, Chris. It's so funny because Tom had this theory that a lot of these companies are buying shit they don't even need to make sure that no one else gets it. And now that's like coming home to roost, apparently.

1:21:40Colin Moriarty:Right. Because it's like Sam Altman, his his he had like a word of intent or letter of intent to buy all this RAM. And now it's like, right, exactly. Maybe not. And I saw that. What is it? Half of all data center expansions or whatever are now on hold or permanently canceled in the United States. I don't think it's I don't think it means the technologies are going away or whatever. I think it just means that they probably don't need as much as they thought they did. And the adoption is not there. And thus, the prices should stagnate if not go down. I don't know. we'll see what happens but good news there anyway but i wanted to i was going to bring this up later but we brought up grand theft auto and and mason did in his letter and chris and i were talking about it so it makes a little bit more sense to bring it up here as well which is i don't know if you guys saw there was a and and i don't want to report on it too deeply this is kind of what we the tension we had with the insomniac leak uh rockstar was hacked and people released a bunch of information the information is out there and being circulated i feel like it's worth reporting on that i obviously don't condone just like with insomniac i don't condone what happened to rock star i think it's wrong to do those kinds of things i think as i'm reading it at least now as at the time of recording rock star was threatened by this hacking group to say like we're going to release all this shit and if you don't pay us and they're like we'll just release it.

1:23:02So to me, that's I like not playing with the terrorists and just being like, well, whatever, just release the data, I guess. But at least it's not the game. The one thing I wanted to focus on here, though, were Grand Theft Auto Online numbers. We have incredible insight into data for Grand Theft Auto Online. And I thought it would put into perspective how big Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to be. Indeed, we got a letter from Dwayne's Rock Hard Johnson who says, Holy mother of pearl, I know it's one of the best-selling games of all time, but the fact that GTA V still has that many players weekly and makes that much money weekly is bonkers, especially on old hardware.

1:23:43No wonder why they were never in a serious rush to get the next one out. Grand Theft Auto 6 is really about to be the best-selling anything of all time. So what he's referring to are these numbers. Now, I've gotten them from GTAForums.com. They kind of have them collated here. so grand theft auto online revenue by stream the average weekly haul for grand theft auto online is 9.5 million dollars garnered from shark card purchases of 7.3 million dollars a week and gta plus memberships accounting for another 2.3 million per week gta oh so grand theft auto Online active players on a weekly basis. 9.9 million average active users per week.

1:24:36New users, almost 500 ,000 every week. Paying users, almost 400 ,000 a week. And the maximum average users over the last year was 15.4 million people playing Grand The Thought online that week. Platform breakdown I thought was really interesting. I won't get deeper into this in a minute. PS5 has 3.4 million active users on GTA Online. PS4 has 1.8, almost 1.9. Xbox Series X has 1.1 and Xbox One has one. PC, not even a million, 894 ,000. absolute dominance by PlayStation in this space and really, really interesting stuff there. And then top countries by total bookings, the United States between September 9th and March 24th.

1:25:31So September 9, 25, March 24th, 26, GTA online in the United States grossed Rockstar$153 million. Absolutely insane. So just wanted to throw those numbers out there. Dustin, Any thoughts here on the on the reveal of Grand Theft Auto Online's true might all of these years, by the way, people might look at these numbers and be like, yeah, this is good. And I'm like, this game is really old. This is a PS3 game. I want I want to remind you just printing printing money. What do you think?

1:26:06Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it is crazy that I mean, on PS5 alone, you know, almost three and a half million weekly active users. not just people that like have logged on or whatever or something like that like this is active users um to me this says first of all that while we will be getting a new gta online with grand theft auto 6 they're gonna have to keep supporting this like why wouldn't you continue there's gonna be a clear drop off when those uh what was it you know three and a half million ps5 users switch over to the new gta online and also probably some ps4 users that are going to upgrade and switch over as well but it's crazy man i i think i mentioned a few weeks ago there was a youtuber i was watching who i think was in packets pakistan that was checking out like video game stores and electronic shops and the guy in the store was like oh we sell the most Xbox 360s because that's the cheapest console that plays Grand Theft Auto.

1:27:10Colin Moriarty:Oh, interesting. Now, obviously that doesn't apply to Grand Theft Auto online because those servers were shut down, but just around the world, the desire for GTA 5 is so high. And also the second highest platform is PlayStation 4 still with 1.8 million users. So they're holding on. it's holding on with that it takes like 10 minutes to load in it's unbelievable to gt online on ps4 chris what are your thoughts here seeing all this i was also curious about because some people are comparing here that there's some red dead online numbers in here as well and that that game is like so much softer which i guess makes sense but yeah they're barely they're making about a half a million dollars a week on red dead online as an example that is you say that but that's uh 20 times less than they're making on Grand Theft Auto on GTA Online.

1:28:06So it's like, why even bother?

1:28:09Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I don't know, man. It's not... I gotta be honest. I think... These are really good numbers. I even thought it was more than this. Just because it's so... The success of GTA is so obvious that I thought it was even crazy. I thought it would have been even like 30 million a week. but like 10 million i mean that's still fucking incredible and it's and it's like they're making what is that so 10 million a week um what's about like four 400 something thousand for or 400 million a year just on grand theft auto if that's your average weekly yeah i mean that's the whole point is like you can't go wrong in that plus most of these people bought grand theft auto 5 at some price to so like they're paying twice plus their um yeah they're spending a lot on these shark cards and stuff it's just it's it's actually a kind of like a mystery world to me where i'm like wow there really is like this whole vibrant ecosystem still for this game it's a dream scenario man it's going to explode like they are and this goes into what where the money comes from as far as I mean we all know this inherently but to just take all the time you want like what I mean at some point you have to shit or get off the pot you're you're you're going to start eating into this things are going to start shrinking but and there's some eagerness I'm sure to turn over and start getting the billions of dollars that they're going to start making a grand theft auto but it's crazy stuff yeah it's it's it's kind of a huge um these numbers are amazing they're unsurprising we you know we've we've known for a while like i i guess anybody clued into the space knows that gta makes a stupid amount of money but like seeing it and seeing the hard evidence and understanding exactly the numbers it's it's it's good dude even even red dead online is kind of crazy like not compared to gta but like compared to like a lot of other like i would imagine there's probably a lot of devs who are like damn dude i would kill for red dead's numbers yeah for a half a million dollars a week yeah that's crazy um what do you guys think about the softness of pc it does go to show you that it's obviously not a priority for them for a reason i mean you would think pc would be a massive boon for them but it's not it's actually almost an irrelevance it's a rounding error yeah i wonder if that's to i mean inherently pc is like i don't know maybe people will disagree with disagree with me here but like i don't know sitting at your desk and playing a video game is kind of inherently less relaxing than just like sitting on your couch playing it on a tv there's also the fact that like pc is a wide open platform where there's a lot more experiences available to you so technically there's more competition on pc than there is and like even in our modern console markets that are fairly backwards compatible in comparison to previous ones like there's still like probably like infinitely less available on them compared to the pc space which is like you've got hio you've got you know you've got all sorts of different storefronts and and different games and a lot of different competition it makes sense to me that gta with its massive appeal would be most popular on the most accessible machines that tracks to me.

1:31:39Colin Moriarty:But it is surprisingly low, I think. Like the degree to which it's low is kind of surprising. I had heard this from somebody and I looked it up to make sure. Apparently GTA Online on PC has really bad hacking issues. That makes sense. For example, I mean, this is anecdotal, but there's multiple places I'm seeing around the internet. A post on the GTA subreddit says, GTA online is unplayable because of hackers and all the comments are like yeah play in a private server uh play somewhere else so that could be part of the problem is that just like no one wants to play there because there's you know a guy with that's running across the map in the air with an infinite rocket launcher or something can you can you turn cross play off I would imagine so right like i don't think gta has cross play oh does it not i don't think let me look gta that's kind of surprising i guess there's a big enough player cosplay wow it's before that really was a thing pc gamers ruining everything for everyone that's yeah i so surprised listen i i play marathon bro uh so does chris yeah you can't play ranked right now you can't i've never played ranked because all i've heard is that they're hackers and cheaters i don't understand how people touch it i'm so ignorant on this stuff obviously but it's like how are they figuring out how to do this so quickly i don't know and why is it so easy for them to do there's yeah well so in marathon's case there's different ways to cheat that are not readily apparent like the one that's most common that is most easy to get away with is people queue at the same time in ranked and then they form like these like kind of united squad that like anybody else who matches in with them are completely fucked uh which is technically cheating because you're you're planning outside the game to coalesce in a way in a situation where you can't naturally the game doesn't let you do that for a reason um but then there's other stuff like wall hacks and stuff i have not i gotta be i've i gotta be honest i've never even been remotely drawn to ranked in in marathon even before i heard about this stuff because like the game by itself is already plenty competitive i don't need i don't need this extra try hard mode but I've heard that like that mode in particular is like ruined and so PC is definitely hacker central which is unfortunate but it is what it is I guess Shepard Commander wrote in and said hey Jens regarding Colin's tweet about the huge player base of GTA Online to this day on PS4 I gotta ask is this really a surprise?

1:34:20The PS4 sold 120 million units I believe and it was the dominant platform when GTA Online came out. The comparison to Xbox is somewhat weird given how much smaller the console numbers are. It's not a huge surprise that even the PS4 with its huge install base is above Xbox Series console, which sold one third of the amount of the PS4 sold. I think by far the much bigger news here are the incredibly low PC numbers. What say you? I'm not saying you're doing this, Shepard Commander, but this is a cope, as the kids say. The PS4 came out 13 years ago. that there are that many people still play it doesn't matter how many machines it's sold it's matter how many machines are active and that you have that level of active user base above a current gen console is insane in my opinion i don't know how else you possibly can get around it doesn't matter like it's the it's the equivalent of having it's the equivalent of like still playing on ps3

1:35:16Colin Moriarty:basically um yeah especially this deep into like it would be one thing if the new consoles were only out for like five months or something you know what i mean because you'd inherently be like mega limited compared to the preview but like we're how deep are we into this we're six years into this the i also i i know i noticed this when i tweeted it out because it was just i thought it was just an anodyne tweet i was just researching i'm like wow that's incredible like but then obviously everyone gets upset about everything it's like what do they say hit hit hurt dogs yelp or whatever hit dogs yelp it's like enough already man you know like not everything is an insult that you need to take umbrage with as well it's just an observation it's a really interesting observation and you could yeah and if and if it makes you feel better that that ps4 that there's more people playing Grand Theft Auto Online by a wide margin on PS4 than playing on the Xbox series.

1:36:15Okay. I mean, if you don't see why that's crazy, then more power to you. That's why you listen to the show. You learn a little bit. You're listening to a show such as ours. All right. We're going to talk about a couple of upcoming PlayStation games now. One announced, one unannounced, but widely acknowledged. both of these news articles come from the site that we've been citing a lot more in in recent months and maybe over the past year and they used to be much more relevant back in the day mp first in fact i could be wrong but dustin we've talked about this the past didn't nick colandra launch mp first or something like the guy that does the the escape stuff now he has like some history i think with these sites which is interesting but anyway they're coming back with all this news.

1:37:05And I want to start, and so congratulations to them because it's great. I want to start with this. They write, Report, God of War Fae spinoff claimed to feature, is it Tyr? Tyr, yeah. And multiple mythologies. It's been four years, they write, since Santa Monica Studio released God of War Ragnarok, and since then, the studio has kept silent on what they're working on. While nothing has been announced so far, rumors have serviced that Santa Monica is working on a new entry in the franchise, the one that's a spinoff that stars Fae and not everyone's angry dad everyone's angry dad Kratos. We've already covered a little bit of this.

1:37:37Seems the rumors surrounding the God of War spinoff is gaining steam and more info about it has surfaced. And we here at MP First have also spotted new reference to the project as well. Now they go into what they know so far and then add a little bit of their stuff. So I'm going to just read it here. They say, quote, a report way back in 2023 from Fandom Wire mentioned how the spinoff will feature two main characters and it won't include Kratos. Though it mentions how the Spartan hero will make an appearance somehow. Since that article went up, the author has since corrected some of the info and in a comment from a now deleted reddit post clarified how the prequel will star fey kratos's deceased wife and not freya as they were led to believe initially as well as tier the nor the norse god of war the comment also mentions how the player will have a companion that's some kind of gelatinous cube a talking sword will also be present in the game which is said to be merlin yes that's odd we agree we agree in addition to that they write The prequel also explore several mythologies such as Mayan and more, which isn't surprising to those that played God of War 2018.

1:38:35At the very least, we here at MP1st can confirm that East Asian mythologies will be a part of it, as we've heard that elements from Chinese and Japanese mythologies will be a part of this new entry in the series. Having said that, game development is a fickle thing, and as such, things are always subject to change, though we expect those to be present in the final version of the title. and then they go on to say that Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming said that he heard that the game would be announced this month I don't know when they would do that I mean we're only halfway through the month so anything's possible I don't know Dustin anything here interesting to you kind of precious new information about the God of War Fae spinoff I will say this one thing about it I don't like the idea of and it's kind of a gross way of putting it but it's like blowing your load it's like don't we don't need all of these mythologies, like focus on one and like really break it open again.

1:39:25Like why rush through all of it? There's so many cool options. So I don't want to prejudge a game, but I'm going to from that perspective and just saying like, just do one thing. Like it would have been cool if it was like, oh, just the Inca or just the Maya or just the Egyptians or whatever. So the idea of having all of this shit in it is kind of whack. I also just, again, want to reiterate what I said when we found out that this is apparently Corey's game, which is I'm like, it's so corny that that this is what he was working on the entire time. What a disappointment. But again, so I'm a little down.

1:39:56All right. Dustin, go ahead.

1:39:57Colin Moriarty:I'm most intrigued by this gelatinous cube companion. You know, what's his motivation? What's his story? What's his character arc? Sounds kind of weird, but I like weird stuff like that. And yeah, I agree that doing everything, you know, all these different gods at once does seem like you're blowing your load a little bit. but maybe we can get a buddha boss fight out of this you know he takes takes up the sword he's done with his passive ways of peace and you got to fight him you got to do it what about merlin being in the game yeah so a talking sword which is said to be merlin very interesting i uh i don't know i remain i don't know if skeptical is the right word i guess cautiously optimistic just because it is cory and he's shown that he makes very very good games uh despite us maybe being a little bored with we bored with god of war just like i don't know i don't even know how to feel about it but if it's revealed this month then we won't have to speculate much longer it's uh a lot of this week we thought well like we were getting ready for a state of play but yeah did micah tell you colin that she uh she messaged me and she's like we're trying to figure out their state of play do you think there will be one because i need i want to buy ribs to make for dinner oh yeah i was like i told i was like if it's not announced by 3 p.m today this was yesterday i'm like i don't think it's happening but who knows so yeah no state of play this week maybe next week yeah maybe next week yeah i don't know where that rumor came from but um because i think isn't xbox going this week so it could be possible that they both selected arbitrarily selected the same date they learned you know both learned of it and one pulled out um to do it at a different time but by the way mike is just going off with the the grilling and the smoking oh she's going off some ribs man i love yeah me too ribs are great uh chris anything to say about the new not too much new detail but some some new texture for the god of war game the fey game that's apparently coming yeah i mean uh this sounds like a mess i mean my initial read on what we know so i'm sure maybe it'll it'll all come together it'll make a lot more sense but like i don't know man i hear gelatinous cube and a talking sword and i'm like oh no bro it it it it has um it's it's reminding me a little bit of uh what is it oh my god what's that game for spoken with like the talking oh like the talking inanimate object where it's just like even though we'd rather be separate we've gotta work together and it's like all right all right i don't love this i don't love the sentient talking item thing like i just i've never i don't know that's that trope to me has always been a little bit corny yeah it's it's a it's not exclusive to games but it is a game trope because it's a way to have exposition while you're playing you know yeah i think that that's the whole thing yeah and and i i get it i i just i don't know this this just kind of seems like it just seems like a lot of people like pitching everything and and somebody in the room being like yes but maybe it's maybe it's great and uh cory barlog hasn't given us necessarily a reason to doubt him but at the same time i i don't know because cory barlock was responsible for 2018 and it's been a while you know like he's he's not necessarily been on like a a generational run as as it were you know what i mean like he made a really good title with 2018 And even that game retroactively has some, some, you know, revisionist criticism going on with it.

1:43:59So we'll see.

1:44:00Colin Moriarty:I'm open to it. I'm look, I'm curious about it. I will play it, but nothing I'm hearing about it is particularly nothing. I'm hearing about it. It makes me go like, oh man, I'm really excited. You know, if anything, I'm just curious about what, what they're working on and I would like to see it. Yeah. It's, uh, I want to be clear that I, I think it's unfair to be too hard on something that we don't know very much about. And so I want to be fair to the game. My disappointment in it merely comes from the fact that this is what Corey was doing. Because I think we all just assume that God of War's mantle was being taken by someone else.

1:44:35And we might finally get something else out of Santa Monica. Literally for the first time since Connecticut. So 25 years. And then to these rumors being like, no, it's just more God of War.

1:44:49Colin Moriarty:yeah the opportunity cost the opportunity cost of it not being a new ip from santa monica is disappointing that's kind of how i and i understand people probably feel this way about horizon and it really is all about the ip that you're tuned into like i want more god of war is like uncharted and uh like horizon and a few others where it's like you could do this every five years probably in perpetuity and be totally fine see the problem with assassin's creed for all those years in my opinion just as an outside observer was it was just too much it's not that assassin's creed can't be ever present it's that you don't need and that they were annualizing assassin's creed that's too much but the multi-annualizing right multi-annualizing in some cases because then they have like that one year or like a couple years ps4 version yeah yeah where it's just like what was it uh oh my god i can't remember rogue assassin's creed rogue and i think assassin's creed um was it unity unity yeah it's just like dude two games that there are different games releasing on the same at the same time that's insane like you've you've lost the fucking plot if you're doing that to me like i think there is that that's just way that's too much to ask out of the players too much to ask out of a fan i think for some of these bigger ip it's like two games a decade is you could do that forever you could do an uncharted game like that forever you can do god of war like that forever it's it's where you get all these interstitials and then things start kind of getting interrupted and it's like all right so now are we getting like another God of War mainline game too.

1:46:18And then you have the God of War remakes and you also had the Bluepoint God of War game spun up for all those years. And it's too much. Like, I don't know what you don't understand about that. That's too much God of War, just like we were kind of getting and maybe even getting into that realm with Horizon and so on and so forth. So I understand like in this era of expensive development and big bets or whatever, you might want to stick with things that you know but it's just i just i'm just disappointed because i always just read it it's my own fault for reading it like this but like cory's like all right i'm gonna i'm done with god of war i'm gonna go do something else and that's just kind of what i assumed and so i thought it would have been anything else and i know that this is going to be a different sort of god of war game with different characters and i think it's going to be very attractive and i think we said it's like there's no reason to think that it's not going to be great it's just i don't i'm kind of sick of god of war like i i want to see what all santa monica could do to guerrilla's credit not that they stuck with kill zone nearly as long as santa monica with god of war but like they did move on and gave us horizon and i wouldn't mind seeing them move on again at some point we only get the new things if studios are willing to do so and i'll just reiterate that we would have never gotten uncharted if they didn't want if no i don't want to get off a crash and jack and we would have never gotten ghost without sucker punch wanting to move off as sly and infamous move on yeah all right some information also from mp first about phyzzin phyzzin of course was revealed what 2024 and we know that this is kind of the new espionage thriller coming from kojima with playstation productions in a second party capacity i think everyone assumes it's going to be a ps6 game i think that's fairly safe to assume I think in 24 slash 25 Kojima had said they're about going to take about five to six years to make the game so we won't see it till 2030 at the earliest but they say here report Hideo Kojima's fizzin new casting details on earth teasing a villain so there's not too much here of interest but we're I think this is one of the few games we have to talk about that's upcoming that's kind of unknown and so let's give it a little bit of feature here on our show.

1:48:28They write, quote, while we don't have many details since development has barely just begun, we already know some of the cast. True to Kojima's style, the roster features Hollywood talent, including Charlie Frazier, Don Lee, and how do you say this? Minami Hamabe? I guess. Minami Hamabe? Japanese, I assume. Kojima has also noted that further casting, scanning, and performance capture for the title would kick off later this year. That process appears to be well underway, as we spotted some brand new casting details that further confirm the character roster is moving forward and that performance capture should be kicking off very soon.

1:48:59These new casting calls offer a bit of insight into the project, revealing its internal code name, which is Shimmer. It's also revealed that Mary Ueda will be the casting director. Ueda is the founder of the motion capture company Pivot Motion, and they worked with Kojima on Death Stranding 2. As for the content of the casting call, while it doesn't reveal really anything mind-blowing, it helps us picture the kind of title Kojima is going for and definitely reinforces his return to his action espionage roots. they write the calls are looking for to fill the roles of multiple passengers on a hijacked bus among them are a mother holding her newborn baby five teenagers of different ethnicities two other male passengers and lastly an antagonistic character with a german accent out of these characters the one that stands out is definitely the villainous type interestingly the role's description is for mads mickelson and hannibal but with flair a nod to an actor we've already seen working with kojima a few other small details are provided noting his complexion is slim and his personality is quiet but intense and confident in a psychotic way.

1:49:59There's a strong emphasis on the German accent requirement, which makes us wonder where the setting could be, though it's hard to conclude much with so few details. Still, chances are that this role isn't for the main villain, but rather a minor antagonist, as an open casting call would be a regular for the type of Hollywood A-listers Kojima tends to cast for lead roles. It's also worth noting that because we haven't seen a trailer for obvious reasons, the casting work could be for early vertical slices meant to establish the game's tone. Shooting for Shimmer is scheduled to start around June of this year, which gives us a rough timeline of when we could see the game.

1:50:30The Stranding didn't start development until 2022 and the game was released three years later, but he said obviously that he wants to go longer and I highly doubt we'll see it this decade. So nothing too interesting there, I suppose, Dustin, but something to add to the record. Where are you on this game? What do you think? Timing, content? I mean, anything to say?

1:50:50Colin Moriarty:I want Robert Pattinson to be the lead there's already been speculation about that there's a photo of him and kojima together and i just think he's great and i think it it would be awesome i looked up some of these other people that were already cast in the project uh the one that the japanese woman that you mentioned i lost where her name is on here it is minami minami hamabe Manami Hamabe she is in Godzilla minus one yeah she is Chris you speak a little Japanese speak a little Japanese for him Derek but yeah I have no idea I feel like this is going to take forever like you said not this decade and I think that's probably right mid PS6 maybe should PS6 come out next year yeah mid PS6 seems to be seems to be a good goal um sounds like me i mean german accent europe based in europe i mean it could be kojima since the very beginning metal gear has had a fascination with the united states and obviously much of what he does is in the united states it would be cool to kind of change a little bit make something more european or foreign to us home to someone else i wouldn't mind that so the german accent that doesn't really say much of anything but um robert pattinson that's the guy from um the vampire movies right twilight and batman batman right i liked him in batman he's good i actually he's a really good actor yeah i like him anything you want to add to this chris we're obviously all kojima fans this we're going to be eating these little morsels up for years to come i assume as we learn more about the game yeah it's i'm i'm sure i'm looking dude Dude, I don't know.

1:52:42Colin Moriarty:This thing is so far away that like it's in that territory of like, I don't even know if I should be excited because like who the, I don't know. Am I going to live that long? Is a bus going to hit me? Right. You know, it's, it's kind of in that territory. It was like, I hope I live to see it, but I hope we all live to see it. Yeah. I look, it's, it's cool. I like the talent that he chooses because it's like, it's, it's legitimate Hollywood talent, but it's like, it's understated. Like I knew, I knew these people. like from there like i know i know um charlie fraser was in i think um mad max and uh like in and what was uh hamabe was in minus one don lee's kind of everywhere i feel like i feel like i see him all the time like he's in that no i don't i don't think that's don't you cut that out cut that don't leave i've seen like he's because he's in that um that that game that like may or may not be canceled right like that the yakuza kind of spiritual successor right right right right um yeah i wonder what's going on with that hopefully they've someone's come in and kind of working to finish that game yeah but he's i've seen him in a lot of things too so like this is cool and if there's anybody that i give a pass like normally i don't know man if i heard that if i heard that like uh i don't know sucker punch was was casting their next game and they got like i don't know kelsey grammar for it i'd be like whatever you know like i don't i don't know if i give a shit but like kojima is so hollywood and he kind of the stuff that he does with traditional Hollywood talent is so weird and so out there that it almost it's it's almost in and of itself an exciting factor of it that's removed from from like just standard star power for like a standard script you know it's going to be weird you know you're going to see these like um really big names doing some some of the weirdest shit you've ever seen and so that in and of itself is kind of like a more exciting than just seeing like I don't know random a-list actor cast in random AAA studio game.

1:54:55Colin Moriarty:What was that terrible, terrible game that I think you were really excited about? It was the Raque or something? Oh, Crime Boss. Yeah, that's what it was. I don't know. I don't even remember the names. It was literally just a bunch of recognizable names. That's the kind of thing that I usually associate this with, but Kojima typically nails it so like i'm looking forward to it but it's so far away that it's hard for me to feel anything about it really um but i look forward to it and i i hope it's i hope it's interesting and weird and cool and exciting and worth the wait i uh i realized my mix up here maybe it is racist benedict wong is who i was thinking of in weapons he's in uh don lee was in eternals right I believe at least that's what this screenshot is showing me yeah Bennington Wiling I think was in the is was he in Doctor Strange I'm not sure I don't remember Doctor Strange I never saw Eternals so like I never associated him with Marvel oh and he's in that gang of dragon dragon right yeah that's what he was saying yeah I'm connecting all the dots I'm sorry that Asian people all look the same to you yeah it's crazy I go when I'm at Japan I'm like wow I thought you were a little more in tune with your own culture than that but apparently not oh my god more first party news here I'm very curious to what you guys think of this this is being reported by Variety which is of course the well known TV movie film industry music industry publication they write Bloodborne video game getting R-rated animated movie adaptation from Sony.

1:56:45They say PlayStation's Bloodborne video game is being developed into an R-rated animated feature for Sony Pictures that the studio says will embrace the carnage that made the game so popular. Is the carnage what made the game so popular? Sanford Penich, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Pictures Group, promised during the studio's CinemaCon presentation that the long-rumored film will be very true to the gory spirit of Bloodborne, which follows a traveler who journeys into a gothic city full of nightmarish creatures. What's with them all right bloodborne was developed by from software and published by sony and active entertainment which shares a parent company with sony pictures and playstation the film is co-produced by playstation productions lyrical animation and creator and gamer sean mclaughlin better known by his pseudonym jack septic eye for the uninitiated mclaughlin is a gamer who has spent years in the world of bloodborne whereas digital adventures are tracked by 48 million online fans the film is the latest in a string of video game adaptations they write sony pictures and playstation productions recently announced the adaptation of hell divers directed by justin Lin, who has some several Fast and Furious films.

1:57:41It's another guy for you to get confused, Dustin, there. And starring Jason Momoa. The studio also recently completed filming a screen adaptation of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda. Wes Ball, the maze runner, will direct with Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and Bo Bragason starring as Lincoln Princess Zelda. Series creator Shigeru Miyamoto is producing the film. So we have no more information about this. People are really hung up about the Jacksepticeye stuff. I'm less hung up on that. He is a producer. it's a really important job but also meaningless depending on the nature of the producer we always talk about this the bigger thing is why are they so obsessed with the goriness like I've never heard I've played Bloodborne obviously you guys have played Bloodborne I've never heard anyone talk about the gore as the reason it's the atmosphere so I wonder if they're fully understanding this but what are our thoughts here anything to say so So...

1:58:31Colin Moriarty:So I wonder, first of all, if this means anything for some kind of Bloodborne related game, because let's break this down. With every PlayStation Studios movie thing, they have at least tried to have a game out. okay uncharted they had the uncharted legacy of thieves collection uh with last of us they did their their various ports and the combo pack stuff like that they attempted to make a twisted metal game did not succeed of course but they tried so could this mean that maybe they're going to try to spin up even if it's something basic a bloodborne remastered obviously we've talked about this numerous times that especially with all the blue point stuff that they wanted to do it they said no there's something weird from software i don't know i'm just putting out there as a possibility second thing the jack septic eye stuff this is a little weird to me i don't know jack septic eye i don't watch his content i know who he is of course i had no issue with him i watched his video on his channel with his announcement of this i found it a little bit odd because a lot of the video is him like saying i am i was feel like this is what i was born to do all of my career has led up to this and that's great and he's like i am the a huge bloodborne fan i have a bloodborne tattoo i have these bloodborne statues behind me and i'm like dude anyone can tattoo whatever they want on themselves and anyone can spend multiple thousands of dollars on these statues like i don't care it's what i'm saying it's like good you spent you invested a lot of money and your own skin on bloodborne stuff and he does go on to say like he has played plays the game multiple times a year and you know his fans about so he's like a big fan and that's great but i i was talking about this on my stream the other day that have you guys seen the kanye clip where he's like i like some of the gaga songs but what the fuck does she know about cameras you know and i'm like i like some of the jacksepticeye stuff what the fuck does he know about making movies right and you're right colin that a producer role can mean a lot of things you know can mean a lot it can mean a little i wonder if this is a situation where um am i disconnecting no no am i good you're good yeah chris gave me a weird look and i saw no no it says no it's it's it's my thing it's sometimes it'll say like disconnected and then reconnected but then nothing will change we're good we're good we're fine crisis averted um i think i wonder if sony's going for a play where the uh iron lung who is that markiplier right you know you have a youtuber attached to a movie ip uh that's a game or a game IP that becomes a movie.

2:01:34Colin Moriarty:It's a very different scenario, though, because Markiplier stars in it. And I believe he put up a lot of his own money. And I think he directed it also. He made the movie. He made the movie. But I wonder if they're looking at that and they're like, maybe we should start attaching well-known YouTubers to these game related IPs. So I don't know. I don't I'm not trying to diss Jacksepticeye. I don't know him. And I believe that he's a big fan. but as as kanye said what the fuck does he know about making movies other than this is a branding opportunity which i just when i think of youtubers that i would attach to a bloodborne movie i think of um vati vidya like he's the guy he is the guy that if they were like he's attached as producer i'd be like holy shit this thing will be amazing if he has power involved with it so it just feels weird all of it feels weird to me yeah the i don't know anything about this jacksepticeye person i'm looking at him now i didn't even know he was irish um which is interesting so so i i'm totally disconnected from from who he is i know the name it's an unfortunate name i'll be honest with you it's an unfortunate name to go by septic having septic in your name yeah not i don't know i don't know if i feel how i feel about that but i do think it's an important thing and you said i said it you said it doesn't in the reiterators who go over to chris is like producers are there.

2:03:00There are all sorts of producers. They're all going to be called the producers and associate producer, executive producer or whatever. But it's it's. And I think Chris would know this is like it's infamous in the film world of like producers that don't do anything. Like the names attached to things. I remember there are like all sorts. You'll see all sorts of weird ass names pop up when you if you pay attention of things that are happening or whatever. So, yeah. Sometimes it's just like the producer is literally the facilitator of things getting done. I mean, that's the easiest way to describe a producer.

2:03:36That's true in games as well. So it could be. And this reminds me a little bit of you hear this from a lot of actors is like a lot of people for casting calls and whatnot, like are not even interested in you if you don't have a social media presence or some sort of other thing going on because they rely on that for you to promote their product. It's a symbiotic thing that didn't exist. 10 20 years ago so there's that as well so i'm not so mad about it but i'm also not a huge bloodborne fan so i don't really give a shit one way or the other chris um any thoughts here to

2:04:06Colin Moriarty:share i mean i i'm not so deeply familiar with bloodborne or even jack's uh familiarity with it like i've i've met jack like i think like maybe like twice he seemed fine but like there's not i don't know him you know so i can't even really speak to anything as far as like oh he the only conversation he had with me was about bloodborne you know i don't even have something like that so i mean it is it's interesting only because you would imagine that somebody with um the following that jack has and the um presumable like financial stability that somebody like that has attaching them to a project like this i don't know is is it like a is it like a keep us on the straight and narrow kind of thing because like it'd be very easy for them to make decisions be like actually we're gonna do this and then he's like well i'm gone and people are gonna know about it you know what i mean like i don't i wonder like because if you do care about that um if he does really care about bloodborne then like it it's not not a an asset there's a lot of shows uh namely i think of the halo show because it's the one that's so it's near to me where i'm like damn you could have just avoided a lot of this by just getting even just a a moderate fan in the in the in the writer's room or in like the production hall um and they kind of didn't and that show suffered because of it and i think it helps to have fans in there on some level like again you don't need to be a fan to make the movie you don't need to be a fan to like you know write it but i do think it helps to have people who like are really familiar with it and really excited about it and really deep into it involved in the process at the very least to steer the ship i'm sure there's a lot there's a lot of series right for each of us where like if we were asked to give notes we'd be in our we'd be in a perfect space because we might not be able to write from like the ground up we might not be able to structure it or even like figure out the nitty-gritty of it but we can look at a script and be like that's fucking wrong you know or like an outline and be like no you can't do that so i would imagine that like maybe that's i would hope that that would be his role and he would he would probably be completely fit to do that um but we'll see video game adaptations are getting better definitely and uh so i think it's kind of we're we're hitting a stride now where it's no longer a complete death knell to hear that a video game movie is being made um we're approaching that comic book kind of that comic book movie renaissance i don't know if we have our spider-man one or our x-men yet i don't know if we've we've had that we've definitely had it success wise but like i mean like critical wise i don't know i don't know if we've necessarily had that yet but the success of these things are proven and they're being looked at more seriously and so it seems like they're taking it more seriously and this kiddies you blow up in their face because like a youtuber has no reason not to just leave and make a public fuss about it if things don't go well and that's very risky so i don't know one thing i will say that i disagree with Dustin a little bit on is like his his tattoo and his statues whatever it's like yeah anyone could fake their way into doing that but it does say something about the kind of person that he is generally a fan that would ink his body or spend thousands of dollars on those things and it reminds me of like would you want me involved in a Mega Man project I have a shit ton of Mega Man toys and my dogs are named Russian treble and all these kinds of things it's like yeah anyone could do that but it probably indicates that you might want to have me involved in your or at least like someone like me so i'm not saying that's like all you need but i i in a producer role that's kind of ideal you want to be fair to him though i don't know him the the other um thing that i'll say is is yeah like what do you know about this and it's like i kind of understand that more and it is it is different like youtubing and and obviously the production has changed over time and people are very sophisticated on youtube there's amazing shit on youtube chris is one of those people that has made that kind of stuff where it's like this is very high quality um i think that the only way you learn is by doing and so this could be obviously a huge advantage for his own career but it reminds me of like when i started getting into game development and people could say like well what do you what do you know about making games and the reality is is that like well literally nothing i didn't know anything i mean i i was around the making of games all the time i would visit studios and interview people and stuff but like being in the trenches and doing it nothing but six games later it's like i know a lot yeah actually we got a funny message i thought you would appreciate this uh from someone it was a joke obviously maybe half a joke where they're like colin you always instruct us on how many codes you get when you release a game and how like everyone lies to you when you say they don't have code so can i with that and said can I get a code for Saint Slayer and I'm like well no I'm swimming in codes but no you can't have one I'm sorry Dustin you were gonna say that well yeah I was gonna say that my my argument for like your situation it's like you didn't know how to make games but you weren't immediately attached to a Mega Man right that's true that's true you know and the thing with I guess my point about his video that I just found I don't I don't want to ding him too hard for this but i just found it odd that he led with i'm a big bloodborne fan look how much money i've spent and then he said he plays it twice a year and i'm like i just i really don't care about your statues bro like i have a an evangelion poster that cost me 150 because it's uh it's from japan when it came out and i had the collector's edition so are you happy i'm involved with the new evangelion series like no yeah i have no business being involved with a new evangelion but i don't know i don't want to sound like i'm taking it so seriously like i don't want him involved because honestly it's like good if he's a he's a big fan and he's attached and he can help market the movie i think that's a great thing i'm just pointing out a little bit of the weirdness in his video yeah well the thing too about him is that like um if i were him or if i were somebody like him like like if if for whatever reason like uh people came to me and they were like hey we know you're a big we know you're a big halo guy you're gonna produce this this thing i'd be like yes i'll i'll do a better job than all of you but but i would know i would also know who to who to communicate with i would also know who to bring on board and like if i were jacked up the guy the first person i would be talking to is vati yep i would be like immediately like you've got to be involved in this somehow right i don't know i don't know if a producer necessarily has that level of pull because like producer is like a very it's a very tiered system like tier like it's it's not like producer tier one or producer tier three but like functionally that kind of is how it is there are producers who are in name only you know pinos and there are people who are like really like you know nitty-gritty involved in like making making genuine like granular decisions on like every bit it's like it's it's a very kind of non-specific term um but if he has like any level of leeway i would be like if i were him the first person i'd be like all right we're gonna get this guy involved uh i don't know if it's in like a script supervisor kind of position or like what but like he consultant consultant he's got to be there and i would say the same thing if i was like a halo guy i'd be like we got to get hidden xperia in here we got to get like the x x y z content creators involved because i know it's content creation and i know it's like measly compared to Hollywood, but these people know their shit.

2:12:05Colin Moriarty:And they're going to be able to save you a whole lot of grief. Another person they should consult? Miyazaki. Just an idea. The creator of the world of Bloodborne. The man who's standing in between us getting the game re-released. The man who shut down Bluepoint, as Colin stated. Thanks for that. I didn't realize you were the king of PlayStation. appreciate that holding holding everyone hostage with your stupid fucking game all right one more piece of movie news and i actually did a lot of research not a lot but i went and read about some of what's going on with this because i was so curious because this has been a story for 20 years or so at this point the hollywood reporter another site that we sometimes source for film and TV news and so on.

2:12:59They write Metal Gear Solid movie in the works from Final Destination Duo as they ink Sony First Look. Zach Lepofsky and Adam B. Stein have become among the more in-demand filmmakers in town. Now, Sony has snapped them up for an expansive deal that will cover all of the studio's films labels. They write, quote, Just a year ago Zach Lepofsky and Adam B. Stein were a filmmaking duo with humble indie horror roots prepping to release their first sizable feature, Final Destination Bloodlines from New Line Cinema. Now, thanks to that movie's critical and box office success, Lepofsky and Stein, who first met 17 years ago as competitors on Steven Spielberg's filmmaking reality show On the Lot, have become one of the busiest movie makers around.

2:13:37They are so in demand that Sony Pictures has snared them, signing the duo to a sweeping and expansive first look deal which covers all of the studio's films labels. Under this deal, Lepofsky and Stein's newly launched company, Wonder Lab, will develop films for the duo to direct and original projects that they will produce for other directors. The focus is creating wildly fun commercial character-driven genre blending films. They are currently meeting potential executives to help lead the company. And as part of this deal, the duo will direct Sony Columbia Pictures adaptation of Metal Gear Solid, the pioneering video game created by Hideo Kojima.

2:14:07It would mark the first time the blockbuster title, a stealth combat action game with sci-fi and spy features, would be brought to the screen. Father and son team Abhi Arad and Ari Arad are producing the feature. Oh, no. so um so they get more into it or whatever with metal gear solid now i went and researched this and it's funny you say that the first rumors of a metal gear solid film are from 2006 and i was reading about this that apparently david hater himself like wrote a treatment um that was turned down by executives and that at this point they wanted paul thomas anderson to direct it who i've only ever seen i've only ever seen boogie nights i was looking at his filmography and I'm like, I don't, I haven't seen any of these movies, but he hasn't done very many.

2:14:51He's done like 10 movies or whatever. And then, uh, snake was going to be played by either Viggo Mortensen or Hugh Jackman. It's really a sign of the times. So interesting. Yeah. And by 2010, that project was dead because the big thing is that this is either the third or fourth attempt at getting a Metal Gear Solid movie, depending on how you look at it. So then in 2012, Columbia Pictures, which is the same brand here and Sony has owned Columbia since the eighties. this is when Avi Arad got involved. Now, I want to know more about because I don't know anything about this shit. He's a producer to this day of all the Spider-Man movies.

2:15:24And he was the producer of X-Men and Blade or whatever. So I want to hear more about this. You would know more about this. And at this point, so that there was this 2012 thing, they got involved, nothing really came up. And then 2015, so this is the third-ish time, they wanted Jordan Voight Roberts to direct. And he directed I think his only film that he ever directed was Kong Skull Island, but he does a bunch of commercials and he did apparently PUBG commercials and Destiny 2 commercials and so on. At this point, they had Oscar Isaac playing Snake. And I thought this was a really interesting piece of the little tidbit here.

2:16:00This never happened. This never went anywhere. And 2015 is the infamous year that Metal Gear Solid V came out and then Kojima was out at Konami. So that's probably why everything went pear shaped. but you guys might remember that there's a character in death stranding called the director and it's it's jordan voight roberts that's him so there's a connection to that third film so this is the fourth attempt now uh let's go to you chris first what's your what's tell me more about this about these guys because i don't know i know the names and i saw their filmography of extensive production credits in the marvel world especially so what are your what are your thoughts here

2:16:36Colin Moriarty:yeah yeah they look avi arad produces a lot like he's definitely he was like pretty instrumental in like the spider-man movies early on he he's most famous in my mind as uh being the person who's like let's get three villains in spider-man 3 you know like let's uh let's do three more toys let's pack it yeah more toys like it's just it's very i don't know i don't want to say he dooms projects because like ultimately these things make money i think they make money more so because the ip is just objectively like impenetrably successful like spider-man that spider-man trailer in the first day got more views like the new one by the way the fourth tom holland spider-man movie i think that the trailer has like orders of magnitude more views in like a like a day than gta 6 had cumulatively you know what i mean so like spider-man's huge he's hitched his wagon to a pretty good horse i would say but i don't know like as a producer like he every time i've ever seen him give an interview it's just like he's so clearly just like not i don't know he's just not the guy man you could get better you could get better people than him again he doesn't doom projects but he makes he makes them questionable for sure uh based on uh i haven't kept up with him since back then but like i mean i've seen the spider-man movies and uh they're fine you know like they're not anything to write home about so we'll see i guess how this shakes up the other names i'm not super familiar with uh but i've known about middle gear solid movies like coming and going i've heard i've heard about that my whole life um so maybe they'll actually say it seems like they're actually motivated there's no they're not associated with playstation productions which is interesting i guess not that interesting because it's not their ip but you'd think maybe they would want to use that that um that expertise which has done pretty well so far i will say i think i i will say i will say before like i think a lot of projects that previously were like brought up and killed and brought up and killed over the generations or over the decades i think they're going to start coming to fruition now purely because of what i said earlier we are in kind of this early stage of like a renaissance is too maybe high value of a word but like the an early renaissance of of video game adaptations uh comparatively to like you know mario bros in the you know in the 80s or or a street fighter you know back in the 90s or maybe even late 80s i can't even remember when that movie came out but we are in a different space now where like If something progresses enough, there's a pretty good chance that it's going to be made.

2:19:24Colin Moriarty:Whereas in the early 2000s, things were entirely written, in some cases, casted and set to direct and all these things. And then they just kind of fall apart because, I don't know, the industry was too young to figure out how to negotiate these deals. The industry is a lot older now. It's a lot more mature. It knows how to interact with transmedia stuff a lot more than it did in the early 2000s. I think famously like the halo movie was shot down because Microsoft was like no let's not accept any offers it's brilliant brilliant strategy because they thought that they could just leverage like how in demand the IP was and they're like oh well no we've got other things to make what do you what are you talking about that we that we own so like no we're not gonna like pay you we're not gonna give you a hundred percent uh what is it um toy rights to this or like merch rights to this film franchise that we're going to be making it's insane so the industry just knows how to interact with these spaces a lot more so i think this metal gear movie is going to happen i just wanted to say this before we move on at columbia anyone out there watching columbia picture from columbia sony pictures konami etc etc um i'm available to play fat man and i'll wear us like he wears the big bomb suit i'm not nearly big enough to be him yet maybe maybe by the time this movie comes out but um i'm a i played hockey my whole life i'm great on skates uh yeah i love to drink now i don't now i don't make bombs i didn't make a nuclear bomb in my bedroom when i was a child i love that little lore about him how he made like a small nuclear warhead or whatever it's like how where did he get the uranium the plutonium he enriched he enriched your radio as a child but uh i'm available um if they want to kind of put him in there and i'd love to play him you say you're not as not as big as him but they could use like gandalf tricks right you know to make you uh make you appear bigger i just love the i love that i love that fight with him in metal gear solid 2 where like you see him at first and he's just skating by you know they don't really ever yeah yeah yeah it's so good oh it's so fucking good that he's so fat that he has to get around on skates all right i saw this over on video games chronicle this is crazy just because i can't believe that this guy doesn't know any better um they write spider-man model appears to tease new playstation game and now deleted post it says in an instagram post published on monday ben jordan posted an image of himself gearing up for performance session the post was accompanied by the message i y k y k or if you know you know and a spider emoji.

2:22:01The post was soon deleted, but not before it was archived on Reddit. Jordan typically works as a model and is only acting credit so far for PlayStation's Marvel Spider-Man games. And it's been speculated that the capture could be for Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game. But with the title due to release this September, that seems unlikely. I highly doubt that's what it's for. Maybe it's for an expansion or something. I just think this is so funny because it's like, what is wrong with you? You think that like you, I don't know, man. I'm so surprised by like, We were talking about what was Christopher Judge, I think, that was getting interviewed by someone or whatever.

2:22:33And like, he didn't know he was being interviewed or he wasn't being recorded. That's a little different. But you putting this out there with if you know, you know, with the spikes like what and this he's doing the spider like he's doing the Spider-Man.

2:22:44Colin Moriarty:Yeah, the fingers, the handsome. Right. I'm sure they were thrilled. I'm sure somebody was amped. So stupid. Chris, Spider-Man 3, you think? Yeah, I mean, I would assume it's it's about that. time right you kind of figure um yeah i mean i don't know what else to say like it is funny to me that like are people when when people get a gig like this are they not hyper protective of it the last you replace the guy right that's what's so wild about it is like he understands that he's like replaceable because he is the replace it's a good point so like and that was for like i don't even remember like i think there was like some rumor story about like what that originally was right like why that original guy yeah i don't remember they said it was because they said it was like oh he wanted the the new model to match the voice more and it's just like it matches the voice less so like that's clearly not that's clearly not the reason there's something different going on but i don't know i just can't even get in the headspace of doing something like this dustin did he blow it oh yeah he definitely blew it i just i don't know how people aren't trained to some degree maybe it's a spider-man curse chris with like uh tom holland you know because he was always leaking stuff yeah he was always spoiling things yeah yeah i don't know um i would kind of hope i mean spider-man 3 would be cool but I want the Venom game.

2:24:21Colin Moriarty:I want the Venom spinoff. So I'm hoping it's for that. It could be for that. But it could be either. It's not for Wolverine. It's not for Wolverine unless it is an expansion because Wolverine's got to be pretty much done at this point. Alicia H wrote in and said, Hi, CDC. With Marvel's Spider-Man 3 now essentially confirmed thanks to the photo of Ben Jordan and MoCap circulating. I have to ask how big of a role you expect Peter to have in the next installment in the franchise. At the end of the second game, we see a Peter that is ready to settle down and hand over his duties to the younger, but finally ready Miles.

2:24:53I assume this meant the third game would fully lean into Miles as the sole lead, but with a few Peter moments sprinkled throughout. This would also allow for the trilogy to be equally paced with both protagonists, one focusing on Peter, two on both, and three on Miles. What do you all think? Will Insomniac keep Peter's role as the forefront or make a bold move and have Miles lead in the next game? I mean, I always thought it was inevitable that that was what it was going to be, but he has to be in the game. Yeah. So I assume that you're right, Alicia, that that's what they're going to do. And I assume that's what you think too.

2:25:20Chris is to move totally into Miles.

2:25:23Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I think that's how the comics seem to be going as far as I understand. Like, I mean, Spider-Man's, as far as I know now, he's just like, he's not been Spider-Man, Spider-Man for a while. Like, it's really Miles. So I would imagine that the game's going to go that route. I could see them killing Peter because Peter's not allowed to be happy. You can't have that. you can't have a happy thriving Peter Parker it ruins it I can't relate to you so I think they're gonna I think they're gonna go with Miles and uh presumably end it there yeah I would have to I mean that was the whole plan that I mean during the leak we learned that the plan was to end it with three and then move into X-Men is there a way to this is like a real Marvel ignorant thing but like does spider-man ever interact with the x-men surely yeah well because i was wondering like will they tease it um i wonder if like if they'll if they'll somehow integrate the x-men or something in it or just in the ending or whatever i mean we'll find out at some point um yeah if that's still their plan too i mean people might remember the insomniac league had them doing an x-men trilogy so then i think had them signed through 2038 or something crazy like that.

2:26:39So now this is a little disappointing for Insomniac. I think we all agree for that, but I will say this. I saw a tweet going around that was many, many thousands, tens of thousands of times, like retweeted and liked about how Insomniac has just fallen off for people or whatever. Um, and that they're just becoming like a Marvel factory. And I'm like, all right, fair enough. But it is important to understand you don't even need to integrate Miles Morales, like the game into this Spider-Man. I don't even need to look to know that this is true. spider-man one and two have sold more than every insomniac game ever made combined yes and the idea that they're going to go back is nice right it's a nice thought but like didn't we find out um all-time best-selling ps5 games spider-man 2 is i think number two or three and i think Miles Morales is like number nine or something yeah these are fucking crazy numbers and Spider-Man 2 is still in the top 20 best-selling games every month to cumulative across all platforms it seems to just silently sell hundreds of thousands of copies a month I would imagine

2:27:48Colin Moriarty:that it's the first it's I would bet a good amount of money that like Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man and like you know the Spider-Man series on PlayStation is probably if not the first game that a new PlayStation 5 owner buys it's it's in that you know what I mean it's like that's that's the introductory course I would imagine it's the most accessible it's like the most kid friendly so like you would imagine that like you know even younger players are probably going to jump onto that as opposed to like God of War and Last of Us it's like no seven or eight year old is like I want to see what Joel's up to you know what I mean that's not really in the nine year olds lexicon he wants to play Days Gone Remastered right uh so like i so i mean yeah i mean it's it's a wildly successful series it's making them a shit ton of money it's over insomnia insomniac has found their place and it's uh it's it's it's here it would be ideal to have it both ways and i think we're kind of having it both ways like we all right so we learned a lot from the insomniac league we also learned that they have this just they have ratchet games in development or at least one ratchet game in development and it's just like this little line gonna take a long time kind of thing so they're keeping that going but it seems like everyone else is working on the marvel stuff and it would be nice to for them to bring back resistance or ideally just make something totally new we haven't really gotten a new notable game from them and like their own ip since sunset overdrive i mean obviously they did some stuff for psvr but or for just vr generally for oculus really but it's nothing of like a mass market appeal it would be cool for them to do something else but i get it like at the same time it's like this is the one thing that is inarguably working for PlayStation first party is like actually the relationship with Insomniac is born incredible fruit.

2:29:34Spider-Man is intrinsically related with PlayStation now. And that's huge for them. So I'm not so mad about it. That's a wildly good association to have. Yeah, definitely. You know, it's insane. And it's so funny how full circle it is. We always talk about the Spider-Man font on PS3, but also like the Spider-Man movie, Sony kind of getting the Spider-Man IP for film during Marvel's dire days and how that all came full circle. Then that relationship was established. They managed to segue it in the games and they made really, I mean, it's just clear based on the sales. Spider-Man is even bigger than the Arkham games.

2:30:08There were, there were, I wonder like what the sales comparisons between those two are. Are the four Arkham games, really even three Arkham games and then Spider-Man, Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2, I wonder.

2:30:21Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I think, I mean, in modern history, like especially as long as games have been around, I think Spider-Man is always... Spider-Man just is the default superhero. I think before the games industry even existed, I think there was probably an argument that Superman was like default hero. You know, like the guy in his underwear with the cape flying around. Spider-Man is that character now. Like every new superhero, like Invincible, it's like you have the... Even Invincible, who's like a character of Superman, is like that's a Spider-Man-like character. Oh, he's a young kid. He's like, oh, I don't know.

2:30:52Colin Moriarty:You know what I mean? Like all of that is Spider-Man. And so. First, through PS1, those games were doing well. Most Batman games outside of Arkham were. Quite bad for a while. I think there were like a handful of like, you know, here and there. N.E.S.'s Batman was excellent. That's like an excellent game. Sure. But that was like it was the N.E.S. to the 360. Yeah, it was. It was like this like a long, like. Collapsing bit like there was I think there was like a I think I could be. misremembering this but i think there was a batman begins video game yeah there was pretty sure around that time right i think ps2 uh original xbox and that was a fart in the wind man and that was around the time that video game based uh or like you know uh movie based video games were doing fairly well spider-man 2 was you know it's a pivotal that's like intrinsic to the game and games industry like that in gta 3 you're like really early provable data points of like oh we can we can do open world that's also the time of like the ea harry potter games and the ea lord of the rings games which people also liked yeah so like i mean spider-man's just trounced batman and a lot of it's specifically in this in this uh medium for a fucking long time so it's not surprising they've built a good association there i mean and and they've got a good cycle too because when a new movie comes out it's just new publicity for the game really it feeds itself and so it's just it's going to keep doing that for as long as spider-man's keep keeps coming to the to the theater you know all right let's get into this last story which is quick and it's that the game catalog is being updated on playstation plus on april 21st with some new entrance this is of course where ps plus subscribers at the extra or premium tier so not the essential tier that most of us are at only if you have access to the game catalog uh some good games in here i actually thought if you're interested in checking some of these out so we have the crew motor fest the kind of that's a forza like a forza horizon like game and that came out on 20 and 2023 that's on ps5 and ps4 by the way horizon zero dawn remastered from gorilla that's going to be available to everyone obviously um this will be on ps4 and ps5 remastered is only available on ps5 but if you have the ps4 if you want to play it on ps4 you'll get zero dawn complete edition instead.

2:33:16You have Sega's and Sports Interactive's Football Manager 26 console, which came out late last year. And Sports Interactive, of course, is the Sega-owned studio that is expert at the spreadsheet game, as they call it. Warriors Abyss. I read a little bit about this. I didn't know anything about this game. Warriors Abyss is from Omega Force and Koei Tecmo. Have you guys heard of this? This is apparently a crossover. I didn't know this. This is a roguelike crossover game between Ninja Gaiden, Atelier, Dynasty Warriors, and Samurai Warriors. Oh my God. All my favorites. Isn't that strange? I mean, it's a cool idea for them to do something like that for their own fans, but I didn't know that that game existed.

2:33:58This one's in here, Squirrel with a Gun, which came from DD Creations in 2024. I always meant to get to this game, but I never did. I always thought it looked fun. The casting of Frank Stone, which is the Dead by Daylight spinoff from Supermassive Supermassive and published by Behavior, which of course makes Dead by Daylight. There's the game Monster Train. I did a little bit of research on this as well. This comes from a studio called Shiny Shoe, I think. Came out to PS5 in 2024. There's no PS4 version. This has been on Switch since 2021 and Xbox since 2020. So people have played this game, but I've never heard of it.

2:34:31And then a big one for me. Wild Arms 4. Coming the PS2 Classic this month. This is, of course, a MediaVision-developed Sony-published game, 2005 in Japan, 2006 in the West. Wild Arms 4 is not very well considered. I don't think Wild Arms 4 is even very good, but I'm going to tell you this. I platinumed Wild Arms 1, 2, and 3, and thus, Wild Arms 4, that will probably be a summer platinum trophy, I assume. So there's that. People are disappointed, of course, about the inclusion of just one classic game. Albert Hendrickson wrote in about this, though, and says, hey, CDC. It's awesome that the classic collection continues to grow.

2:35:06Today it was announced that Wild Arms 4 is coming out this month and Time Crisis is coming next month with motion controls. I understand that the cadence of releases bothers some people, but you have to at least admit that if you had this as a physical collection, it would be impressive. Slowly but surely, it has become quite huge. If you tally the price up of the original releases, it's even more impressive. So cut the catalog some slack. As long as it's around, at least we know we will continue to get some retro re-releases. I don't necessarily disagree with you just because it's like, I'm not really here for these games anyway, so everything's kind of a perk.

2:35:34I don't really give a shit. If I really want old games, I'm going to go to Nintendo to do that anyway. They have a much better service for it and a much better selection of games. Did you see, Dustin, I wanted to ask you this. Did you see that they're re-releasing PS3 physical games? No. Yeah. They. Who? There's like some someone has like a released like the infamous collection, the Jack collection, like a bunch of random stuff recently. And I was thinking of you. Huh? Did you look it up and see it? I don't know.

2:36:08Colin Moriarty:I'm only seeing a YouTube video. I'll find it for you. They're also making a new Neo Geo. Unrelated. I saw that. Yeah, it's so... The Neo Geo is very nostalgic for me because that was such an impressive machine and I especially loved it in the arcade. But yeah, it's interesting that they're doing that. I have to send that to Dagan. And it's not like a Neo Geo classic or something. It is straight up Neo Geo. they're saying it's Neo Geo hardware and it plays original Neo Geo cartridges and they are putting out new reprints of Neo Geo cartridges games, which for anyone who doesn't know, insanely expensive to buy and collect Neo Geo and extremely rare, kind of interesting, but it is SNK.

2:36:56Colin Moriarty:So yeah, be careful with your money, um, dude. So as far as this PS plus list game squirrel with a gun, is a 10 out of 10, 7 out of 10 game. Hell yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Some of you may remember I played this over Christmas break last year. I got the Platinum. I love this game. It has many issues with it, but it is so cute and funny and the Platinum is really fun. It's not too hard. I highly recommend it. If you have the extra subscription, absolutely check out squirrel with a gun i put the link in here by the way that the site i'm thinking of is vgp video games plus which is a canadian outfit oh they have some interesting shit here i don't know exactly how they're doing this but it seems like they have relationships i guess with some of these publishers or just a lot of new old stock perhaps but there are some things here that that say that they are well i i don't want to say i know but people have been circulating that they were reprinting like a bunch of ps3 first party things maybe with sony's permission but I don't know if you see it here for you like up top it says painkiller hell and damnation and then it says THQ Nordic variant THQ Nordic didn't exist when the PS3 was even publishing games so clearly this is a republish so people are still getting PS3 games I guess through certification somehow I don't really the game must have to exist I would like to look more into this because the last PS3 game I remember even coming out was what was that game remember that guy that made the old school he was Canadian he made the old school games um shakedown hawaii remember that came to ps3 and i think even came to psp if i recall and i say this only because we would at lily most still make ps3 and vita games if we were allowed we would straight up launch them on those consoles not physically but digitally we would we remember we kept using an old game maker version like this really out-of-date game maker version because it worked with vita right and once you updated to whatever game maker we couldn't make vita games anymore so it's cool to see this but i wonder what the rules are and i just thought it was interesting i wanted to draw it out there for for you for from any game collectors out there but i'm sure there's more to it than that but the whole painkiller thq nordic variant means that there was again there was no such thing as thq nordic right um when painkiller came out oh it's the same thing here with siberia collection thq nordic variant i wonder man i wonder very interesting yeah like the kill zone collection they have a bunch of kill zone collections ratchet collections so on so forth so check those out all right that's all we have for the news let's get into what we're playing my friends and we'll begin with chris i don't know if you have anything you want to say chris you said you're still playing marathon you're waiting for mouse we'll talk about mouse in a moment is there anything you really you know are we all yeah yeah yeah i've been i just wrote down like i done been waiting for the mousy game and they fucked me by not having a normal release schedule but now i'm still playing marathon it's interesting because it's like it seems like it's a new experience like week to week they keep doing these experimental playlists and stuff there's now like basically a free kit kind of rumble playlist battle royale mode it is kind of battle royale mode and it is like people keep saying that i don't agree though yeah like it's not fundamentally a battle royale but it it plays a lot more casually and it is pretty fun like there's like kind of low risk you kind of get to go out you get to be a little bit more chaotic you get to play it a little bit less safe and a little bit less strategic it kind of becomes a a loud mess but it is fun to just mess around with the sandbox with no fear i guess because it is a really good sandbox but i've been dabbling with that they've changed some of the iconography to uh appeal to uh yellow paint gamers as i like to call it it is more readable but i also feel like it might be a little bit of a skill issue a little bit not all of it but a little bit but i don't have much more to say i'm still really enjoying it.

2:41:06Colin Moriarty:I was really looking forward to being able to I was hoping to play Mouse P.I. really late last night and before the show, but they have a weird... I don't like this new schedule they got going on. I like when a game releases at night and I get to play it before bed and I get to think on it. Maybe dream about it. Wake up. Assess whether or not I'm excited to go back to it. This whole 10 a.m. release schedule thing. not a fan of it not big on it yeah it's funny I didn't use the letter but someone had written in asking you know like with my experience at Lilimo what is with that like what can you set the time and I'm like I honestly don't know like I think it might be where you're like 1201 where you're incorporated or something or you because things just one of the reasons I like to pre-order games like right before the game comes out like I did with Pragmata is not only because it uploads the package or like or downloads the package for you and so you have it ready to go but it also gives you the little countdown clock and so you know exactly when a game's gonna be available pragmata is available tonight at midnight like from when we're recording this so by the time you hear this it'll be available and uh so but they had a pre-order and like you said also like i remember this in california you would get access to games at nine like you said the day before um i really don't know i only have no so like even with saint slayer I'm like I don't know when it's going to pop up I hope it pops up at 1201 but I don't know for sure if that's going to be the case I was bummed out I was kind of getting hyped about it I was like yeah new game and then I checked and it wasn't there and then I went online and they were like I think somebody had tweeted at them and then they responded with that that you know the stylized map that they always show of like the world and like the different like this is when it goes live here and I'm like there's a lot more convoluted than just 12 o 'clock on the East Coast, but like do whatever you want to do, I guess.

2:43:07I'm grabbing it now. It's available now. I'm buying it now. Yeah, yeah. On the app on my phone. But speaking of Mouse, Dustin, you've been playing it and the demons won't let me sleep wrote in and said Olaf fellas, just writing to let Dustin know that because he got Mouse PI early and liked it, he's officially a paid shill. Congrats. Thanks for all that you do.

2:43:27Colin Moriarty:Thank you. Yeah, a couple of people have comments on my video saying that as well. So appreciate it. Yeah, it's fun. But yes, I have been playing mouse PI. I finished it. I'll keep it light here because I know some of you don't really want to hear about it. And if you do want to hear about it, Brad and I talked about it extensively on Summon Sign. And so I'm mostly doing this to be respectful of the people that are just excited to jump in. But it is very good, I would say, overall. all it's a bit of an odd case for me in that the execution of the style the 1930s noir rubber hose cartoon 10 out of 10 amazing work that they did between all the weapons the enemies the environment um i absolutely love that in terms of its gameplay it is like very standard extremely standard and that's not a bad thing at all if you love boomer shooters you're gonna love this so one thing that might be disappointing to people though i don't think they ever pitched it as this is that while it is called mouse pi for hire uh none of the gameplay involves solving cases there is like a thing in between missions where you're putting things on a board and you put all your evidence on there but there's no like crime solving mechanics or anything like that it is through and through a boomer shooter so that's good thank thank god I'm not smart enough to solve any cases there are surprisingly a lot of story and dialogue in the different characters you talk to of course Troy Baker is Jack Pepper and he does a great job my other small complaint this game has way too many cheese puns they're making cheese references and jokes constantly it never lets up there's a point where i'm like okay enough like we get it a cup of fondue after the case you know stuff like that and you're like okay i get it but overall i really liked it um for 30 bucks it is i think worth that price as colin said though i didn't even think about this in terms of trophies once you beat this game that's it there's no level select there's no new game plus there's no kind of challenge modes or anything so if there are trophies i assume that have related to collectibles everything's missable apparently and except for like the trophies you get for um for beating the bosses or whatever the stages because it's uh yeah like you collect baseball cards and all sorts of things right in the game so they were saying that some of it's kind of like near automata where you could buy some of the stuff you missed yep but you still have to do certain things to get the things to appear and because there is no backtracking or new game plus they suggest that you make a ton of saves manual saves you apparently can make a hundred manual saves and so you should just make a bunch of those just to make sure you don't miss anything but yeah so that's something i need to know the trophies are also broken apparently like i said earlier and hopefully they'll they'll fix that in short order but um it looks excellent i mean i i can't wait to play it 30 bucks not so bad yeah yeah it's a fun romp and i'm gonna play marathon too of course yeah last night i'll just share one little anecdote i was playing with the now legendary pork poncho we're up in pinwheel and a rook comes up which a rook is a solo player that spawns in midway through the match a scavenger type and he's on the other side of the door and Poncho's like how are we going to play this Rook what are we going to do and he's like are you going to kill me and Poncho's like no man no if you're cool we'll be cool he's like you'll adopt me and Pork's like yeah he opens the door immediately blasted him in the face with a shotgun and stabbed him and I was like damn dude and he's like psycho that's a rook that's dead is a rook that can't shoot me and i was like yeah god bless and he's absolutely right i will never we say about the vietcong i'll never trust a rook dude i had an army of them gang up on me like like seven of them i was like on our stream well that happened on our stream too but like they've been they've been congregating like they've been like now they can revive each other yeah there's like a secret truce now that like all like they're like they've they've formed under one banner and so like they meet up with each other and it's like it's it's terrifying um but i don't know i will say now is a really good time to jump into it if you've been curious about it because that free kit playlist is really casual and really fun yeah like if you've been curious about it if you've bought in just were like too intimidated by it now's probably the best time i support rook on rook violence um because a rook i was in a gang of rooks and they said they were all friendly and then i was in drone ring wing alone with one of them he murdered me lord of the flies secrecy of the group it's fucking lord of the flies with rooks man you just and i will never dude i don't care i shoot on site i don't care if i'm also a rook there's no camaraderie yeah they're done i put the the rook murder sticker on my guns that you can get that has like rook faces crossed out oh really oh really i didn't even know that i and don't get me wrong i'm trying to get the upgrades to spawn as a rook with a shotgun because i want to do that yeah but if i'm a if i'm a normal runner you better watch the fuck out because if we're in We will murder you.

2:49:23Colin Moriarty:We will pretend to be your friend and then put a shotgun in your fucking mouth. We pull the trigger. I matched up. I don't care. I was doing matchmaking. I was doing crew fill. And I've noticed some people there because you can change your name on, you know, Bungie.net or whatever. Yeah. And have have unique. And I saw. So the enemies are usually like UESC recruit or like UESC whatever. And I've seen people change their name to UESC recruit. so like if someone pings them they're like oh that's an ai you don't gotta worry about it that's awesome and i'm like that's crazy love that smart but marathon's still fun it's good well as i anticipate saints as we all anticipate saint slayer and of course mouse pi for hire saros pragmata and so on i've been playing starfield i played starfield for about 25 hours i want to say in-game.

2:50:18And Mikey 12 wrote in to us on Patreon. This is my friend Mike that I bring up sometimes. He says, Ground Control to Major SS, maybe you can help me out. I have almost 50 hours played in Starfield since its PS5 release and don't see myself stopping anytime soon. I have enjoyed learning all of the different systems, switching between quests and exploring, customizing certain settings to fine-tune the experience, and adding a few cosmetic mods. Apparently, this is not a shared opinion across the internet, with most comments being most boring game of all time and total piece of shit. All while I contemplated spot in my personal top 10.

2:50:49Please advise me as to why I'm retarded with bad gaming taste. Thank you for your attention to this matter. I'll hang up my Boba Fett bucket while jumping out of the emergency airlock and listen. Go Flyers. So he and I have been playing this game kind of in parallel and talking over text and we're having very different experiences with Starfield. Starfield is so fucking boring that I like can't even. It's not even that it's bad. it's just boring. It's perfectly competent. There are things to, there's lots to do. There's an insane amount of writing and voice acting. There's all, there's like over a thousand planets I think you can land on, which is crazy.

2:51:30At least there's a counter of them. Maybe there's some of them are in a system. You just kind of hover above them and study them or whatever, but there's all these different factions. There's a robust main quest. There's space battles and ground battles and deep customization. and it's just so boring. And I can't sit with it for more than a couple or a few hours at a time without being like, I can't do this. Like, I can't play this. Like, and then I'm like, oh, and I kind of get eager to play it again. I'm like, oh, I'll do something else. And then I find a little bit of fun and then the game kind of gets in the way of you having fun.

2:52:10It's a strange game. and you could and what's funny is that I look at it I'm like you should have done this totally differently who am I to really say but I'm a I'm a hard so-called hard sci-fi guy I like that kind of stuff I like all sorts of sci-fi though and I like these kinds of games I like role-playing games and I like non-linear games and open world games I think this is a game of it being a million light years wide and an inch deep. And I just feel like I'm spending all my time on load screens on my ship going from location to location in these fucking annoying ass menus. Things are just inconsistent and don't work sometimes.

2:52:56Like sometimes you just can't look at your area map for some reason. Sometimes you can't just do this. You can't travel to a place because your ship's not big enough. But if you travel to a star closer, then you can travel to that star. It's like this is fucking wildly cumbersome. And I think about Mass Effect. Now, I know that these are different games. Yeah, going for different things. But Mass Effect understood that you could have breadth. Like you'd go to these different systems and you'd mine them and you'd learn about them. And it was fun. I loved reading all the fictional shit and that music that would play, like that very Mass Effect music when you're in the menus.

2:53:31and it's very pleasing and you're just learning and you're getting more. In this game, it's like, no, you're going to land on the game. You're going to go to this system. There's five planets and like three moons. You can land on all of them. Then you can scour all of them for flora and fauna and minerals and do all these kinds of things. But you never learn about the place. It's like, so the comparison, the mass effect is like, you go to a planet mass effect. It's like, here's the fake history of the planet. Discovered at this time. these guys got caught here they discovered the moon was full of these minerals whatever like some cool story here it's like here's a bunch of data and here's and here's like a bunch of things to do on the planet that are it's like no man's sky kind of like a really broke down version of no man's sky in a way and i really wanted to like this game but the thing that micah keeps telling me because she's in the room with me while playing it most of the time and i lamenting and she's like dude everyone told you you know like obviously there are people that like the game and that love the game and i think that's awesome my friend mike's one of them and more power to you i see what's likable in it i don't think it's bad i just think it's fucking boring it's like oh my god let me just play like let me do something it's like dude i literally did this quest line early in like the soul system our system where it's like go to the moon talk to the sky, then go to Neptune and talk to this guy, then go to Mars and talk to it's like, just let me play, send me somewhere and like, send me to a mission and let me shoot some shit and let me be somewhere for like a half an hour or an hour.

2:55:12And that's what Mass Effect got was there were, there was all of these locations, but there was no purpose for you to go to any of them. So you couldn't, it's like, yeah, you could conceivably go and Mass Effect one got into this a little bit where it's like and everyone hated it. It's like where you could conceivably be like, go here and fucking drive the Mako around and find some shit. And they even did away with that. And I know that the linearity of the increasing linearity as we got to Mass Effect 3 and bothered some people and it became much less of a role playing game and much more of just a third person shooter with some open ended hub world shit and some side quests and stuff.

2:55:46And I understand people's complaints about that, but it actually creates a finer experience and Starfield should have been somewhere in between those two things. Instead, it seems like it was a game that was made in a bunch of silos and then like a couple years before it came out they're like alright what do we do with all of this and the answer is you make some really bloated boring shit I'm gonna I want to keep sticking with it because I see something in there but it's like I don't care about the story the story's boring you know about like finding these things and like this secret power or whatever it's like I don't give a shit and then all the side quests are just kind of random I'm like, there's so much shit.

2:56:25Like you can join all these different factions everywhere you go. It's like, it's cool. It's just, it's overwhelming. It's nonsensical in a way. And I just can't believe how trite a lot of it is and how annoying a lot of it is. Just everything about it is just fucked up in some weird way. And I don't know. I can't believe that at one point people thought this was going to be like the game of the generation. It's like this is. Nowhere near being in the conversation about the conversation about that, nonetheless, being in the conversation or being that game. So it's funny. And I thought I kind of did.

2:57:10I don't want to say.

2:57:14I kind of bought into the idea that like it people were being too hard on it in my mind. I'm like, it can't be that bad. like it can't be and again it's not i don't want to say bad because there's nothing it's just i don't know and i was i was trying to articulate this to micah too is like games can even be boring and good i know that's a weird thing to say too but like i've been bored like um the example i use for micah was i think civilization is kind of boring sometimes you're waiting you're going through these turns there are these turns that are really important and then there's turns where you just things are happening and you're like all right like got away for the next thing got away for the next declaration or some fucking barbarian ship and it's a little bit trite to get through all this stuff but then you get to the real exciting part again there's always something mooring you or something to do just as an example and i always use gone home as the example of games that don't have to be fun but can be impactful and interesting this game just it's just i don't know man i don't know i don't know allegheny hogs got me straighter than Hormuz wrote in and said, hey, sacred gents.

2:58:21Reports are saying that Starfield sold just 140 ,000 copies on PS5 in the first week. Assuming these numbers are close to accurate, how do you feel about this performance? I think Bethesda were hoping that the narrative around Starfield would change with PS5, but clearly they should have tried to turn the narrative sooner so PS5 owners actually cared in the first place. That's the problem. And we're going to talk about it later about Xbox's, you know, this idea that Xbox might go back to exclusivity, which I don't think it's gonna happen but it could it's like yeah you you the downside to this is that you gave it so much time you gave it it's the same reason why forza horizon 5 did well is the same exact reason why starfield didn't because there was these years of percolation about how good that game was and there are years fewer years but years of percolation about this game where it's like this game kind of right it's kind of rough but especially by the game studio standard so So in a way, they're kind of lucky that they extracted that much.

2:59:14And it's like we were making fun of Todd Howard when he was like, if you didn't like the game now, then you're not going to like the game now, which I thought was like one of the great quotes, not verbatim what he said, but basically the idea. And it's like, yeah, they were right. So I don't know if those numbers are accurate or not. They come from a linea. I generally trust their numbers, but they aren't rock solid. I'm sure they're wrong about some things. But if it's in the low hundreds of thousands, which it seems like it is, it's like, I guess that's successful. I thought it would have been a little higher than that just because anecdotally, it seems like a lot of people on my list are playing it.

2:59:44Oh, interesting. But that's meaningless data really at the end of the day. So, yeah, I'm not super surprised by its softness. I think, yeah, you give you gave the game almost three years to circulate about how bad it was. So. I mean, the funny thing is, is and this is true, and I think a Reese from Alinea said this is that if Starfield came out on PS5 at the same time, it would have sold probably millions copies. yeah so that's the funny thing you know is and that according to him it's only now past 300 million dollars in lifetime sales which is pretty bad for a bethesda game studios game he was saying they made that much money in a month when skyrim came out so yeah i mean that's a big a big difference so yeah that's what i've been messing around with i'm not gonna give up on i'm not giving up starfield yet but i'm getting close dude and it it does seem like it is filtering people like if you just look at the trophies it's like yeah a lot of people are not getting far probably because it's fucking boring it's boring me to dears All right.

3:00:53That's all we have for what we're playing. Let's get into six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas from the audience as we wrap things up. We always like to wrap things up by hearing from you over on Patreon.com slash Last Day Media. You've heard your inquiries throughout the show so far. We put up our thread each Wednesday for$2 and up Patreon subscribers, and you can put your inquiries in there. Here are six more that I thought were interesting to discuss. Crafton Picard wrote in. a few people wrote in about this subject and so i thought it would be interesting to talk about i was a little surprised to hear this but i wanted to give it an airing nonetheless says hey cdc i just wanted to stand up for capitalism after last week's long-winded rants oh yeah it needs defense i don't understand why everyone is claiming capitalism is a failed system after a few triple a studios go under restructure and lay off some people i understand having sympathy for people losing their jobs but if there is one thing that capitalism is about it's change Government controls and central planning only make things worse.

3:01:49Let's not forget that half the reason for the console price increases are due to tariffs and inflation, which are entirely caused by government intervention in the economy. The market has spoken with these AAA studios. People don't want to pay for this over-budget slop. Studios don't need to employ thousands of people to make a bunch of novel assets for generic open-world games or first-person live service shooters. Are any of you wanting for games? There are more amazing games than any of us can play, and they're coming out constantly. Nobody can keep up. There are plenty of studios that have figured out how to make games at a reasonable price.

3:02:18It's only really some creatively bankrupt Western publishers with bad business models that are eating shit right now. And to that, I say, good. Let the failing businesses fail. They don't need propping up. Gaming is changing. Everything is always changing. That's the beauty of capitalism. It's creative destruction. You have to embrace it and not lament the fact that things aren't the same as they used to be. Movies have changed. Music has changed. This isn't a failure of capitalism. It's a success. Anyway, I hope you're looking forward to Pragmata as much as I am. Let's all reward Capcom like true capitalists.

3:02:45and buy their game. Yeah, Chris, a few, this was the first one I came across. I thought it was the most eloquent. So I use this one, but a few people wrote in about the same thing saying like, oh, it's not, let's not, let's take it easy on capitalism. I want to be clear. I mean, if it's not clear, I am a capitalist. I think capitalism is a wonderful economic system. I'm simply stating that you have to mind the garden. Sometimes you can't let it get overgrown with weeds. You got to make sure it's getting appropriate sunlight and water because then it becomes a bastardized version of what you're looking for.

3:03:24We can reduce what's going on in games or anywhere else in the market for numbers on a spreadsheet and people kind of getting moved around and these people get laid off. 10 ,000 people get laid off, 5 ,000 people get laid off and all the rest. But you can't let a system like capitalism spit people out with impunity and expect that capitalism will survive regardless of how effective of a market or of an economic system it is. And so that's all I'm saying is like, you've got to mind the shop, like people are the cogs of these machines. and you can't be so flippant about it that it's not part of the equation of what you talk about and why things matter.

3:04:09There's no doubt that a lot of studios are dying because they're simply ineffective. They don't, they lack the requisite talent. They don't have the right product. All those things are true. And I, you say creative destruction. I used that exact term last week. That is what it is, but watch. Let's, let's not be flagrant about people's lives. About. the necessity of having people gainfully employed and what it means to not have them gainfully employed. That's all I mean. Capitalism obviously gives us video games. There would be no video game industry without capitalism. It's not a natural thing.

3:04:44It's not a mercantile fucking market where you're trading wheat for Japanese role-playing games. So I understand. I'm not one of those people, because I do think there's a real dissonance and a disconnect when people complain about capitalism in the games industry sometimes where it's like what are you talking about we're all here because of capitalism this is but got to control it chris you don't seem to

3:05:09Colin Moriarty:think that this deserved any sort of defense i wonder oh no i just think it's like uh if you're a real capitalist you would have you wouldn't have done this you wouldn't have defended it for free first off problem first first rule of the game really but i don't know like i just think um I just find a lot of it to be very, I don't know, like the whole like, oh, government versus corporations, like corporations are governments, like they're micro government, like their own, they're their own monolithic like systems with their with exorbitant pull over our actual government. So that's kind of the issue, right?

3:05:43Colin Moriarty:It's like, and this, by the way, extends beyond the games industry. And I think the games industry is like the least important part of all that. and I'm not even like saying that like certain systems shouldn't be profit motive motivated there's a lot of systems that should be and arguably games should be one of those but like also like I just I just don't think it's healthy to have all I'm really saying is that I don't think it's healthy to have a system that rewards cutting corners and you know squeezing as much as you can out of out of an individual like anything and then not really being beholden to the people who got you there in the first place that we've got your success i don't think it's healthy to have strangers with a lot of capital come in and be like we'll fucking invest in your company and not care about the product and then ruin it like i just i don't think it's a good incentive to have i i don't know i just think it's it's busted in a lot of ways and it's not to say that people can't be rich i think it's great that people can be rich and you know make a shit ton of money off of something that they love that's cool and i i would want that to continue to be the case it's just i don't know i don't like that my games are covered in fucking skins for twenty dollars and like i don't know it's just like it feels like they're just ringing everything out of these things and i just i preferred it when it was a little bit more holistic and when it was still capitalist but it was just a little bit more i don't know considered it consider it or like ethical.

3:07:13Colin Moriarty:I don't even want to say ethical because theoretically always unethical. Like there's, you know, there's always somebody being stepped on in some way, whichever form, but you got to pick your battles with that at a certain point. But like, it just felt to me that the games industry as I was growing up, yes, it's corporations. Yes, it's money motivated. Yes, it's, you know, you want to make a profit. But.

3:07:35Colin Moriarty:I just felt that they were a little bit more I don't know, like respectful of how you felt about their desire to get money out of you. Like they were like, hey, we want your money. That's obvious. So let's make something really great. And like that demands your money. Where you're excited to pay it. I remember being excited to pay money for games. You know what I mean? And there's a couple of games that I still am. But like it's significantly... died down for me where i'm just like i wonder what the catch 22 is for this oh yay a battle pass you know like oh yay um you know half the game has been cut out and it's going to be sold sold to me later or just like i don't know it's it's it's depressing and it is worse and it is a result of just kind of unchecked you know like this this uh insatiable appetite for more at the expense of you know the health of not only the player base and the people but like the the people who make the stuff that we like and so i don't know it's more complicated than that but you shouldn't charge you should charge for your for your services yeah you fucked up you fucked up dustin anything you want to have yeah so crapton picard uh i don't want to be too hard on you because you've written in many times always with good write-ins but and it's hard because i also as we've said many times do not remember entire conversations from previous previous episodes let alone anything that happens but i do feel like this is a little bit of an online moment where it's like we were very critical and because we didn't mention the positives which i believe you did colin it's like oh so you guys i need to defend this and it's like no no no like I think that basically everything that Captain Crafton Picard said is true.

3:09:33Colin Moriarty:And we add, you know, that his what he said, his defense can be true. And all the criticisms that we laid out are also true of capitalism. And I think thinking back on our conversation, at least from my point of view, my main criticism is the stock market. and how the constant fiduciary duty to make more and more and more and more money has oftentimes resulted in a lot of the problems that we're seeing, not just in video games, but in everything where it's like, oh, like, for example, someone like Chipotle, where it's like, oh, well, we need to be able to make more money. So let's start squeezing our customers a little bit.

3:10:19Colin Moriarty:let's start upping the price enough that they'll still buy you know because they like us uh and it's like oh well now we're going to lower the amount of food you get or in the case of video games that's chris was mentioning like more skins more monetization things like that where it's like yeah there is definitely something to be critical where it's like and this is a point that you always touch on colin is like why can't enough be enough at certain points and you do see that from privately owned companies often where it's like, yeah, everyone's happy. Everyone's made a lot of money. We don't need to make money for other people that are only, I mean, I guess financially involved, but passively involved in some way.

3:11:03Colin Moriarty:So I think I'm perfectly happy of what I remember to stand by all of our criticism from last week and also acknowledge what he said is, yeah, definitely true. I think I also agree I agree with what you said and I agree with a lot of what he said as well and I agree with a lot of what Chris was saying I think all these things can be true I think that the there are some just common things that you have not common there are obvious things that you have to consider when you're thinking about these issues and I think one of them is you have to have people to buy your goods. Right. Like the idea of capitalism is to have circular spending where things prop each other up.

3:11:52And it is true that both tariffs, which I support, and inflation, which no one supports, are both caused exclusively by governments. That's true. And that's one part of it. But you can't go in the other direction and go to this gilded age, 1880s, 1890s, like insane wealth disparity, no concern for anyone, no labor laws, no unionization, no nothing. I don't know what people think is going to happen to capitalism if people don't benefit from it on a per capita basis. the average person should be benefiting in material ways from capitalism or the system is going to be undermined. And that's what I'm talking about.

3:12:44So all the things you're saying are true, but I still think you need to have some sort of control. And yeah, what is enough? That is a question worth asking. I've said it a million times. I don't mean it to be a dickhead. I just, I could have extracted way more money out of this operation. Believe me, in a million different ways. But it's like, I don't want to live like that. Have covered with ads for the products that we cover, right? That we talk about. It's like, they're going to pay us so I can get more money. More money is great. I want more money. I just want to get it a different way. The thing that I think is a shame about the short-term public company thinking is that they have to feed the next quarterly statement or the next yearly annual fiscal statement.

3:13:36And they can't make mid and long term choices that would make them more money later. That's the major problem with a lot of these layoffs. On one hand, these companies have way too many people working for them. And I've often said that a lot of the tech companies. On the other hand, there's really no attention paid to like the longevity of a company when you have to hit these quarterly earnings. It's like kind of what's happening with Xbox. it's like, yeah, we have these margin stuff, but it's like, yeah, but you're in a different fight in the minute to minute thing. You have to do different things to survive here.

3:14:06And then there's a different long-term goal. You can put those together, but it's going to take planning and sacrifice. So I don't know. Maybe it's too humanistic to want those kinds of outcomes. And maybe it's me putting too much unspoken virtue into the market. But it is a system that has revolutionized the world. You have to be careful with it because the other solutions to capitalism are not good. And you want to know what doesn't exist in some of those systems? Video games or anything close to it, comrade. So you want to be going to.

3:14:46Colin Moriarty:Yeah, we're going to we're we're we're capitalizing ourselves into that situation right now, man. That's that's the issue. It feels that way. At what point do you not go like. well we can't have a fucking 50 unemployment right you know because that at some point that is going to happen like there will be like just machines and ai doing fucking the majority of things maybe not in our lifetime potentially maybe though so i don't know what do you do in that situation like how how ethical is it to just like let 50 you know what i mean like you have to address those situations that's that you have to you have to cut those off at the root before they happen before that's necessary if you want to keep things going and if if you don't then well everything's fucked well that's why i think it's it's worth pruning now as opposed to dealing with the solutions later because the solution to really high interest or the really high unemployment rates is universal basic income but we've learned in the in but we were talking about the inflation from from covid that was caused by a form of universal basic income so you would think that like people would be like oh like that's gonna be bad news for the dollar we should probably figure it out now but no one cares about anything beyond what they can see in front of their own faces and i don't know i feel like i'm i feel almost stupid sometimes that like i didn't shouldn't extract even way more value because i'm like well fuck it no one else gives a shit yeah that's kind of what i'm thinking but part of me is like i don't still feel like you can make individual change or at least try to do things the right way and let the cards fall where they may i guess

3:16:27yeah leon scoliosis kennedy wrote in i don't know why that why that name says hey sacred lads perhaps not newsworthy but something that may be of interest to you as predicted we are beginning to see the start of games being marketed as ai free last week the devs behind phantom blade zero put out a tweet declaring that the game is in the final stages of development. Following this, they made clear their stance of the use of AI saying, quote, every single piece of content in our game has been crafted by the hands of real artists. We will not use AI visual tech that could alter our artists' original creative intent, end quote.

3:16:59While one might split hairs with the statement with the phrasing visual tech, possibly obscuring other ways AI might be involved in development, I think it's a step in the right direction. AI might be here to stay, but it's promising to hear developers swear it off. What do you gents think? As always, take care and have a lovely day. I bring this up for one reason. We're all tired of talking about AI, so we're not going to get, we don't have to get deep into the AI conversation. I wanted to bring one thing up, though, about the use of AI. And I was thinking about this, and this is a totally honest thing.

3:17:25We were talking about this at Lillimo, and I think I had brought up that we have a no AI policy as far as our art and all the visual stuff, the audio, all the rest. And really, that means for anything, the writing, none of that. But I was thinking about it where I was like, but as I was searching Google as I was writing the story, Gemini told me a lot of stuff and pointed me towards a lot of things. I didn't, I didn't like verbatim copy any of the stuff, but like one of the things I asked was like, give me a list of like 20 or like, what are the most popular? What were the most popular names of men in the Holy Roman empire in the 17th century?

3:18:03And then it gives you a bunch of links, but it also gives you the list. Right. And I was like, is that using ai like am i am i going against our own our own mantra of not using ai but i'm not trying to use it and my the end result of what i'm doing is the writing sure and the writing is

3:18:25Colin Moriarty:not ai at all i i think the moral obligation is generative ai whole wholesale like i think that's the issue is like you're asking a machine to create something you're taking credit for it and then putting it in the game i don't think using ai as a search engine or like basically siri qualifies in the same yeah i think you're probably right because that was just where my mind was where i was like i wonder if it's disingenuous to say and then that's what i was thinking of i'm like should we have a declaration of no generative ai because ai is kind of implementing itself into our own workflow in terms of like well if i'm using google i'm googling the same exact way as always i'm just not clicking on as much as i used to which is the entire idea of this gemini push but um right yeah it was just something i was thinking of to be to be fair i was like well yeah i mean if you didn't verify if you were if you just took its if you just took its word for you know what i mean just like oh i i guess sally is a medieval name and you didn't you know what I mean you didn't like look further into it I guess you could make kind of an argument that you're relying too heavily on AI but even that still wouldn't be generative AI I don't give a shit like there's so many AI there's so many AI tools that people use all the time that have never bothered me like procedural generation in open world games like Morrowind and Oblivion were made with like you know with that model where they procedurally generated the world and then they carved their own spaces into it.

3:20:04Colin Moriarty:Which I think is fine. There's really no issue there. The issue really is ultimately like, oh, we're we're siphoning the collective art of millions of people against their consent, by the way. To build a unique asset, not by hand but just a prompt. putting it in the game and then crediting myself as like a as like a 3d modeler or something you know what i mean like that's that's the contempt i think i don't think anybody gives a shit if you googled something and jim and i told you something and you verified it yeah one of the one of the things that i find so useful about because i i again i i have chat gpt on my phone but i really don't use it for my workflow i just ask it weird shit and then when i am researching or writing on my computer i use google and so jim and i just comes up often one of the cool things that i think both of them do is they give you the links to everything that like so you can just go verify it's like oh here's a record of names from the holy roman empire that we're sourcing and then you can go and kind of verify so it's cool but yeah i just wanted to throw that out there it's kind of like if anyone's considered that and like what it means is a no ai declaration if it really like should be gen ai which i think is it you're right and that but then if you differentiate and kind of and then people like well why are you so what are you doing with ai that you don't want to saying it's like i don't think i'm doing anything with it but ai is it's what i was saying last year when i when i discovered it with uh with game guides where i was like it's kind of the really elite search engine you know like you can't deny that it's amazing for that perspective it it used to be it used to be better um i found now that it's it just gives me like a lot of just wrong shit and it's just like all right well well i haven't tried it in like a couple months because i just i remember i i googled something through chat gpt and then it like it told me something that i knew for a fact it was just not true and i was like oh well i'm i'm kind of done with with this at this point you can't even do the one thing i needed you to do which was be a better search engine than than google would be but yeah i don't know i i think um i mean there's an argument to be made like ai as and i know people are sick of me saying this but like ai as as we're calling it is not true ai anyway it's not really what we imagine in our minds is like sci-fi AI and I know some people are like they're working on it I'm working on it but we're not working on I'm trying to build AI leave me alone but I I just feel there's an argument to be made that there's some level of like dumb like incredibly trivial AI involved in pretty much everything that we do anyway like if we're if we're typing out a thing and then like the red underline thing in Microsoft Word tells you you've misspelled a thing wrong that's not AI in a traditional sense but it is an automated program telling like guiding your direction and like correcting you it's like hey you you fucked up here you should change this you know what i mean that's a computer essentially like influencing your workflow it's like well i meant to misspell it and you can actually like choose to ignore it right you know what i mean which which so i don't know i don't get too hung up on like these minor tools the issue is like really like the plagiarism of um of just stealing models and stealing art styles to the point where like it's just you could tell when something's ai now because it's it's such a mix of every art style that exists that it's become this like trite really obvious to spot it's got that piss filter over it for some reason always very odd i wonder why that like where that comes from but i think that's where most contention is and where most contention should be really but yeah i agree chris that we need to we need to have more terms of what kind of ai and it exists but people just don't use them i think you saying generative i is a really good point it's reminded me because i was thinking like i bet you pretty much every triple a game uses ai to some degree if we're using the broad term AI it made me think of when Maddie interviewed Ken Levine Maddie asked him about AI and he basically I was looking over some of the transcript and he was saying how he wasn't really that impressed with it in terms of most game development things but he mentions that when they're training people they're using AI as like a data repository and so it it holds all of the stories information and all of the different threads that can go on because of its crazy building block story structure.

3:24:42Colin Moriarty:Right. And he said we even use it for training people when they come on board because it's interestingly like we have a database of our entire story. So if a new writer comes on and they're working on a script and they're like, hey, what is what is this? Why is Tom asking hope about this? And you can ask our story database and we'll give you an answer. Very interesting. Yeah. So could you use the term and say, well, Judas is using AI for development? It's like, well, yes, technically, along with, as I said earlier, pretty much every other AAA game and probably smaller games, too. But we have to be clear on what kind of AI, how is it being used as a tool?

3:25:24Colin Moriarty:Because it's very important. And why we we're still figuring out the vocabulary of all these things because it's so new. Yeah. it's also not accurate to what we even in the public consciousness have assumed to be AI you know like when we think of AI we think of like a truly simulated human consciousness that's like holy like from all the sci-fi that we've you know ingested over time and we're not even fucking close to that I know some people are like they're building it in secret and it's there it's real it's like okay alright brother but what we're dealing with on a day to day is not that and it's not even anywhere close to that so yeah that's uh that should be the the main focal point if we build them if we build a real like synthetic human consciousness that's fucking crazy cool it's ethically dubious but like it's dangerous i'm interested yeah i mean but that is what we're i mean presumably that's where the science wants to go um maybe i'm just too ingrained in sci-fi right now but i think it'd be interesting as fuck i'd be that's the thing that's so frustrating is like i would actually be genuinely interested to see what kind of art an actual ai makes you know what i mean like it like it just a completely like what a computer that thinks it's a person like what art would it make i would be genuinely curious to see that if it's just a database being like this is from fucking bloodborne like i don't give a shit yeah something that learns like that like yeah like can be nurtured right yeah that would be very interesting it is fascinating with uh what do they call it a biogenesis where it's like the creation of life we don't know how to do it that might be the only way to do it is through silicon and stuff it's fascinating ZW wrote in and said CDC with the new Super Smash Brothers and we visit this every so often but I want to talk about it now with a new Super Smash Brothers release all but guaranteed in the next few years what do you think that the likelihood is that Playstation would allow their characters to appear in the game if it does happen which three characters make the most sense to represent Playstation thanks Dustin we have zero zero zero percent chance I was gonna say we have a little bit of movement right the gate like since we've discussed this last I mean some game Nintendo IP has gone or some I'm sorry some Sony IP has gone to switch like Patapon and Freedom Wars Horizon Sony Pictures is working with Nintendo on the Zelda movie there seems to be a little softening between the companies I mean that's I think that's a somewhat substantial thing these companies don't like or didn't like each other at all and I still think it's Sony keeping them out not Nintendo so you said but you say zero I'll okay I'll change it to one one percent it's not completely impossible but I don't know I just don't really I don't see it happening I don't see that Sony want I'm sure they're fine as you mentioned with certain games coming out horizon the lego horizon but i don't know if they want their characters appearing in a nintendo game i think that might be a bridge too far yeah it's weird because it's like why not yeah i don't know why wouldn't you want to be there yeah go ahead well i just think the framing is a little bit funny it's like do you think like what's the likelihood that playstation would allow their characters to appear in smash brothers as if they're as if nintendo's like please can we get deacon saint job yeah like like let's be real like if anyone is to benefit from it it would it would be sony to have like a kratos appear in super smash brothers that's like that's huge and nintendo's perfectly fine not doing that they don't i doubt they give a shit really so like the framing is a little bit funny but and that's not to say that i don't think there are ip that are worthy of it i would i always viewed um smash brothers as as kind of this thing that should evolve into a kind of a celebration of the broader industry i know that's not nintendo's responsibility responsibility or motivation but does feel that way i mean like you have you have banjo in there you have like solid snake in there the lines are kind of blurred already um and so it would be cool to see like it would be dope as fuck to see kratos and like master chief and in and mario fighting on in a real super smash for this game that'd be really it'd be really exciting but um that's ultimately up to nintendo and i just don't think they're that i'm sure i'm sure sony and microsoft would be chomping at the bit to do that you might be onto something chris a little bit that it also might be that i don't know if nintendo doesn't want it you have to imagine that microsoft so there are microsoft characters technically in smash brothers with uh minecraft steve minecraft and banjo and banjo but we don't have master chief or marcus phoenix or doom guy or something which i mean those may or may not for work for various reasons i don't think doom guy will ever be in smash no i don't think that would fit dude if he like chainsawed a pikmin in half captain olimar and it's and that part that part is in is rendered in unreal engine 5 yeah and only that i'm sure microsoft would love that but i think nintendo wanted specifically the games that had you know presence on their platform with Minecraft and Banjo from many years ago, of course.

3:31:18But I guess the other...

3:31:20Colin Moriarty:Okay, so the other part of this question is who would be the three characters? From Sony? Ratchet and Clank. John Hunter from Bloodborne. That'd be cool. John Bloodborne. John Bloodborne. It would have to be Ratchet. Ratchet and Clank. You could even argue Jack and Daxter, although it's not a relevant IP anymore. They fit with the vibe of Nintendo. um sly cooper would be cool sly those are the obvious ones because they're the most yeah like i wonder if that was it because you had said kratos dustin which i think is interesting i've always said drake i think would be hysterical in it i wonder like what direct and sack boy obviously like i wonder and even astrobot and stuff like i wonder what yeah where if they even had one choice because it wouldn't be three it would be one to start it'd be like who would it be kratos might be the best one to do but i think that's kind of lame like it would be cool to do one of the more cartoony ones not that that everything like obviously the fire emblem characters and snake and other it's cloud and the belmonts and everything like these are not cartoony characters but they fit uh i think sackboy would be funny but it's kind of obscure at this point you'd really have to use it for the pop like it has to be something good i don't know ratchet and clank might be the best have an ice climber kind of approach or something i think um Well, this has kind of gone out the window, but I think they've who's the the guy who's the what?

3:32:47Colin Moriarty:The main Smash Brothers creator. What's his name? Sakurai? Sakurai. Yeah, Sakurai. I think he said before that it's very important when they're choosing a character, they have to envision what the moveset is, you know? So like. What does Sackboy do? Yeah. Other than jump. Yeah. Kratos has a lot of options. A lot of options or even Astro Bot. It's like he doesn't I guess he has different abilities because he like picks up the different suits and stuff when you're playing. So maybe he would have a little bit. I think Drake would be cool too if they could lean into the guns, you know, like have him have all the different guns, which I think would be cool.

3:33:23Snake kind of does that. But it wouldn't really fit. I just think that that would be really funny if they were able to do like a real Nathan Drake.

3:33:31Colin Moriarty:I charted for Nathan Drake. Yeah. Most inappropriate characters. Heavy rain guy. oh yeah um yeah he he he james people i remember i remember when we at uh at ign i've said this before like it was so fun to cover playstation all-stars because when it was still called title fight because we would just make up all these these uh fake i would work with the art team and they would make like a fake roster picture and we would put ethan mars in there like there would be like really cool shit that would be obscure and wouldn't like fat princess would be dope like there are characters where it's like if in a perfect world you even had 10 selections you could really get into the nitty-gritty and certainly get into like fat princess would be awesome and and others but yeah i don't i don't know it would have to be something like kratos i would imagine maybe aloy abby with the golf club yeah that would be if they had if they had a sense of humor which they don't know uh that would that would be that would be fun ultimate smash ability dude it's great yeah it's the full seed yeah i don't think it's a zero percent chance anymore like i think i i i really feel like it could happen and i think that would be sick and i it's what i said like i think nintendo would allow it that's what's funny to what chris was saying is like i don't think nintendo's begging i don't think they give a fuck but i think if the two sides came together and sony was like could we get like you know i think nintendo would allow it i really think it's sony that's being like because like why wouldn't they allow it they have all this xbox shit in there now i know that the relationship between the companies are different but their fan base like the nintendo fan base is much more associated with playstation than it is with xbox this is the japanese nature of the companies uh a lot of the old ip and the old schoolness of it it'll be really really fascinating for that is crash in the game no no that's the thing that i wonder that's the thing where it's just like if it was going to be any Sony IP I feel like it would be crash and then and then Xbox could just do it for them you know right yeah I and Spyro I don't know Spyro would be interesting yeah like there's so many characters that really belong in that game that aren't and so many characters that are in that game then I'm like why'd you waste the spot for that why are there seven fucking fire him the fire and shit gets me so annoyed like it really I know it's a joke but like it annoyed me when there was like when there was like three of them I was like whoa what what is it with these wasted rosters spots and now it's like it sucks especially because they all played relatively like it's just like it's a guy it's another guy with a sword you know what i mean it's a stick oh the fucking 17th stick man great like it's just yeah it's the opportunity cost in my view was just like so high and like three was like fine because you had you had mario luigi and like you had like a bunch of mario which which mario should get quite a lot of shine but three was fine four was you're pushing it five was what are you doing six was fucking egregious and and it just keeps getting worse from there and i'm just like bro you you could have had crash you could have had all sorts of kind of all sorts of like really hype like really incredible like placements instead you just got like marth number five yeah it's it's awesome yeah great great choice if they could keep the balance because obviously the thing about smash is that it it's it's expertly balanced i know that there are better characters than others but like the game is fairly playable it's not like marvel versus capcom 2 where like there are characters in that game that just really aren't like no one would play as unless it was like a joke or like you wanted to you know like like surf bot right exactly or roll or like characters like that where it's like there's no purpose of playing with these characters if they can keep the balance well it's like why wouldn't you could theoretically over the years get hundreds of people in smash brothers i mean that would be what would be kind of cool as if they were leaning into that we always talk about the meta of metas with Fortnite, but if they leaned into the meta of fighting games, because isn't Ryu in Smash Brothers?

3:37:30I'm pretty sure he's in Ultimate. I remember that being true. It's been a while since I played Ultimate, though. So I just think it's a cool idea, and I'm always covetous of the Smash Brothers idea because I think it's a really neat thing. Sony needs to figure out a way to celebrate itself. Astro Bot is that, but I still think it's not great at it's a great game. It's not great at celebrating itself. remember what i was saying like you really need to know yeah shit you're seeing in astrobot it's a very if you know you know kind of game all right no one can stop mr domino wrote in and said hey gents this one is mostly for colin but anyone can chime in several weeks ago you mentioned that the ps2 was your least favorite playstation console as someone who feels similarly why do you think that is for me a big issue is that many of its best games are best experienced elsewhere trilogies like sly and jack got noticeably worse after their first entries and with all three platforms having solid exclusives that generation i take the xbox over the other two if someone put a gun to my head what say you thanks for all the laughs but let the chicken drive once in a while hey thank you for writing in no one can stop mr domino i think i've identified why i feel this way and you you guys are going to feel differently about it and a lot of people love the playstation 2 and i think the playstation 2 is awesome i had the playstation 2 the day it launched i had a shit ton of games on it i played the shit out of it uh i loved it but i think it's the one generation where there were just a lot of options and yeah the options were reasonable like they were good if you think about the nes era it was like the nes or the master system which had some good games but no volume of them or like turbo graphics and shit like that like so the nes was the clear winner and the snes and genesis generation a lot of people would say that they're both kind of equivalent i disagree the cool thing is is that they have their own games and there was a reason to own both of them i didn't have enough money at the time to do that I didn't own a Genesis until later.

3:39:19And then the PS1 era, I didn't own a Saturn. And the N64 and the PS1 were differentiated enough from each other where they felt very complimentary. And the game releases were seldom enough where you could really keep up with both of them. I think by the time you got to Dreamcast and then PS2 and then the next year, Xbox and GameCube. So Dreamcast 99, PS2 2000, and then 2001 for the other two. I just feel like there was so much crossover there and so much interesting stuff going on there and it might be unique for me because that's when I actually had money my own money for the first time because I had a job I could afford all the consoles I can afford the games I spent all my money on games I had nothing I had no money ever because I would just buy games and I just felt like the GameCube was the more elite console with its catalog of games there were great games on PS2 and then I think the Xbox when I finally got one in 2003 felt so advanced that it It brought its own thing and brought me into playing games that I still I don't play to this day, but like playing online and doing a lot of stuff, which the Dreamcast did to a degree to with sports games, especially.

3:40:22So I just think the PS2 was kind of uniquely for me, uniquely crowded by other things where you could have a totally great experience just on PS2 that generation. But I feel like a lot of shit was happening off platform. And I don't think there's really a lot of generations like that. 360 was probably the closest it ever got to that. Against PlayStation three, but so that's kind of how I think about it in my mind. but I don't know I really don't know it's just the way I feel and I've always kind of felt that way the PS2 was very exciting for that one year and really before the other stuff came out or whatever and really once the Dreamcast got canceled then it kind of felt like a lot more powerful machine like it finally killed the Dreamcast and everyone was anticipating that but that's where I'm at so that's how I answer it I don't know if you guys have anything you want to

3:41:07Colin Moriarty:say but yeah I think I agree and in some ways like the PS I I love the PS2 but it's it's definitely it was of the machines it felt like it was of the machines that Sony made at that time so like you figure like PS1 PS2 PS3 and even early PS4 like the PS2 was the first time or like the only time that I felt like I guess PS1 through 3 I guess is more accurate but it was the only time that i felt like it was kind of just it was doing the least like it had the dvd player in it so that was cool but that wasn't really i didn't really give a shit about that like i had a lot of cool games too but like the xbox was doing this online thing it had the hard drive you could do a lot with it the dreamcast had this own like weird identity to it the gamecube had its own like it was portable it had the handle like if the ps2 felt more like a box that you just kind of played games on and everything else felt like it had a little bit more intrigue from from my perspective um but everything that generation was awesome really like that was like a really great time yeah it was awesome everything everything was worth having um everything had something worth playing on it everything was doing like its own interesting thing you could argue that's also true of like the what is it the uh ps3 360 and we like they were all doing very very different things but yeah there was just so much like i wanted every machine back then like i wanted a dreamcast i wanted an xbox i wanted a ps2 and i wanted a gamecube i ended up just getting ps2 and xbox i missed out on the gamecube missed out completely on the dreamcast i think i played at a cousin's house like a couple times i remember playing time crisis i was so envious of that thing like the controller with the screen in it yeah vmu was so weird man an eclectic time yeah the Dreamcast was the Dreamcast was I was so excited about it because it was so affordable and and but it was just too easy to pirate on anyway yeah Sam Ward wrote in said hey CDC there was a report from late last week about the remaster or broken sword to beating its Kickstarter goal within 15 minutes after reading this it got me wondering if there's still a market out there for these point-and-click adventure games and if so would any of you ever consider giving them a go thank you for everything you do and for making my work week a lot easier to get through with your content so broken sword is an old series by revolution software that first came out in 1996 the first two were on playstation the third one was on ps2 and then i think the fifth one was on ps4 and vita the fourth one was on pc only but this is a fairly well-known um and well-liked point-and-click adventure game from that era and i remember i never played them but i remember them because they were covered in PlayStation Magazine pretty heavily.

3:43:53The Kickstarter that he's referring to is for... So Broken Sword, the first Broken Sword is called The Shadow of the Templars, and they re-released that game, I think, like remastered it. And then that came out in 96, and the remaster was more recent. And then Broken Sword 2, The Smoking Mirror, came out the next year in 97, and that's the remaster for this that they got, and I think they got like half a million dollars for it on Kickstarter, which is awesome.

3:44:15I'm curious what you guys think of this, because I do like adventure gaming to a degree. It was loosely introduced to me in the NES era because we got some like bootleg versions of like a Maniac Mansion and shit. But it wasn't until I played Phoenix Wright probably that I really sat down and truly played what I would consider an adventure game. And there are games like Danganronpa and Professor Layton, which is coming to PlayStation for the first time later this year, which is amazing. I was so excited to see that because I love Professor Layton. That's more of a puzzle game, but an adventure game too.

3:44:52But I think a lot of it is about if you came up on PC or not. And though these games were available and playable on console, point and click adventure games are really home on PC. And so I'm not really into them. I played, I've talked about it in the past, how I played in high school and computer classes. My friends would always have like Police Quest, King's Quest, that kind of shit space was space quest one of them something like that um and uh the ones where you'd like type in words like go left and then open locker and shit like that no i don't really like it it's not for me but i i appreciate that people do dustin are you a point and click guy

3:45:32Colin Moriarty:do you like any of that kind of stuff i did when i was a kid uh but specifically kids pc titles uh there's a company called humongous entertainment and uh they released like the pajama sam series freddy fish uh spy fox putt putt i fucking love these games and uh my parents it was great because i think they were really affordable at the time as well like you could pick them up for i don't know 10 or 20 or something and so and they were not like educational games but definitely you know geared for kids and i loved dude i fucking loved all of these games and as an adult like when i've tried to play a point and click adventure game i really can't get into it anymore the last one i tried to play was broken age uh the oh yeah that's uh yeah tim schafer yeah with uh elijah wood i believe in it and it was cool it's cute art style is great but I was just kind of so it's not really for me anymore I've always been curious about a game like Monkey Island or something like that but uh just not my thing but it's very nostalgic where are you Chris uh I'm in Los Angeles but I think I think these are like I don't know I'm kind of where Dustin is like I remember playing a lot of them when I was a kid to the point where like I really can't even remember how many like it was a lot though it was everything that Dustin was talking about i played like really obscure shit too like i remember a game uh called like darby the dragon that i played a lot it was like a a kid's point and click game um i think i think i remember although i don't think this is a point and click game there was a there was a game called i think i brought it up maybe in uh the jeopardy the lenny loose jocks i don't know if that was yeah i'm not i don't remember if that was point and click though i think it was like kind of because you I remember moving with the I don't remember exactly but I feel like it was that kind of a game so I played a lot of these things and I really loved them but similar to Dustin like it was it's like when I've tried to revisit that genre it's I'm kind of left with um it's not that I don't think they're good it's just that like I'm looking for different things out of my games now and I think I think they're actually a very good like introductory genre it's going to get people into like interacting with a screen but like it's it's low pressure it's not like combat it's not like reflex dependent but like i really get a lot of joy out of reflex dependent stuff i get a lot of joy out of like doing something in real time and and like watching my actions have immediate consequences and being able to like chain stuff off of that and so it's the same reason why a lot of turn-based stuff doesn't necessarily work with me that well either anymore uh compared to when i was a kid and i was playing like command and conquer and um some early like turn-based stuff um i'm just more i i look for different things now and i appreciate them i'm glad they're still coming out and i'm glad that they still have like their own kind of like core um hardcore audience like supporting it i think it's dope but i think i had the same experience with as uh as dustin with broken age as well where like i remember playing it and i was like i like this but i don't I'm not driven to keep going you know I'm not getting what I want out of a video game from this but more power to the people who like it though little Collins big hole wrote in final inquiry says hey CDC hope all is well with recent reports from friend of the show Jez Corden stating that Microsoft oh can we get some can we get some punctuation hey CDC hope all is well this is all one sentence by the way hey cdc whole ball as well with recent reports that's one sentence with recent reports from friend of the show jez corden stating that microsoft is having in-depth conversations about bringing back exclusivity how likely is it that that could actually happen as papa colin says once the genie is out of the bottle it's up it's out but considering all the money microsoft has could they pull the trigger on this i'll hang up the phone and get some water because these pretzels are making me thirsty thank you for writing in little clowns big hole.

3:49:51This is the news of the industry. The last week is reporting from multiple sources, including Jez. I think maybe The Verge had something or something saying that these conversations are happening behind the scenes. I'm sure they are happening behind the scenes. I wonder what the conversations are and what the outcome will be. I think that's what we're all curious about, but seems impossible to imagine. I don't want to say impossible. Seems unlikely to imagine that they're going to go back on this. I don't know what they really have to gain from it. especially if they're going forward with a PC as their next console, doesn't really seem to make any sense.

3:50:23It is true that some of their releases are doing softly on PlayStation, comparable to some of the others. So we had big successes like Forza Horizon 5 and Sea of Thieves. Grounded did really well. To a lesser extent, Doom. But on the other hand, we've had games that come and go. I think South of Midnight, according to Linnea, sold maybe 20 ,000 copies, which is not a huge surprise. We were talking about it earlier. they have starfield between 150 and 200 might not be worth the squeeze for some of those smaller numbers and yet it just seems like this is the die is kind of cast and i don't know why they would change since i don't think there's any win condition for them to do so dustin where are you

3:51:04Colin Moriarty:i think the only thing you may get is some launch timed exclusives for the next console but they will not be advertised as such and i think it could be a big pop for that audience and really draw people to that launch depending on what the game is and then you'll see it come to either playstation 5 or playstation 6 i don't know six months to a year later yeah i think that that that i could maybe see happening just to try to push that console but it won't be permanent this is a problem though because this is what we were talking about with starfield is if you if you space it out too much you hurt yourself even more and maybe you might might not want to do that i guess if you have confidence it's what we were saying it could benefit you with like it did with forza horizon if you're confident games are good like fable well we know fables coming day and day that's a bad example i guess gears is probably the next one that could maybe not come to playstation gears getting its own showcase right yeah i think that's soon and gears is gears one didn't do great on playstation not a huge surprise i mean it's old i don't think they did really much to promote it it's also not the iconic gears game as far as having cord and all the other things i think two or three would be the ones that people would really want to get into but i expected that it would have done better i just think they're kind of in between a rock and a hard place they it's going to be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle as he was saying and i just don't know i don't know i would love to know what they're thinking because i i i would think if that was those studios i'd want to proliferate our games they've kind of been locked away but i feel that way probably about all exclusive studios in a way even sony's so any thoughts you want to share here chris i don't know man i think it's i think you've the issue the real issue here is that if they choose to undo this right they're basically saying like we've got to eat the cost of like 300 million dollar development for you know for a lot of these games bare minimum and then these and then we're going to lock them down to a console going forward after we've already had so much mixed messaging to the point where like let's say best case scenario you actually you go through with this and uh it kind of works out um like you get a lot of interest in your machine why should the customer base even believe that that will remain the case if you've already been so wishy-washy like oh it's exclusive and then it's not and it's a time exclusive and then it's oh but this time it's for real guys it's only going to be on this machine come by our machine and then you find that it's going to come to place you know what i mean like it's they've they've spent a lot of their what i would argue is even just base level trust you know like on this pivot to the point where like i i don't know like i if they committed to it and they were okay with like eating the cost of like having a limited you know audience like maybe they could re-establish xbox as like a as like a domineering platform again like they have the ip to do it um it just it's just a matter of whether or not they're willing to eat all that development cost for to build that back up again after they've spent so much time tearing it down and then what do you do with game pass like we're a lot of the situation is because of game pass so like are you cancel that and if so that's another promise that you've just gone back on i i just it's it's a really kind of a no-win situation really like the only the only the like the clearest most safe path forward for them is to just be a huge multi-platform publisher and make a shit ton of money on every platform as possible get your games out day and date so if if something fails it doesn't even have a chance to percolate negatively and like like we were talking about earlier starfield like if starfield launched day one on ps5 like it would have made a shit ton of money i think um like way way way oh my god yeah would have killed if they didn't space so yeah because there's a lot of anticipation for it and at the time people expected like something huge so like i i yeah i don't know i guess i'm kind of going in different directions with it but that's kind of generally how i feel about it i just I don't know how you I don't want to say it's impossible to do it it's just a matter of like whether or not they're committed to actually doing it and whether or not the audience has the trust that they're even going to follow through on on that commitment if they so choose to make it which I just I'm not convinced as somebody who grew up an Xbox guy I loved the original Xbox the 360 is probably my favorite console probably ever I was an early Xbox one adopter i like that platform a lot and still do but i i have no faith in that company to make their machine something that is worthy to invest in over something else that will ultimately have everything that experience has to offer and the stuff that it doesn't so I don't know.

3:56:10Colin Moriarty:Xbox has a cool history and I'll always remember it and I'll always love it. But. I don't. I don't need a new one if you're not going to make your shit exclusive and you also can't. So. Yeah, I think I think the Activision stuff is always going to be multi-platform. I think that Bethesda stuff will obviously always be multi-platform as well, beginning with Indie. And I kind of I remember saying this at the time, long before any Xbox games started coming out to PlayStation. I remember Blade. I was like, I bet you that comes to PlayStation. And we'll probably see more of that in the coming couple of years.

3:56:46But it's interesting, like the games they've already announced, should they like backtrack on them? I don't think they will, obviously. But it's like you already said Halo's coming, Forza Horizon 6 and Fable. That's at this point, like why stop? Yeah, it's a would be a weird and arbitrary place to stop. I don't think they will, but we'll see what happens. And I've been very clear. I want them to. I think it would. It's going to be a great episode of SideQuest, so do it. either way i win and on that note it's time to end episode 407 of sacred symbols of playstation podcast let's go around the horn say goodbye to everyone as we often do chris goodbye to you be

3:57:20Colin Moriarty:well enjoy the rest of your day any plans no just editing and um and chores probably i should do i should do some laundry you know like there's like you know sometimes you got like quilts and stuff and it's just like this is a whole like this has to go in by itself because it's so big and it's just like i always put it off to the last fucking minute so i might just go ahead and do that stuff but low-key day i think cool fair enough mouse pi oh yeah me too you're gonna be all over that later dustin goodbye to you be well anything you want to say before we go nothing i really want to say uh i will be playing marathon this weekend and losing everything at the lose everything factory pragmata of course chris i'll see you tomorrow for our oh yeah our group mailbag never done well i think calling you and i have done mailbags together maybe yeah i think so this is something new we've never done a group mailbag like this so uh let us know what you if you're over on Patreon when that releases.

3:58:28Colin Moriarty:And yeah, hope everyone has a great weekend or a great week if you're listening on Monday. Right, right. Of course. Yeah, I got it. I'm going to wait. I mean, it's five o 'clock here. A little after five. I'm going to wait till like 715 and I'm going to mow the lawn. I got to mow the lawn. It's just so fucking hot. I got to like let it let it die down a little bit. So in the meantime, I'll get some work done. Maybe I'll work out too. I don't really know. And then yeah, ease into the weekend. I have a lot of shit to do with St. Slayer this weekend, but it'll be worth it. And the game comes out Monday.

3:58:58So I hope you guys go check it out when it does. Have a great weekend. Like Dustin said, if you're listening early, if you're not, have a good week. Patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access. Last day media store for merch. We'll see you next time. Until then. Goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Collins Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show was conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer, Dustin Furman.

3:59:35All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

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