#408 | The Thin Line Between Entertainment and War

35:59I hope this gives you all some confidence in knowing that it is possible to be a gamer and a responsible parent. I wanted to read this, Dustin, because boy, oh boy, are parents going to be so annoying. The new annoying part of your life are going to be other parents. Oh, man. The FromSoft people, they take a back seat, right? Elden Ring fans, Trails fans, Nihon Falcom fanboys, all of them are going to take a back seat. Expedition 33 people, Xbox Game Pass subscribers. none of them are going to be as annoying as other parents. Sure. And I feel like this letter, I'm not a parent, but I was parented.

36:41And I feel like this letter is a little reductive. Oh, in my opinion, I don't think there's nature and there's nurture. And I think there are great parents that have very difficult children. And I think that there's only so much you can probably do about that. Unless you have like real punishment, and like fear of consequences and all those kinds of things. But I just want to say that, like, I feel bad for the parents out there because I think there are a lot of parents that put in a lot of earnest effort and doesn't always work out for them. You know, so I don't want to I don't think it's that simple.

37:16Personally, sure.

37:18Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I think there's definitely a little nature and nurture in there. I do agree, though, that something that and, you know, I haven't spent a lot of time around kids, so I have a lot to learn. And so I'm not saying this as some position of authority, but something I observe is that there are a lot of kids and babies that aren't taught how to just exist. Or, you know, for another example is like, it's important for young children to just hear how adults talk to one another. you know like it wasn't like not that my parents were never let me play game boy or something or do my own thing when i was at my grandparents house but there were times there was like no you're just gonna you're just gonna be here with us and you're gonna listen to the adults talk and that's how you learn how to interact with other people in a normal way and uh yeah the sleeping thing i can't remember who it is i'm sorry but someone sent me a very nice email and recommended me a book about like, here's just some things you should do to help your baby sleep better.

38:24Colin Moriarty:And I bought it. Have not read it yet. I will close. It's actually probably around the time where I should start reading it. But yeah, I'm. You're going to need time. You got to sound it out. Yeah, exactly.

38:40Colin Moriarty:So, yeah, I'm very excited. And I am not worried about the like, oh will I have enough time for gaming I'm just not worried about it I'm sure it'll be a little less certainly yeah he said he says here with a full-time job and being a parent I've had few a few hours less time for gaming but I played less in recent years anyway Dustin plays less games he's gonna have a lot more time to play games because he won't be working here thanks for writing in no you got you're gonna I'm gonna be very intrigued to see the balance that you that you it's gonna be very interesting to watch you and i'll be watching with keen eyes uncle colin will be watching right i partially too something i'm thankful for is that my job is not full-time hours but it is full-time attention to the job if that makes sense like yeah i'm always plugged in and monitoring things we have stuff posting on the weekends and And so some days are more jam packed than others.

39:46Colin Moriarty:And so because I'm not putting in a literal 40 hours, I'm blessed in that way that some of that time during the work day that, you know, I could spend making sure I'm caught up on stuff for games. So I am in a unique position for sure in that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. You're going to be good. It's going to be very exciting, very fun. I'm looking forward to his name day. Hmm. No one knows what I'm going to. I don't even know yet. I want to I have to see the baby. I need to think what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at the baby five, 10 seconds. And then I'm going to kind of go for a little while.

40:25And then I'll be back. The first word I'll say is what I've come up with.

40:30Colin Moriarty:I know that pondering Colin look. I observed it very well in my own home, actually, when you were here. Oh, really? I don't know. I don't think you were like you know like cooked like blazed but maybe a little bit and I observed you pulling an amiibo off the shelf and just standing there looking at it not absurdly long but slightly longer than I think than the average person right right and I was like so that's the kind of look that I expect yeah yeah you'll get me I'm gonna put all my effort all my mental efforts into it like the wizard ponders the orb right right that's exactly right because it's an important i mean it's very important it's probably one of the most important things i'll ever do is picking your baby's name sure yeah i i do think naming a baby like that is like one of the biggest like little domino things right for for that individual like the name decides a lot i think i i like i don't know how scientifically true that is but i have i have a feeling that like the name determines how how the kid looks i think it really determines a lot i'm not even kidding i'm not like if you have like a if your name is like simon or whatever you're probably gonna fucking you're either gonna overcompensate right and be like atypical you'll be like oh well who's that that guy that guy's name is simon he looks so jacked or he's gonna lean into it so you're not gonna have like a middle of the road simon i've never met a middle of the road simon i've only ever met extreme simons yeah i've only met two and they've been both i've met a jack bodybuilder dave sybert i was like that's so funny and then i've been a guy who looks kind of like me but like way skittier and like with paper thin bones i remember being like this is interesting and his parents are not like that i don't know if i've ever that's fascinating naming is tough i think so like we've when we're we've you know been thinking like well jokes aside we've locked in the name so it's decided for this baby but you don't want to pick like we look at the most common baby names 2026 because it's like okay we don't want to pick a top 10 or top 20 name because we don't want him to be just like blended in with all of his classmates in the future and his friends but you also don't want to pick something too weird that's gonna you know be off-putting for not only for him but for other people it's got to find that middle ground of like somewhat unique but definitely not weird so i'll i mean you guys will gotta take now you gotta take the initials into account it's a lot it's a lot you can say that because thank god like i you know i'm chris ray maldonado thank god my middle name isn't like ulysses dude i was thinking the same thing that was always because you and i have the same initials so it's like right i always thought of the name ulysses as well for cum and uh that was because that it's so funny man every cm probably thinks the same thing you know right yeah it's like because that there's no way you're thinking about that in like the 70s or like the 80s or something you know what i mean like it's probably like oh yeah you listen whatever you realize it's coming you're like yeah it's not a real word yet and as dagan always reminds us he like you're sending that kid with the the initials come into like the most hardcore social experiment of all time which is like america from 1975 to 1990 or whatever like when you're in school and you're just getting bullied and tortured like dagan always talks about how like you like if you were into toys by like fifth or sixth grade people were like no yeah and that would stick with you forever like you had to get off like you had to like move on to adult things and now and now look at us and well now it's like that school's the same except now it's like now you'll be famous for how lame you are right right i mean there'll be like there'll be a video that with like 60 million views of you getting your shit pushed in and like the in the in the locker room because you you made a shitty joke to somebody way bigger than you and then it's like that's it so you got to be careful that name's a big deal wild shit man i have love it is it fortunate or unfortunate initials with dtf your oh that's yours that's mine what's your middle name thomas travis travis oh you're bad yeah yeah um that's awesome yeah that's fine well because it's that's an abbreviation is like it's as long as it's like not like it's not a word like cum yeah not cum or like fat or like the the fat yeah that's a good three letter words are like gay dick d-i-c gay though now my initials i haven't been dtf since i was born i'm a rare i'm a male that had two last names crazy out of context sentence by the way right right right yeah but i originally had my mom's maiden name oh interesting and then when my parents you know same dad but married that's when i was gonna ask what your mom's maiden name is but you shouldn't say yeah i'll just i uh just probably not a big deal but i um yeah it's uh it's a lot that's what i was thinking of when this topic came up too is like i love how little chris was saying about like a name a person's name it's it's it's everything right and yet they're permanent and they're not at the same time like you can just change your name but like even if you hated your parents and like had a horrible upbringing everything like and your name was tom like you're just going to stay Tom probably and it's just funny how like no that's my name yeah like someone and I find that so fascinating but even being driven to the point where you want to change your name in the first place is its own thing also like that's a deterministic I don't know man I think about that little domino a lot and that's like that's a big one no you're totally you're totally right like I I personally love my name I think my parents did did a good job with their kids names very 80s kind of thing Dana for instance my sister that's a very 80s name which I love that a little bit of a legacy from from a different time or whatever.

46:19But I never I never considered changing my name, even when people would make fun of my name, which they always did my entire life. So it's like, no, that's who I am nonetheless. I don't think there are that many Collins, though, like it's always been a name that has. I met I met the first time first I met a column was in fourth grade. I remember that. but like it's a name that's always kind of just existed as like a heat signature but it's never been like an overwhelming choice of anyone's probably because I think a lot of people are like because it's a one vowel off from being colon maybe consider that at some point but they didn't and now my name is Colin Mooka Mooka Ronan said hello everyone I'm currently a university student and I'm doing a summer internship after losing my job that helped me pay for school.

47:09It's a huge opportunity for me, but it's causing me to feel imposter syndrome and a lot of self-doubt. I wanted to ask if you guys have felt like this in your careers, especially early on. You all inspire me tremendously and I've taken a lot of your advice in the past. Thanks so much. Fuck imposter syndrome, dude. You're exactly where you need to be, in my opinion. And if you're not, you're going to wash out really quickly. But the inverse is very rarely true. Everyone has thought that they've had that at some point. I think I've thought it in the past and I've been amenable to having imposter syndrome, but the longer you go on in your life and your career, you realize like that you're surrounded by a lot of imposters and actually you're the real deal.

47:46You're the bonafide article, you know? So I think you just got to, you got to embrace where you are, even if you're swimming and barely keeping your head above water, you can be, you're there for some reason and you can stay there as long as you work hard and put in the proper work and stuff like that so don't don't fall into the trap of the imposter syndrome sometimes doors just open for you i've said it a million times i was absolutely not the most talented writer on game facts i was a great writer but i got lucky you know like there's a lot of people that could have done what i did and i understand and respect that that's not that's just me getting that's the luck of the draw that's not being an imposter um yeah i was talking to my nephew recently and i've use this analogy with you guys, but like he got an internship recently in his field.

48:36And I was like, I'm like the, the, the door is open. Kick it off the hinges, dude. You know, like they opened the door. That's all you needed was for it to be unlocked. Just fucking booted off the hinges and show everyone how much of an imposter you aren't. So don't, don't be in that place. In my opinion, if you can help it, unless you really are an imposter, like, like you are in an accounting firm, but you have, you're not a CPA and you lied. that's different you know if you cheated on the bar exam and you found yourself at a law firm yeah that's different you know uh but like being where you think you should be or like where it makes sense that you might be lean into it it helps it helps to be vigilant and to make sure you're not getting complacent and to make sure that uh you know it helps to reevaluate often i think because or just assess what you've done and just make sure that like okay you're you're still kind of on top of your the thing to me with imposter syndrome is like i felt it like numerous times and i even feel it like i feel a dull sense of imposter syndrome all the time but it's not like really thick enough because to me the thing is like you you you spend enough time around people and you realize like oh a everybody feels this at some point so like it really is just kind of the default so it kind of doesn't matter and b i've met so many stupid people who are not bothered at all that they are terrible at what they do so like why should you really at a certain point it's just like right i get it chris if you are even thinking the question of if you have imposter syndrome you are already ahead of the game right but it's but you can get stuck there so like uh i would i would just yeah just don't don't put too much stock in it it helps to from a self improvement angle like it helps to kind of like constantly be thinking about that because it It makes sure that you don't like stagnate or whatever.

50:26And you're always improving. You're not getting too complacent. You're not going to be like left behind or whatever. But it can be a really, I don't know. That's it. It depends on your personality, I guess, too. It's a bad mix, especially with like perfectionism and imposter syndrome. I've dealt with that a lot. And that's a bad recipe. But generally speaking, don't worry about that. Think about how many people are living it up and they're fucking brain dead. I always I don't I encounter them and I'm like, damn, you encounter them. You see them all the time. You know, like I don't know, man. I look at I look at videos of Jake Paul speaking and I'm like, I don't whatever.

51:09You know, like, what am I? What am I? What am I worried about? You know, it's funny, Chris, because like the era of TV and radio obviously really started or wrote it, but like the era of the internet has completely dispelled this mysticism around anyone, right? Like where you would think like a Brad Pitt style is like, I have nothing against Brad Pitt, but like handsome actor, you don't know anything about him. So he's got a mystique and he's like the guy. And then maybe he has a social media feed and you'll learn a little bit more about him. Then you look at his likes or like you see like stupid shit he did and people are leaking.

51:43And then before that, you know what, these people become very distinctly human. And I think that that level of that differentiation doesn't exist anymore. So like truly like people just float around dependent on the talent that they bring forth in some way that people demand it, I guess. And for the Jake Paul guy. And again, I don't know the difference between the two Pauls still to this day. It truthfully does not matter. That's the vibe I get as well. Like they serve some sort of purpose. It's what I always say about the Kardashians. Like I don't know much about them. I mean, I know where they come from and everything, but like I don't follow them or anything like that.

52:15But it's like people shit on them. And I'm like, I don't know if you should be shitting on them. It seems like they're doing pretty good. They know exactly what they are, you know? So you have a place in this world, in this society, be that person and Godspeed to you. Do you have anything you want to add to us before we move on?

52:32Colin Moriarty:Yeah, I was trying to figure out how to put it because it's not fake it till you make it, but it, it kind of is in that vein. You're not faking it. I remember when I started my first gaming site podcast thing with my friend Brandon and then eventually we brought Ben on was like it felt so weird that we made a website in a podcast and just started posting on it and then it's like oh well now someone's sent us a game doesn't feel like they should be doing that because we're just three fucking idiots who are writing stuff on a website right and then i remember being at psx and being in the press room and being like oh shit and something ben always said to me is like even if you don't feel like you belong there act like it oh yeah fake i guess it's not fake it till you make it but it's like fake the confidence to some degree where it's like no you belong here do the work and eventually that fake confidence becomes maybe mustard confidence i don't know it becomes real confidence colin do you know what do you know what's uh seinfeld line i'm thinking about as we're talking about this it's a it's not a lie if you believe oh if you will yeah that's right right of course yeah yeah you just gotta you just yeah just um i think fake it till you make it is honestly like perfectly valid definitely because i think that's think about think about how many do the expose is on just like studios and shit like i think about i think about halo 2 bungie all the time and how they were able to deliver a masterpiece with like no one fucking leading the project at all and everybody was just like what are we doing everybody's floundering around nobody knows like we are fucking chimpanzees running around pretending like we're fucking angels or something like we're not nobody knows how any of this works the economy is literally fake so like whatever go do shit do what you do i do i'd uh be confident and if you're not confident pretend to be and then you will eventually be yeah i mean you have no you won't get anywhere without confidence i'll tell you that that is very yeah you learn that quick yeah just be just be be you and if you suck i'm sorry but i don't think we have a lot of those people out there in this audience this audience is above average tone wrote in and said what's up fellas just a quick question being one of the four black people in this community he says me cog micah and colin is it okay to use my profile pick for my profile pick for a black power t-shirt now his profile pic guys is the picture of me doing this uh there's like a picture of me i don't know like from what i think it's from one of the shows and so um i think that's perfectly fine i wanted to tell you that i think as one of the four black i am one of the four black people in the company as you said and are in our community i think this is totally fine so um make go go get it done and send us a picture please yeah all right on that word let's get into the news nice non-sequitur yeah um a couple of interesting playstation related uh items as it were that get a little deeper into the weeds and i thought they would be fun to talk about for us so this first one has been circulating and it's that shuhei oshida the longtime producer for sony that became the head of first party studios and was the head of the first party team during its most prolific output.

56:00I think everyone understands and agrees that has been slowly talking more about what happened with him. And to my credit, I don't get everything right, but I've been saying since the very beginning of him being removed from first party or kind of retiring from that role is that he was removed and he was demoted. That's not something you do. You don't walk away from leading 200 and 300 million dollar games to go lead an indie initiative. That doesn't make any sense. And Sony wouldn't take a talent like that and do something like that unless there was more to the story. And so over time, he's told more about this, including on Sacred Symbols Plus last year when he came on and talked a little bit about what was going on.

56:44But this is the deepest he's gotten into it. And what I thought was interesting about this is that this happened at a conversation at the Australian Games Festival, Alt Games. And he was giving, he was speaking. Now, I haven't seen the video. We're using this week in videogames.com and their quoting of the piece because I assume that they are the speech because I assume they were there. But what I think about this, what I think is interesting about this is that certainly he wasn't vamping, right? So these are, well, Dustin, do you have more?

57:14Colin Moriarty:I think he was on stage with Alana Pierce. Oh, so he's being interviewed. Because the picture they have here is him at a podium, at a podium, which is interesting. Like, I'll look up to verify that, but I'm pretty sure. Yeah. That might just be like a, that might just be a picture of him. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So, so, all right. So that's good. Oh, so Alana was there. Alana, isn't she, didn't she just, something just happened with her. What was it? Something was announced. Like she's doing something right. Like something big started. Like she started like a production company, I think. For movies.

57:44Yeah, I think so. Yeah. That's cool. For games. I've only met her once. I met her. I met her at the PSVR reveal. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. So that was like, you know, many, many years ago at this point. So he was speaking at this event, Alt Games, and he says a lot. So here's what he says. I'm going to read the piece. I won't read it in its entirety, but I'm going to read quite a bit of it just to give people some some insight. it says quote speaking at the 2026 edition of australian games festival all games the 31 year playstation veteran introduced himself by recounting his long career including his transition from leading playstation's first party studio efforts for over a decade to becoming the company's indie game evangelist as head of playstation indies he said the following quote i helped santa monica to make god of war and naughty dog to make uncharted and the last of us and sucker bunch to make the beautiful ghost of tsushima ghost of tsushima was one of the last games that I worked on as the president of Worldwide Studios.

58:44But in 2019, after 11 years leading the first party development, I was fired from the role. This is the first time he's ever really said it in such explicit terms, in my opinion. He goes on, quote, Jim Ryan wanted to remove me from first party because I didn't listen to him. He asked to do some ridiculous things. And I said, no. So we have a little bit of insight into what happened here. Dustin, I'm curious. if you, well, we all saw this, but when you saw this, what you thought, it's kind of the most explicit he's ever been. We're like spurned exes in that like this happened so long ago now and we're still shook by it, but.

59:26I am bitter about it because it did have ramifications. Like now we know his games kind of left the games he greenlit like Returnal have left this. You know, so now we're getting everything else and it's not the same. I think everyone knows that. But what do you think about this and what do you think he was being asked to do?

59:44Colin Moriarty:Well, I think he mentioned it on Sacred Symbols Plus or I mean, maybe one of the other interviews. I listened to quite a few, but I think Shuhei mentions that there was a crossroads where it was like, well, we want you to do more multiplayer live service stuff. And I think there was a quote around this talk as well, where, you know, he was being asked to do things he didn't wasn't comfortable doing. Like that was never his forte was doing multiplayer games. I mean, PlayStation tried, of course, in that era, but they kind of relegated the multiplayer space to Call of Duty and other successful IPs already established.

1:00:25Colin Moriarty:And so Jim Ryan being primarily, I would say, the man pushing the live service initiative at that time, wanted more of that. and I just wonder how much Shuhei was like, hmm, this isn't going to go well or whatever plan specifically that you're asking me to do isn't going to go well. I'm convinced more and more all the time that Jim Ryan, I mean, I don't think, I think all three of us knew that he was not ideal and not because he wasn't a gamer, but just because of some of the things that we were seeing and hearing about it. But especially now in hindsight, looking back on how all this live service stuff has played out, it's like.

1:01:15Colin Moriarty:We've always said that we think that he retired, but I'm starting to question that now. Yeah, I am. Well, I've been open from the beginning that like I've evolved from this much more staunch like he had optionality. Like it's time to go. Your job is done. To. Yeah, they're like it took time for everything. to come out for things to come out in the wash. And then you realize like, yeah, I don't think they fired Jim Ryan. I think they just didn't renew his contract. And it's like, it's time for you to go like, and you can go do something else, but you've made a lot of money and you can just retire.

1:01:49Yeah. You don't seem to have a great passion for this anyway. So yeah, I think you're absolutely right from that perspective. Chris, let's get you on the record. What are your thoughts here? Do you have anything you'd like to share? I mean, it's I wanted to speak more. I feel like maybe he's too like respectful and he probably won't do like he won't go on like a he won't do like a Jerry Springer type tell all, you know, for on his time. And like what I want to know what specifically Jim Ryan asked him to do. I'm sure it's related to multiplayer stuff, but like that's or at least that's my where my my gut tells me.

1:02:34uh he's aiming the direction of the conversation at but like i would i would love to know like what like to be a fly on the wall in that room when that discussion was happening it's like i mean you probably wouldn't understand anything you'd probably be too worried about spiders and stuff but i think like that's just i would i just want to know more you know that's all i'm left with like this is like a tea like a morsel yeah and i'm like oh no no it's it's getting juicy and interesting say more please but it's not necessarily surprising i mean given given now that we've seen some of the decision making kind of pan out um before it was a little bit more up to like oh we'll see where things go because maybe these multiplayer bets pay off well uh you know that was a possibility um has not shaken up that way obviously cancellation after cancellation the last of us getting canceled and you know god of war being put in this weird live service but like all of this is you know not ideal and a lot of it we didn't know so we just have a more complete picture now um and so with the complete picture this is not necessarily that surprising it's a lot interesting it's a lot more interesting than it what that it is

1:03:44Colin Moriarty:than it was before we knew all this for sure well let's let's speculate for a second maybe what jim ryan asked him to do we know that shuhei was the one who greenlit concord yeah right that's right is it possible that Jim Ryan was like yeah we I need you to figure out who you're going to cut from fund more into Concord fund more or it's like tell these studios or push these studios in this direction or figure out and you know that kind of thinking where it's like I need you to change how you're because that's one of the main things that you talked about in your interview Colin was like figuring out like you have this bowl of money where's it going to go right resource management and Jim Ryan's like okay well I need you to change how you're doing that maybe even ask him to cancel projects I don't know yeah like I I think there's a well there's a lot to say about this because I think to be fair this puts Herman Holst in a better light in my opinion in a way and it also brings in the question what should be done about what Shuhei is saying to begin with.

1:04:51I think we can get into all this because let me read this inquiry first and I'll get into what you're saying because I think these will answer the same thing. Big Boss BE wrote in and said, hi, slitter sluts. I don't like that. With the recent reports about Shuhei Yoshida, it sounds like his departure wasn't just routine. He allegedly pushed back against some of Jim Ryan's more questionable directives and paid the price for it. If that's true, it raises a bigger question about leadership at PlayStation during that transition period. Do you think Ryan brought and Herman Hulse specifically because he aligned more closely with that vision, and if so, are we still feeling the consequences of that era today, or has this fully become Hulse's ship at this point?

1:05:22Because on one hand, it's hard to believe that Hulse would still be in his position if he were entirely responsible for some of the missteps we've seen. On the other hand, decisions like the Bluepoint situation feel like clear management failures, and those happened well after Ryan's exit. So, where do you land on this? Does this new context shift any responsibility away from Hulse, or does it reinforce concerns about how things are being handled right now? Keep up the great work, and congrats on Saint Slayer. So thank you.

1:05:49So I think that it's as you're saying, Dustin, a deploying of assets that and the pool of assets is growing. You're getting more and more money. They put that into their own financials, like the graph of the bar graph growing, where it'd be like single player and multiplayer investment. And then they would show them year over year. And it's like, you know, they're spending like double or triple on games what they were spending even 10 years ago. And I wonder if how would I put this? Herman Holst was the compliant choice that I assume agreed with that direction as the producer of Killzone and someone with a little bit of some chops in live and not that wasn't really live service in quotes, but more multiplayer.

1:06:30But just like in that direction. It's not to take away the responsibility Herman Holst has because he does. And obviously, they're not crazy about him internally. I just continue to stick by that because I just think you don't get demoted like that. you simply don't I don't know why people aren't like more focused on that he simply got demoted and but he did buy in and believe in a different direction and it kind of puts a little bit more softness on Herman Holst in terms of like these decisions kind of came from someone else potentially that then he like he took the ball now their decision making was poor and I still think Herman Holst doesn't belong in his position but I think it's it is complex because it's in other words, it's, um, I wish you guys were sports fans, but it's like there, each team has a coach and a general manager, right?

1:07:18The general managers builds the team, the coach coaches the team, and there's like a Venn diagram over them. And sometimes one gets fired and the other stays behind. And then that guy gets fired and another guy stays behind and so on. And there's all these different permutations of people that didn't really belong together. And I wonder if we're in one of those situations now where like Holst now, no Holst made sense with Ryan. Now Holst makes no more sense with Nishino. Shuhei didn't make sense with Ryan. He made sense with the previous leadership. So it's a shitty situation that I think kind of spreads the blame and probably places it to the point we made earlier.

1:07:53So like making it full circle about it falling at Jim Ryan's feet ultimately. And they just made poor decisions. I'll continue to lament the major thing about this is they've made their play and they'll never get to make it again in that way. That's the bummer. The money is like, whatever, I don't give a fuck about their money. I mean, I do in terms of them, I want them to survive. So they do well, but like we're not invested in the company. It's like, whatever they've, they've, they've wasted billions of, you know, I don't want to say billions. It's got to be well over a billion dollars on these acquisitions, the development of these various games, the second party games that haven't worked out.

1:08:28Like it's an enormous amount of money, but they do bring up things about Jim Ryan that I think are important to like in this story that, you know, to be, I want to be fair. We beat the shit out of this guy all the time. It's like, They write this quote during Ryan's tenure SIE moved into film and television production reorganized Sony worldwide studios into PlayStation studios acquired Insomniac games Housemark Nix's Bluepoint Haven and Bungie and made a concerted effort to publish games on PC and develop live service titles. So some of those things were clearly bad. The Bungie acquisition was a waste.

1:08:57No offense to Bungie. I think we've gone over that a lot. Bluepoint was mismanaged. The Haven acquisition was stupid and all the rest. But the film and television stuff has been smart. like really smart um they've made an enormous amount of money on that and have found real success they're winning fucking emmys you know uh getting nominated they didn't didn't fucking grand turismo get nominated for some random oscar it's like that's cool so like i don't want to just beat the shit out of the dude and of course we talked about the success of ps5 as hardware which i think he has a lot to do with as well so i think these stories are about these these interpersonal things are just all deeply complicated and ultimately so getting back to what you're asking Dustin like what was he asked to do my assumption is he was asked to use first party assets on multiplayer games because any other choice we would have already seen that outcome because someone else would have done it so if like if it was like you got to cancel these games it's like okay I won't do it it's like all right you're fired uh Herman cancel the games so yeah you know what I mean so like there are certain outcomes that I think nothing would have stopped it seems like he didn't want to be the guy that's like, I'm not reverber.

1:10:03I'm not directing this ship into that direction. It's not. And they should have never done that. And I've been clear about that from the beginning. Like it should they should have just stuck with what they knew. And even, you know, acquire an arrowhead if you can or whatever, like if it works out and make them do their thing. But I don't want to I don't want to absolve the responsibility of of that completely, because I think that that was a horrible choice. I also don't want to absolve Shuhei, to be fair, I love Shuhei. He'll admit it first. We bring up Demon's Souls a lot, but I still think one of the biggest errors he made was abandoning FPS.

1:10:37In fact, this entire situation might be really radically different if they didn't do that. You know? And I understand his choice at the time of being like, we just don't do this. We don't need to do this. And again, it's what you were saying, Dustin, of limited assets. We can't invest in this and this and this and this. We have to make a cut, so we'll let Battlefield and Call of Duty have the first-person shooter space. That was a mistake. like bad mistake you don't have a shooter can you imagine in 2026 like you don't have a shooter come on man so i don't know that's all i have to say about that i i know i went on and on there but um yeah the other thing i want to talk about it comes from greg k a few people wrote in about this he said hey fellas the return of shoe i'm sure there's been plenty of write-ins about shoes comments around Jim Ryan, but let's talk about PlayStation's ability to bounce back.

1:11:31Obviously, it takes two to tango, but what if Sony brought Shue back to replace Herman? Shue arguably oversaw PlayStation's best years, and it's been struggling public perception game releases, not console sales with Jim's blunders. And now from Holst, do you think the struggles they've had since Shue would be enough for them to say we fucked up? He's right. Let him back. Second question, Jim Ryan forced bad decisions on Shue. Do you think Holst is dealing with another potential bad actor, but instead of saying no, he's agreeing to them? To speak about holes first like i again i think it's fairly clear that holst is a compliant actor for a new direction and now that jim ryan's not there anymore he is going to take the blame whether or not he agreed with it or not he did it all these moves have all again all the taste making related moves we brought up happened with him from haven and firewalk to to bun to bungee to putting blue point on god of war to having Ben make a multiplayer game.

1:12:20That's all him. Now, it becomes clear when you think about it, right? Like, oh, that's why you're making those decisions. You were told to. That's why you came in. These are the decisions likely, to your question, Dustin, Shu wouldn't do. You wouldn't do it. Days Gone comes out in 2019. Like, Shu's there. Like, it's like, what are they going to do next? And they were probably like, you know, what about a multiplayer game? And he's like, I don't know. I think that's a good idea. Little things like that, I think, stack up. And if that's true, he was the bulwark man. And then you kind of got to appreciate his vision.

1:12:53As far as shoe coming back, I would love that. And I think that that would be really interesting, but there's two things. There's three things. One issue is older, you know, um, he's not a young man anymore. He was at Sony for 30 years. It's a long time and he might be done. The second thing is that, and this, this I think is a big part of it is I don't know that there's enough time for him to turn it around and even be there to see the fruits of it you know like game development now is four five six years per game the coaches in sports again come into bad teams and they can turn them around quickly because you can immediately try right the next season is right there it's like you haven't you have another a bit another chance right away with this it's like yeah i got to come in and make decisions and turn the ship and it's going to take years and I don't know if he's interested in doing that and that's kind of a shitty situation to be in because again just like what happened in the early Herman Holst era you're leaving him with this good stuff for the beginning and that would happen again for Shuhay's replacement the second time if he came back it's like oh so you get to experience the ratchet and clank you get to experience you know returnal and miles and all that all these things that were for me and why would you want to do that again?

1:14:10It's kind of thankless. And the third thing is, is I don't know, we don't know for sure that Sony is unhappy with Herman, although I think that it's clear that they must be and that my theory is, is that he's only there because they're writing his contract out. And he could be in a very Phil Spencer-esque position where you just don't believe that he's really making any choices anymore and he's just kind of executing on things while they ride things out. But I would love for Shua to come back. Like, is that Dustin, is that a viable option? Do you think?

1:14:39Colin Moriarty:I think the reasons you laid out all kind of point me to it's not happening. Not that there's never any time where something similar like that has happened, of course, but probably most famously Steve Jobs. Right, of course. Coming back to Apple. But the it's a totally different situation, as you mentioned, with Shui being older. And I think it could be true also that, you know, Sony corporate doesn't necessarily want to change the direction. They might still want to pursue the live service stuff because, as we've said many times on this show, that is where the money is. That's the future of general gaming, not all gaming, but where most of the money is made.

1:15:23Colin Moriarty:So they might be unhappy with the way Herman executed, but they they still want the dollar from the live service skins for sure. Yeah, I think you're I think you're right. What do you think about that, Chris, about the possibility of shoe making a triumphant return to fix things? I just don't see that. I mean, the reasons you laid out are pretty pretty much what I was thinking as well. It's just like it's it's the pain with one is like, dude, it's so thankless. You're planting trees for like, like your successor to enjoy basically. And it's like, that's noble, I guess. But like, but it's also not really because you're doing it for just for a major corporation.

1:16:04So like, whatever. I think, I mean, I think he still cares about games. And I think he's, you know, he's still, he still clearly knows a lot. And he's, he cares about the industry and he's passionate. Like, I believe that's still true. But it's a different, it's not like somebody joining, like coming back to a band where they can immediately play a show you know or like like you said with the with the coach kind of immediately being able to try again this is like a very different thing and also like not even just the the nature of how difficult the job is and how long it takes or this that and the other thing whether or not shoe even wants to be there in the first place given the fact that he was kind of thrown out like i don't i don't know it doesn't seem to me that you would go out and say something like this if you were amenable to coming back that's the way that i read you know what i mean like i just don't i this seems to me like in in a very polite way this is kind of like a nah fuck it i'm i'm kind of over it you know he would never say that probably but i don't know him him just like being pretty candid about like yeah they they they're asking me to do really silly things and i was like ah that's something you say when you when you know when you're confident enough to not care about whether or not they want you back and also if they offer you you're probably not gonna take it um but yeah that's that's the kind of vibe that i get you're i don't did you guys see his response to someone's tweet a couple days ago it was it was going around a little bit i'll um i'll put it here in the chat this guy in Spanish says to him Shusan that sounds really strange the part about you getting fired for refusing Jim Ryan's weird stuff it's out of place to air something like that in that way it doesn't do your legacy or PlayStation any good and he responded you're right thanks for the advice and I wonder I wonder if like he realized maybe he thinks like I'm saying too much now you know especially by Japanese culture standards like way maybe now he is Western he was educated in the West he's fluent in English.

1:18:16You know, he went to UCLA. He worked in the United States for Sony in the beginning of his career. So he's not really, he's Japanese, but he's not totally Japanese. And you can, and it comes out in things like this, I think. Bread in a more Western market, a more open market, but it seems like maybe we won't hear much more about this. I think, which is, this is, I think, I wish he would say more. He should write a memoir or something. But yeah, I think he realizes like he's starting to maybe throw people under the bus a little bit. That's maybe the wrong terminology. He's telling it. People have thought, have thought in my past that I've thrown people under the bus and it's like, no, I'm just telling you what happened, you know, like, so his, his stance could be the same thing, you know?

1:19:03But yeah, maybe he's getting flying a little too close to the sun in some respect, or at least he fears that feels that way. I would love for him to come back, but I just don't one. I just think that Holst needs to go and they need to make it. They need to replace him. And I don't know who would be. I mean, there are great internal people that you would assume could do it better. Corey. Neil. Scott Rody, of course, bring up all the time. He was a well hidden figure, but very powerful in that family. I mean, I think I think you would have a much better. I mean, would you? All right. And it's no again.

1:19:42I like Herman Holst. I think he's done good work. He's a producer. He was responsible for a lot of early guerrilla shit. Cool. Horizon. In that specific role, right? And oh, by the way, Shuhei was a producer too. So there's nothing wrong with that. But in that specific role, wouldn't you want a creative director? Right? Like someone who actually makes the games doesn't facilitate the making of the games because maybe they would have a better understanding of the situation at hand. I'm not saying Shuhei produced like some of the biggest games on PlayStation ever. So I'm not saying he doesn't get it.

1:20:23I'm just saying like if you're looking at creative output as some sort of vital element to your operation, don't you want to focus it through your creatives, like your true creatives? And you would put someone like Neil or Corey or whatever. The guy that runs Asobi, I can't remember his name, the French dude. like someone or better yet someone from the outside that can can come in and crack eggs do things i don't know they have to figure this out i do believe that it's going i believe that it's already on the path to being better i just think and i think i believe playstation 5 will go out with a series of bangers just like the ps4 did like I think that that is going to happen it's just all the time wasted in the beginning and in the middle I think a lot of people feel that has ruined the identity of PlayStation 5 and makes this as we've said this uh era of gaming this generation of PlayStation feel incomplete and I don't feel that as acutely as a lot of other people do but I'm not stupid I see what people think.

1:21:34And so, yeah, we'll see what happens. I don't know, man. I'm fascinated by the idea of him coming back. Should we talk about more drama, though? Yes. Yeah, let's do it. So there was an interview that I got to talk to this guy at some point, Kiwi Talks. It's a smaller YouTube channel, but he does these pretty insightful and interesting interviews with various games, development game development people, you know, from various studios. And his 206th episode was with Gabriel Betancourt. Gabriel Betancourt was a lighting artist for years at Naughty Dog. He actually comes from Treyarch. We were talking about World at War.

1:22:13That was his first game as a lighting artist. He also worked on Black Ops. Then for The Last of Us, during the development of The Last of Us, he went to Naughty Dog and he was the lighting artist on The Last of Us on Left Behind and the remaster for PS4 on Uncharted 4 and then on The Lost Legacy. He was there for a while. I originally had two pieces of this interview I wanted to talk about. One of them was about the future of the last of us. However, and it's about him basically saying that there was this idea internally that they were, there was a bunch of people or a lot of people that were immune and sudden they were this, this idea of like a community of immune people and all the rest from the disease or whatever, from, from turning in the game.

1:22:49But I was like, he wasn't even there for the last of us part too. So it's like, I'm sure there were a lot of ideas. It's like, I don't know that that's that interesting. Actually, the, the, the thing that is interesting though, is what he had to say about uncharted. And he doesn't say Uncharted explicitly, but I think based on who he is, when he was there, and all of the rest, that he would know a little bit about Uncharted. This is a pretty long interview. It's an hour and a half long. I didn't get a chance to listen to nearly all of it. Did you, Dawson, get a chance to listen to any of this?

1:23:26Colin Moriarty:I didn't listen to all of it, but I listened to this part specifically clipped out about Uncharted 4. Yeah. So for people that might not remember is that Uncharted 4 was announced before PS4 came out. Do you remember this, Dustin? It was like Amy Hennig was on stage or something and it was just the Uncharted logo. And or was that the launch? The PS4 launch? I remember there was some kind of launch event stream thing and they showed off the trailer that had the vo right right right it ended up being totally different than the actual story of the game naturally so um so hold on i'm trying to find let's see okay here it is so and people can go look it up at 9 40 in this interview again it's called number 206 from kiwi talks Gabriel Betancourt interview on Naughty Dog, etc.

1:24:23He talks about this mystery project. And what I wanted to say to give people context, because a lot of you guys might not have been around or tuned in at this time is Uncharted was announced in 2013 for Amy Hennig obviously was going to direct and write it and lead it. She had done all the other Uncharted games. She had come over. She was actually started her career as like an artist and whatever in the 90s. And the game obviously had a huge problem problem at some point and i've said before and i've talked about it openly now is that like i interviewed amy hennig for the history of naughty dog in 2014 or whatever and i saw like what the like i didn't see the game but i saw the whole wall of like chapter by chapter like what the game was going to be and she walked me through it and showed it to me and it was really cool it was actually like a really cool experience and she was a very friendly and very decent person we spent quite a bit of time together that day and uh it was later reported by ign and i was privy to this reporting.

1:25:17It was not my report, but I know who the sources are and like what was going on or whatever. I've never talked about it. I never will. But that Amy Hennig was basically removed from Naughty Dog at some point during Uncharted's development. And this is when Neil took over. And Neil, of course, had a lot of experience with Uncharted. He helped write Uncharted 2 and 3 and worked on these different things. So he had experience there. But anyway, this is the tumult, the background for the story. So he says, Gabriel Betancourt, ex-lighting artist, says, quote, everyone has a vested interest in fact, I remember, so he's talking about the games and he's like, I remember this one game prototype and I won't say which one.

1:25:57It's like, okay. But there was a project that had been in production for two and a half years, almost three, and corporate had basically said, you know, we're having questions about this and the franchise was successful up until that point. There was no reason to question this thing would be successful, but at that time, the leader was surrounded by people. So the leader of the game was surrounded by people who were always saying yes, and they were living in the glory of their success going on to their fourth project. Okay. So now that's when he gives away the game. And I don't know if he realized that at the time.

1:26:26And now you know that they've delivered this deadline for a demo. And I think they just took it for granted. We've already had success before. We're going to have it again. We've done this three or four times already. So we're just going to be this great thing. and one of the directors from another team was asked to weigh in and I wasn't there. I only heard the story and that director walked in full of all these people. He's picked up the controller and he said to everyone, this game sucks and everyone was quiet. People were flustered. The director of that project was angry and you could just, you know, from what I understand, you could cut the tension in that room with a knife and then someone said, you know, that's really rude of you to say something like that and he and the director fired back.

1:27:02He said, no, but the game sucks. There's no objective. It's hard to follow what's going on. The controls are clunky. This isn't like you guys. This isn't what we delivered in the past. And in the meeting, people walked out of there really upset. I mean, even this director, like, I'm surprised he had that goal to say something like that. You know, he was he was disrespectful, not by calling anyone names, but he was disrespectful in that he was so adamant about how bad it was and insulting of the work itself. But it got personal. And then here's what happened. Corporate looked at it. They decided they were going to push forward anyway.

1:27:29They're going to, you know, ignore the naysayer. Corporate looked at it and they said, you guys are in trouble. We're going to pull funding from this if you guys don't fix this. as a result the director of that project was pulled away even though they had been successful and the naysayer along with two others were put in to help fix it and then the game had to be redone

1:27:49Colin Moriarty:so what could it be this is what this is pretty dog game is it the only question in my opinion about in my opinion and again you can read this any way you want the only question is who the director was in the meeting right um because it could have been one of three people i guess but other than that it's pretty wild shit what do you think doesn't yeah well it's interesting i can't remember where i saw if someone on twitter or something was like it's the george lucas effect where you do some really, really good work. Everyone respects you. You kind of get lost in the sauce on it and no one's willing to say what you're doing is bad.

1:28:35Colin Moriarty:And I, you know, if you're like, who am I to question the person in charge of Uncharted who has released three excellent games that each one exceeding the quality of the last, then this has to be good, right? And so I could see that maybe being a little contentious, but the thing with any kind of collaborative project, not just game dev, is that there's people got to be honest with one another. Something isn't working. What I'm really intrigued by is that I believe the line was like the controls are bad and there's no I don't know what I'm supposed to do. what was this our uncharted game that it one had radically different controls and two seemingly had a loss of direction in it just because i guess up until uncharted 4 i mean uncharted games were extremely linear games obviously in uncharted 4 that's where naughty dogs started to play around with the idea of open world style you might see some of the bones of that yet and what came out you know yeah like the desert map and and some of the towns that you come across and you can kind of walk through them in different ways but so it's interesting to think about a I don't want to say more ambitious but I guess ambitious in a different way uncharted for and what we maybe could have had but clearly it wasn't working yeah I uh I'm fascinated by this this is a fascinating insight like I don't think you should be saying all this uh publicly in my Well, I mean, it's I mean, what do you have to lose?

1:30:11He's probably not under NDA or anything like that, especially 10 years later or whatever. Yeah, when he's been gone, he again, he didn't even work. He worked on the lost legacy. So he was out by 17 or so. So it's been a long time. What do you think, Chris? This is a very interesting insight into the development of the very tortured development of Uncharted 4. Yeah, it's interesting to have more context added on to this story that we've kind of known about for a pretty long time uh in in vague ways but yeah like that's my my mind went to that immediately too dustin it's like how different is this was this game like my assumption the assumption that i i get from this video or from this interview and just from what we know about what was in uncharted 4 when we got it is like maybe this was like a full-on open world kind of sandbox oriented game like maybe that maybe it wasn't like as maybe it was a genuine departure where it's just like this isn't quite quite as linear maybe everything is kind of a lot more open and maybe there there was more complexities to it maybe they had to redo the controls because maybe there was more interactivity maybe you had to like use the environment more or x y like i don't know but i'm really curious about what this version is that somebody would be like this fucking sucks that's awesome yeah i love the audacity of that but but it's also like i mean like a lot of i don't know we've heard this before too of just like um games kind of come together at the last minute a lot of a lot of not not in like a bioware magic kind of way but just like literally like it's not running well until like everything gets baked in and all that stuff god of war i think that raising kratos documentary kind of highlighted that where it's like up until the last couple weeks everything was good but it was still kind of like we don't know how this is going to go together and then it works um so i wonder like if no maybe this would have been cool actually or if it was just too radically different and they kind of scaled it back they kept like you said the some of the bones of that open world in there a little bit more you know more condensed but like split along with like traditional linear um more traditional uncharted design i'm really man i'm just i'm fascinated by like what it like how different was it if it controlled worse like and also like the idea that's like oh i don't know what to do it's like what else is there to do in uncharted other than go forward they're linear you know what i mean like all of this communicates like a very very different style of design than the first three games yeah and what's interesting is that like again have as i said I wish I remembered it better it's in my notes but like what the run of the game was like there were a bunch of areas in the game so I wonder if the areas were just like yes small open hubs maybe maybe because you're right like if you're making a vertical demo a vertical slice for like a like a milestone or like for you know green lighting more funding or whatever you're gonna carefully shine to a proper sheen the best part of your game like the thing that everyone stops everything to like make this great like an old e3 demo and so that's weird and obviously they were jumping to ps4 which is going to be different yeah um but this is more in line with this is where things get a little dicey because like what i remember about the reporting a guy named mitch dyer was the one that was like leading the reporting on this at ign and was the one that broke the story um and again i know who he spoke to um because i was i remember clearly like i was called in to like I went home and then had to go back to the office that night and got to like I think I got to like um I used to take the train to the work but I think I got to expense like an uber because like I we had to sit with like the boss like I ran IGN playstation so it's like all right well here's like what we know and what's going on and I remember that very well um and I think I've said too that I think IGN has like since kind of recanted some of the story like if you go back and read the stories from that era, like they're not, I think the bylines have been removed and something's very weird.

1:34:28So I don't know exactly what has happened since, but, um, I feel like it kind of, I remember the term used was like Amy Hennig, I think it was quote unquote pushed out. And that's if what he's saying is true. I mean that you can imagine that's how it all, that's where this direction, this goes, if you're coming in and now again, who's the person who it's either got to be Straley or Druckmann, right? And you would assume it's Druckmann just because he worked on The Last of Us in a more intimate way and had more comfort with Amy maybe from that perspective, co-writing the games and stuff. So I wonder like I, and again, it's not to say, you know, Bruce was there and worked on Uncharted as well.

1:35:17You know, he was the co-director of these games. So it could, you know, it could be him as well, but I just don't know that I see that. But I don't know that I see Neil that way. I know Neil fairly well compared to other people in the industry. And I don't see that for him either. So it's like, it's a weird one. And I wonder, I wonder, I just wonder. But I will say this, like we don't know what Uncharted would have been. Maybe some of that will leak it one day. What I will say is what Uncharted 4 ended up being was phenomenal. So whatever they did, and you can't really, now assuming it was neil or bruce i guess you have some bravado i assume this all right so the game is announced after the last of us comes out so then you assume this demo is probably it must be in 2014 because that's what i think when the story was written i was at igm by 2015 so it couldn't have been any later than that so they're riding kind of high the other thing that you have to agree with i think is that they delivered the goods with uncharted 4 and then Neil delivered the goods again with The Last of Us Part 2 so it's not like he was wrong and we'll see what happens with Intergalactic but it's and Amy's never gotten another game out which is too bad I do think her what she's directing the Hydra game right the 1943 so yeah

1:36:36Colin Moriarty:and it's kind of gone dark that like we haven't wasn't supposed to come out this year yeah I think so and you're right yeah and then before that she did the Star Wars game that got pulled at EA, which I don't know that had anything to do with the game. I think that was just a a misalignment of resources. That was 1313, right? No, no. 1313 was before the Star Wars acquisition. This was like the... What was 1313? That was the Boba Fett game that got canceled. That was... Gio Corsi was producing that game, as I understand. I still think about it. I don't even care about Star Wars. I still think about that game.

1:37:08Did I tell you that I... So I went to Gio's house for dinner. I was very friendly with Gio. He and his wife are very, very good people, and they That's how we bonded. And I went to his house for dinner once in San Francisco and he had a huge, like authentic Boba Fett helmet. Like not like some sort of like cheap prop or whatever, but like the real one. And I'm like, and we, he went in as that, that's from 1313 and his experiences working on that game and all the rest. It was, uh, yeah, that's like the lost Star Wars because the word about that game was it was going to be great. Yeah. But it just got caught in between that Disney acquisition when they just blinked everything out of existence.

1:37:42Um, that's so sad. Yeah, it is. It's too bad. Tragic. And that's before they ruined Boba Fett. I mean, they kind of ruined Boba Fett in episode two, but they really ruined Boba Fett now. And it's just too much. Like Boba Fett's no longer missed. There's like series and movies. And it's like, all right, it's not the same. There's no mystique. Now we know everything about him. So it's not fun anymore. It's like celebrity. Right. Yeah. So those are the two big stories of the week. And they're two pretty big stories, I would say, for us, for our space. Shuhei talking more and this issue with Uncharted 4 I wonder if I'm Sony PR I'm watching this Kiwi Talks page with a hawk because it's got 6 ,000 views right now which is not very many for what he's being I don't know what he usually does but for what's being said you know like it seems like no one really knows if this exists and if they can get by a few weeks they'll probably get you know not have to answer not that they'll answer anyone's questions anyway but but But it's so fascinating.

1:38:46It's also important to note that that guy, Gabriel Betancourt, it's a secondhand source. He is a primary source because he worked there, but he's saying he heard about that meeting. So that's also worth putting out there and reiterating. All right. Just a couple more pieces of news for us to get through, my friends. If you're British or Irish. You might want to keep in mind here that you're going to need to verify your age on PlayStation network because of local laws um this sucks but i also understand it like i here's the thing i don't know that i really give a shit about age verification if it means like we can break open the possible like the potential like we just need to make sure who you are and then you can do whatever the fuck you want it's like all right like it's a private place you know i don't think you should have to have an id to go on the internet but i think you should maybe if you want to go on the playstation network it's like all right it's not the end of the world but here's what it says.

1:39:41This comes from PlayStation.com. And you can, if you want to read about this, you can Google age verification, frequently asked questions. And this, I think comes specifically from the Irish website. They say age verification will be required later in 2026 for Ireland adult accounts to access certain features. If you're prompted, we recommend completing age verification to avoid interruptions later in 2026. We use age verification to deliver the best PlayStation experience for your age and to help protect our younger users. If you have not completed age verification, you can continue playing on PlayStation, but communication features won't be available until you do.

1:40:15On this page, they have a QR code you can use and you can just get right to doing it. The big thing that I wanted to talk about here is the features that will require age verification. So you're really not going to be able to use PSN in any effective way if you or whatever the fuck they're going to call when they get rid of the PSN if you don't do this. So they write, quote, beginning June 2026, if you have not completed age verification, you can continue playing on PlayStation, but some features won't be available until you verify your age. You may not be able to use communication features on PlayStation console, PS app, and web voice chat, text chat, and messaging joining parties or group sessions connected or third party communication experiences, discord voice chat, broadcasting and sharing features, broadcasting gameplay to YouTube or Twitch and in game chat or messaging and sharing or uploading user generated content will also probably be throttled as well.

1:41:04So now this gets a little dicey because if you, either of you read this page in any completion, you don't have to. It's like a lot of the pulldowns, like there's like facial scan technology and they use like a third party to do it. So it's a little dicier. I wouldn't mind just uploading your ID to some sort of, you know, verifier that then deletes it or whatever, just to say like, oh, this is who I am. so it's a little onerous but um gotta do what you gotta do I guess is the police state encroaches this is from all these lawsuits I mean the EU generally and this is not the EU but in Europe like some good things happen because they're so litigious that like uh that's why we have like we don't have the fucking proprietary cables on iPhones anymore for instance like now you can just use USB cables or whatever that's because of Europe they did that so you you have to show them a little bit of appreciation but at the same time they get involved it's like the guys that are that are suing the playstation network for like uh not selling games on playstation network at different prices depending it's like what are you what are you doing you're fucking we were talking about we were talking about like you're gonna ruin it you're gonna ruin this so a little bit of column a little bit of column b but i just wanted to throw that out there this is from the irish playstation network though and i wanted to make sure that i read this right that it was both british and irish because they're two very different things you know yeah i was gonna say

1:42:27Colin Moriarty:we might find out that a pork poncho is actually a 12 year old oh my god with a very deep swell voice yeah he just disappears one day with pure age verification pure potato diet psn age verification let's see yeah yeah it is playstation in the uk according to igm uk and ireland so because i know how much you guys hate each other i don't want to you know instigate any problems right this happened right before we started recording this has been rumored forever so it's fine it's nice to find us to be confirmed assassin's creed black flag resynced comes to playstation 5 on july 9th so this is a remake of assassin's creed black flag which is assassin's creed 4 right yeah yeah correct did they not did they not call it assassin's creed 4 Black Flag it was Assassin's Creed I think it was it not I'm pretty sure I don't think Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag it is Assassin's Creed 4 IV Black Flag so they're right I was totally wrong so yeah I don't give a shit about this really but and it's not even that surprising or exciting because we knew it was coming forever but finally it has been revealed Dustin I think you and I discussed this the possibility of this on the stream maybe and are either of you interested in this game we're going to play it this is a lot of people's favorite, right?

1:43:52Like old school Assassin's Creed game. So yeah. Yeah.

1:43:56Colin Moriarty:This was one of the first games I played on PlayStation four when it came out because it was like either a launch or a near launch title. Yeah, I remember that. Let me look, I think it was a launch game. I wasn't super big on it. There are elements of it that I really like, like the the she's the sea shanties in this are super fun when you're gliding around. sorry what i remember this what it was was that it came to ps3 first and then two weeks later the ps4 came out and there was a right right that's right uh but i i'm good on assassin's creed i'm happy for everyone excited these are not my kind of pirates you are okay yeah you don't they're they're they're too normal they're too normal right they're too european are you gonna play chris uh black flag resynced no no i i mean i played a little bit of the beginning of black flag really got that's another really integral hard l i told colin that on the stream my old podcast i said it too quickly that's a that is a really that's a you got to get that one really right dangerous well yeah we cut it from the show i think i still have it somewhere it will never be released but no i mean i played i remember thinking like yeah the beginning's cool but this is a game built all like well not all around but primarily around the main gimmick of having the ship combat from assassin's creed 3 and i i hated that like i did not like it i liked it conceptually i thought it was cool that they let you do it but the gameplay wise i'm like i'm playing assassin's creed i want to do social stealth i want to be i i don't what is this what are we doing yeah i i just i wasn't into it and so the the idea of a game it's like hey you know that thing that you didn't like this is all that or like focused on it but like we've added more systems to the thing that you didn't like and i'm like i'm good i'm good and that's where yeah that's and then skull and bones kind of gets up spins off yeah skull and bones couldn't be less for me if it was if it if it actively tried it's funny that that's how long that game was in development that that's where it comes from i know it truly is it really is bewildering but um yeah i know it's people's favorite and like maybe i would like it maybe if i gave it like a proper chance and it's been a long time but like it's just there's so much coming out and even just my current backlog of things that i want to play but haven't gotten to yet is is so high that i'm just like this is realistically just not really in the running of things for me happy for fans of it I know that this is this is a quality game I know it's not like shit or anything but it's definitely not my cup of tea yeah it kind of like as I recall it kind of snapped back to what people wanted because I really we've talked about it before I loved AC3 setting and so like I didn't really see what everyone's problem was because I was like oh this is dope like this is fucking so cool but people didn't really dig it and then the setting carries assassin's creed 3 pretty heavily like the rest of it's pretty paint by number the setting's great i think yeah i love it the only part of that game that's aged well i think like the parkouring through the trees and stuff this is cool but yeah ace so and by the way chris on uh on your on your meter of offense re-synced not so offensive right uh i yeah no it's not it's not bad I just don't like, I don't like the, the, the concept of what these games are doing generally now with these names.

1:47:35Like, I just like, it's, it's not that re-sync is offensive. It's, it's more so the fact that, well, it can't be remake or remastered. It's gotta be cute. I'm like, shut the fuck up. I don't, I don't, I don't know why everything's gotta be so, so cute all the time. Like it's fine. Oh, remastered is, is the worst easily, but there's other things too, where I'm like, what there's something i just had something in my mind that was like similar where it just like it bothered me when i saw it but i can't i i'm looking for i'm looking dream it was like a dream like when you wake up and it just like flew away from me while we were talking but i saw one recently too that's why i've been clicking on here trying to find like i was googling worst game remastered titles it's like it's not gonna find what i'm looking for no yeah it's but that would be a funny one to do because like there's some fucking bad ones dude uh there should we should do like a tier list yeah yeah we should i gotta like figure out how to find that yeah it's tricky it's tricky but recinct is fine i just don't like that we're doing this you know yeah it's it's interesting because they i guess that's where they'll begin because they they did re-release right ac2 and ac3 just kind of uprezzed i guess and then um so i wonder if they'll continue the what's the one we were talking about the other week the uh rogue that's like the one that's kind of you can't play it on ps4 yeah because that's just so it's just kind of lost you know that's the old generation did they re-release that they must have re-released that right ac rogue wiki oh no it did 2018 okay so i was way off on that i was like it can't possibly be right like that was an interesting that was an interesting it was less bold on the 360 side right because eventually they got backwards compatibility and so you could go back to those games but on the ps side releasing a ps3 game during the era of ps4 was actually quite bold yeah it's interesting i i don't that's arguably like a huge waste of resources but um that was interesting that was an interesting experiment that they did i'm kind of glad they did it it's just weird one thing i wanted to say it's uh recent it's not bad i actually like it more than a campaign evolved campaign yeah which i still think is a terrible yeah that's rough that's a terrible name man i guess it's a way for them to circumvent the multiplayer modes not right being in it although halo isn't really known for its multiplayer right compared to halo 2 so yeah halo is not known for its multiplayer at all right like you can play it no i'm saying halo 1 compared to halo 2 like people right right because i know what you're saying yeah it's um i don't know don't get me started on this that's fine i want to have a good day.

1:50:22All right. I thought this is a kind of a questionable one for the news, but I wanted to bring it up here. We, we bust Sega balls so much that we got to give them a little bit of a shout out here. Echo, the dolphin complete was announced. Um, a and our artelier, which is a kind of a newer company, I think from the people that originally worked on echo in the early to mid nineties have announced that they are releasing echo the dolphin complete, which is, it seems like the first two Echo games and then a new one. So it is led by Ed Anuziata and or Anunziata. And he was apparently so I had to I didn't know anything about this.

1:50:59I had to read all about this last night. Here's what I learned. Ed Anunziata worked at Sega from 1989 until 1997. And he was the producer of the Echo games for Sega which were made by a couple of studios on the outside that I guess are being reformed in a certain way like did I even write down I gotta look this up real quick basically what happened is do you guys remember that there was an Echo game on Dreamcast and Playstation 2 barely so that's like a different studio the studio that made the echo games was called appaloosa which i think was later renamed to novo trade and so so this guy ed annunziata worked with them but on the outside as a producer for sega anyway he was kind of the echo was kind of the brainchild of his he apparently according to this press release that they they circulated have gotten people back together like original composition art and programming teams along with ed leading the team they're going to remaster i I guess, a bunch of the different versions of Echo because Echo the Dolphin was released in December of 92 on Genesis, but then it was ported in 93 to Game Gear and Sega CD, and then it was ported to Master System, interestingly, so backwards in 94.

1:52:23And they specifically say in the press release they'll be celebrating from the 8-bit Master System through the Genesis, so they're going to get all these versions of the game. Echo 2 is actually called Echo the Tides of Time, which came to Genesis, Sega CD, and Game Gear in 1994. And then the third Echo game is called Echo Jr., which was a Genesis only Western only, I guess, release late Genesis 95 for younger audiences. Interesting thing about this Ed and Unziata guy. He was the, one of the leaders of engage. Oh, that's interesting. And worked at Nokia from 2004 to 2006. And before that he worked at leapfrog.

1:52:59What's interesting about that is that I think he had a taste for that because the last echo game, I didn't know this. I don't even remember this. There was an echo game for the Sega Pico. like I never knew that the Pico was like the child like the let me see if I can find the date I've earnestly never even heard of that until it's like a child's computer that was really it was released in the United States too I'll put it in the I have a Pico game oh do you here it's

1:53:24Colin Moriarty:I bought it for Holly because it's Richard scary oh cool busy town she loves that so so five bucks pico was like a oh my god i had this did you whoa what this is what it's called yo this is tripping me out a little deep memory what do they call that core memory yeah oh my god i haven't seen this in so long so the last echo game before the dreamcast ps2 game that wasn't even made by any of the people that worked on it was that for that so he i guess moved on to leapfrog and then nokia and he's kind of just been chilling what's interesting about this too is sega owns echo the dolphin and it seems like they are working on that with in partnership with sega which is cool so shout out to all the second fans i wasn't my my neighbors had echo the dolphin one and i was always confused by it if i'm being honest it's weird as shit dude yeah it is it's a weird if you don't care about a spoiler look up the final level i can't remember if it's the first or second game, which I never got to when I was a kid.

1:54:27Colin Moriarty:So it was a game that I would start to play and then I was too young to really even understand it. But it was Endless Ocean before Endless Ocean. It's spooky. It's Eldritch in nature. It's crazy. So what is this going to be? Is this going to be Echo the Dolphin Refinned? Or something? Yeah, Echo Refinned, right, exactly. I like that they're just going with the complete. It's really not complete because it's not Echo Jr. and it's not the ps2 version but that's fine yeah it's elegant it is elegant you know it is like elegant so echo the dolphin we remember i i i remember i was just such a nintendo fanboy i was like fuck echo like even like like who is echo like but i was like in elementary school being like fucking sucks you know the idea the idea of child the idea of young colin child college screaming fuck you and then it cuts to just a happy dolphin minding his own fucking business i hated sega so much when i was a kid all right let's see final story is just a circana data for march 2026 i actually think there's some interesting data in here to share preliminarily by the way i'll also note that capcom announced that pragmat has already sold a million copies so shout out to them as well but that would not be concluded in march so we'll get to that in april but i wanted to acknowledge that as well the best-selling game in the United States from March 1st through April 4th was MLB the show 26 not a huge surprise I guess baseball season has started in earnest so congratulations to San Diego studio and Sony that's a Sony gets kind of robbed here on the publisher things it says multiple video game publishers because like I think the MLB acts as the publisher like a proxy publisher on some of the versions it's really a Sony game come on guys Resident Evil Requiem falls from number one to number two very strong and a wonderful game is I understand the highest sales velocity of any Resident Evil game still, which is incredible.

1:56:22WWE 2K26 is third. This is interesting because that wasn't. I know this is true about King of Fighters randomly, but isn't it true about WWE that it's like every other one sucks or something? Or that's like what people feel. There's like some weird thing. Maybe. Like where people have. And I think maybe the last one was the one people had problems with. So anyway, WWE is still huge. Both in real world and in the game world. Now here, Chris, is where I wanted to kind of focus in a little bit. Marathon number four. Now, this is substantial because Marathon's 40 bucks. again I'll remind people these number this ordering is based on gross revenue so it's going up against 70 games and 60 games and it comes in number four I don't what do you think of this I feel like this is an indication things aren't nearly as bad as people are saying or feeling maybe there's a different story on console maybe the idea that console is not dragging this game along is wrong I don't know but those you could it's reasonable to expect that that could have been by by game sale volume the best selling game of the month at 40 uh yeah i mean at 40 yeah maybe i think i mean dude i i've been saying this for a while dude like it's just marathon is very good and so like i think people are going people people are going to play it i think uh does this account do you know if this accounts this is just sales right this is not like no yeah not micro transactions I don't think it is because it says physical and full game digital.

1:57:59So, yeah, well, you, I don't, I'm not worried about marathon guys. I like, that's all that this kind of confirms to me. Like based on how I've seen people interact and I've said this ad nauseam, but like whenever we talk about marathon, but like, dude, consistently when I'm playing the game, I'm running into people with like with paid skins and shit. Like I, I think, and this is before they have anything worth buying. So like, I just think. I think the doom and gloom around marathon is largely a do about nothing.

1:58:30Colin Moriarty:There is one fold where I think, Colin, you said it would be the highest selling or something. Crimson Desert probably would be in beating marathon, don't you think? If it included. Oh, I didn't realize the Crimson Desert is an asterisk. Yeah. So that's a that's a great point. I would have gotten there eventually and realized that. Yeah. Crimson Desert is at number 15, but it's only counting physical sales. Yeah. Which is pretty remarkable, actually. I wonder why Pearl Abyss doesn't participate, but they don't have to. We've known the game has sold millions of copies, right? So, yeah, it probably would have been.

1:59:03You're absolutely right. Also, Pokemon Pocopia doesn't count digital sales and came in. Right.

1:59:08Colin Moriarty:That's a game key card. Actually, both of those games are kind of botched physicals because Crimson Desert is also a download disc. So I don't even understand why I do not understand why people want to do that. Like, what is the purpose? do you want me to no we can't do it sorry we can't do it monster hunter stories 3 twisted reflection is another new entry at number 7 and then everything else is kind of normal ghost of yote holding on at 14 hell divers dropped from 5 to 16 death stranding 2 bounced back up the list from 165 to 17 because of its pc release and apparently it's doing pretty well on pc I don't know if you saw it's got a pretty sticky player base maybe a stinky player base too I don't know I'd be part of that I guess And then year to date, Resident Evil Requiem is the best selling game of the year.

1:59:57Marathon is at number six in gross revenue for the year. It's not too, again, it's not too shabby. Again, Crimson Desert won't be reflected on here and isn't even on the list at all because it would only be reflective of its physical releases. Anything else here? Pokemon Pocopia based just on the game card is at number 12. And Pokemon Legends Z and Z, Z, Z, A. Is it Z through A? Z, A, Z, A, Z, A. Pokemon Zaza Pokemon Zaza did you see the stuff of Forza Horizon 5 here number 17 for the year Forza Horizon 6 apparently has half a million pre-orders on PC makes sense man those car people man they

2:00:39Colin Moriarty:like their cars and Japan I know you can't go wrong there right yeah Xbox sent people to Japan to play it I should have yeah you don't want to go on it so hard on the helix merch you don't want to go on yeah you don't want to go on the i don't do you come on so i am i willing to sell my soul for a free trip to japan perhaps dude i could have sold my soul a million times for that i i and really and really in uh in hindsight i should have i remember i told you that every year for like seven years bandai namco was like uh we'll bring you to tales fest and every year i'm like no i don't want to go i want to watch football yeah yeah all right let's which i'm yeah i'm doing there's perfectly legitimate people that are going out and covering the game just just to say i'm not saying anyone going to japan on xbox path has sold their soul i am saying that oh okay go do it who cares yeah it's whatever take the corporate money nothing matters anymore uh playstation's top 10 best selling games so only on playstation platform shows mlb the show and wwe at the top with requiem Call of Duty and NBA rounding out the top five marathon slots at number six and Crimson Desert at number nine only on physical sales.

2:01:53Pretty, pretty strong. So anyway, that's all the sales content that we have and therefore all the news we have for this week. Let's get into what we're playing, my friends. I think the best way we'll do this is we'll start with Dustin and then we'll go to Chris and then we'll go to me. And so Dustin, talk about Vampire Crawlers first and that pragmata will allow us to go to Chris. Chris could talk about his games ending with mouse PI, which can go to me. Does that make sense?

2:02:20Colin Moriarty:Is that some synergy right there? Yeah, look at that. That's strategy. Take it away with Vampire Crawlers. Vampire Crawlers. This is a spinoff Vampire Survivors game, but it's very different. It is a card battler game. And when this first got announced, well, I was unsure about it because I like some card like video game card games, but I'm kind of hit and miss with it. Like I played some of Slay the Spire. I liked it. I didn't love it. And I haven't played Slay the Spire 2 or anything. So I was unsure about this. And a few months back when the demo came out, I played it for about 20 minutes and I turned it off because it was so good that I did not want to have to wait.

2:03:07Colin Moriarty:Like I didn't want to play a lot and then have to wait for the full release to come out. And it's awesome. It is, as the title suggests, it's a mix also with dungeon crawlers. So it has this element where you land on the, you're on the map and it has like kind of a square POV and a map where you traverse to the different enemies. You get cards, which are the different weapons from vampire survivors. So there's like the Bible attack. there's the garlic that you use and all of them have different ways that you can attack enemies with them and I don't know how much I want to go into the combat because it's I don't want to bore people too heavily but what I really like about it is that it's really combo based so each card has a different amount of mana that it uses up so there's like a zero certain cards that are zero and there's ones that have take up one mana or two mana and so the game is really all about structuring combos so you want to play like a zero card a one card and then a two card and then repeat zero one two and when you get up to that higher combo you do insane damage and it's so satisfying and it has a lot of this it has a similar feeling of vampire survivors because you open up chests it does like the casino thing where it's like all the dopamine factory of vampire survivors is still there, even though it's turn-based.

2:04:38Colin Moriarty:You have the different, I guess they're crawlers, not survivors in this game that you can choose to play as that have different starter cards and different abilities. There's the arcana cards that have like whole game modifiers. As you play each level, you get coins, which then you can also buy upgrades. So it's like do 10 % more damage or earn an extra re-roll on cards. and it's, it's just so incredibly good. I'm addicted to it. And I got Holly to play it as well. Cause she loved vampire survivors and she is hard, was hardcore about Slay the Spire. She beat the whole game. I think on, I don't know if every character or whatever, but she was super big on that.

2:05:22Colin Moriarty:And she told me, she's like, this is, this is better than Slay the Spire in her opinion. So high, high praise from Holly. But yeah, it's, I think it's 10 bucks. and it's available on all platforms i did sorry colin i chose to buy it on steam i was considering playstation because i have the vampire survivors platinum yeah you do you do but i really wanted the consistent portability i wanted to play it on steam deck and i know there's portal and stuff like that but i just wanted to be like i don't i want to be able to play this when i'm on a road trip and maybe at some point i will pick it up and play it again on playstation for the platinum run and I'll be well versed in it at that point.

2:06:03Colin Moriarty:But I'm really impressed by it. I'm just surprised that Vampire Survivors was like a surprise hit from a new developer that they made this game that was basically crack cocaine. And they've managed to do it again in a different way. They've made Cocaine 2. Well, really Cocaine 3. Yeah, Cocaine 3. Cocaine 3. So Vampire Crawlers, highly recommend it. Is Cocaine 2 Vampire Survivors or a crack? oh oh interesting cocaine crack this is this is this is cocaine to recoked

2:06:42Colin Moriarty:repowdered repowdered yeah so vampire crawlers check it out it's awesome next moving on to pragmata we've been saying pragmata in the game though they say pragmata how are we going to handle this chris i'm i'm saying what i i'm saying whatever my brain tells me to say when i say it sure i know that's completely fair i think the i think these like really minute pronunciations are like fine yeah i don't care about being like lore accurate lore accurate pragmata pragmata so yeah it's awesome it's also really awesome it's a really weird time for me with games because i'm addicted to vampire crawlers marathon and pragmata is also really, really awesome.

2:07:30Colin Moriarty:What I'm surprised by, because we've talked about the general premise of the game many times with its hacking, is if you play the demo, it's pretty basic as it should be, kind of introducing you to this concept of hacking a bot and then being able to shoot it and kind of navigating around using the dodge, using some of the other weapons as well. But as you play the game, It just continually adds more layers to it that I absolutely love. In particular, what I found about, I think I'm probably 60 % of the way through the game at this point, is that the hacking eventually becomes not just a way to unlock being able to fight an enemy, but also as a way to do combat.

2:08:16Colin Moriarty:So your primary weapon always has infinite ammo. It just takes a while to reload. so you hack the bot make it so you can shoot it unload your clip and then while you're waiting for it to reload you can either switch to another weapon or you can do another hack that depending on how you navigate through it will do even more damage and so i've gotten to the point where i'm doing a hack i'm unloading my gun and at the same time with my thumb starting the next hack and that's when it starts you really start to get a flow with it and the variety of the secondary guns as well is really neat all of them having a different flow to it one of them is kind of like a shotgun one of them is a missile launcher one of them is a laser that gets more powerful the longer you hold the trigger down and it's uh it all flows together so nicely and it kind of I've always was I was wondering why this game was delayed so long we don't really know the answer to that but the combat in this game is so novel that I wonder if that's where it was like they I could see them having a hard time tuning this to make it feel right and feel good because on paper it doesn't really sound fun where it's like oh in order to shoot someone I have to do a little grid based mini game no thank you right so they really pulled it together with the combat the story is fine i'm not in love with the story i think the setting on the moon is really cool the voice acting and the performances are a little hokey i think at points they kind of feel they remind me of like dubbed anime a little bit and the girl the diana she sounds like an adult woman trying to do the voice of a little girl so it's a little stiff at points but it's very charming uh regardless and i'm curious about where it's going to go but i'm not it's not the type of game where i'm thinking like i gotta know what happens next i gotta i gotta see the next step of their journey so overall i think it is awesome and i'm having a great time with it and I'm curious what Chris is thinking about it because you were you were interested but you weren't necessarily like gung-ho about it so but I'm you alluded to me last night that you're enjoying it yeah dude I love it I think it's awesome I think it's way cooler than I thought it was going to be I don't know what I expected it to be really I also kind of went dark on it not even necessarily because I wanted to avoid spoilers but because I was just like yeah I'll i'll play this i'm not that into it but like i am curious about it we've been hearing about this game for a really really long time the first teaser trailer was like god how long ago was that like yeah it feels like forever ago yeah so it's been in the back of my mind for a really really long time and i do have to say the tone of that original teaser trailer is not the tone of whatever this game is and it's been so long that i kind of don't mind um because i kind of forgot but But yeah, man, this combat is really, there's something about it that like scratches something in my brain where I'm just like, I really like this.

2:11:32I love that. I don't know if, and correct me if I'm wrong. This, I don't think I've played a game that has this exact gameplay style. Like, I don't know if, I can't think of anything that I would compare it to, really. like there's a little bit of resident evil kind of in in just like the general kind of you know third person you know shooting and moving around and there's a little bit of other things in there but this exact like hacking minigame while you're shooting things and using the using the face buttons the triangle circle square and x as as like essentially a d-pad in a in a modern game feels so strange because that's something like my brain immediately was like psp you know i mean where you were using the the d-pad as like a the camera because you didn't have a second analog stick and it's just like oh this feels so weird but it feels kind of good and i like how there are certain weapons that kind of feed into the grid like there's like a sticky bomb launcher that like if you hit enemies with it it gets rid of certain parts of the grid to make it easier to hack and like it's like it's also a little bit of snake too because you have to choose which buffs and debuffs to hit on your way to finalizing a hack and there's like a perfect parry or not a perfect parry but like a perfect dodge and yeah like I don't know I'm really the gameplay part of it is is a lot more sticky with me and a lot more enjoyable than I I really thought it would be I thought it might be stiff I thought it might be kind of awkward I thought maybe it was more flash than substance or whatever but like it's it's fairly in depth and there's a lot more to this game than i than i thought there would be there's extraneous aspects to it that i'm not i don't want to say i'm not the biggest fan of i just don't they're kind of like nothing to me it's there's like a hub area where you kind of i think it's called the cradle i think am i wrong dustin is it like this weird like hub in the middle where like you kind of go back to when you die and like it's where you go to upgrade stuff you get to kind of flesh out the relationship between uh hue and diana the the main characters and it's charming it's cool like the story is good enough i'm not really i i don't really care uh it's and i don't mean that in like a negative way i just mean like it's serviceable it's keeping me along i am curious um i'm not like crying you know i'm not like i'm not like moved to tears or anything but i that's always been like the least important aspects of video games to me so it's not really a problem but the hub world is kind of like yeah whatever like you get to flesh out little bits of the space you get to give diana like little bits of earth to kind of experience and there's like some dialogue there and it's it's cute uh i'm not a hub world person i i don't like it's it's the one thing about doom eternal that i don't like is the hub world so like hub worlds to me in general are just kind of whatever but like the core gameplay of it like moving through these spaces and shooting and hacking and you know finding collectibles and like finding like oh upgrade tokens like it's really the pacing is really good like it's really momentum oriented and i'm rarely lost or confused or not doing something that i want to be doing for long stretches of time i'm not like picking flowers with some random woman for three hours oh doesn't doesn't doesn't he he's out he couldn't he couldn't handle the uh the god of war slander i've had enough hold on should i keep you just

2:15:00Colin Moriarty:keep going yeah just keep going just keep going it's my my camera's overheating i need a new air conditioner okay but yeah it's it's i really i think it's authentically great i i actually take a little bit of issue with some people being like oh it's like a it's like a seven out of ten and it's like but it's really good and i'm like i think it's better i think it's it's it's it's substantial i think it's genuinely like from a gameplay perspective i think it's pretty fucking immaculate and uh i'm really into it i'm like i want to say like eight hours in and i i gotta say i bought it on a whim because i i kept seeing the these psychotic conversations online about it i was like all right you know what i was going to play this later but like i'm curious about it let me strike while the iron's hot and i expected to play it for maybe i expected to play it for a little bit on the night that i got it and i ended up playing it for like five straight hours i was like this is this is hitting man so i'm i'm a big fan of pragmata i'm uh gonna be playing more of it um probably later today uh i'm just yeah i'm i'm enamored with it and that is it a spoiler to mention the the the city aspect because i feel like that's been in oh that's been i think that was in like the the reveal first trailer right yeah the new york city on the moon is fucking cool like i was like i was like this is combining this is combining a lot of things that i really like together in ways that i never thought i would see time square on the moon that's insane uh so whoever thought of that is uh top tier good good job but it's a it's a really great game i'm also playing randomly also this is another thing i kept seeing on my timeline i just like i had to see what the hell this was i'm playing tamadachi life mike is playing that as well yeah because i was like hey you know what like i don't dislike these games i just they don't really click with me generally but i am curious about them and i have a i see the value in it like i played animal crossing new horizons when that came out just because we were all locked indoors and i was like looking for something to do and I I found enjoyment out of it but it was it was never going to be a game that I was going to stick to and this is largely the same but it is fun to just make sims based on real people or fictional characters and just like let them and then it's become like a bit of a habit for me to like at the end of the day I'll go in and I'll check in on them and there'll be some like bullshit happening and it's cute it's it's fun it's not a particularly gameplay heavy game I'm not planning on playing it for particularly very long but I did want to dabble in it a little bit I've got an island full of I've got me and my friends and then I've run out of people that I want to include and so now it's just like I got George Costanza in there I got the Soup Nazi in there and I have the Soup Nazi living in his own house really far away from everybody so he's curmudgeonly and I want to encourage that and it's cute it's the same thing it's almost like I don't know sea monkeys or like an ant farm with like a little bit of like I don't know there's there's an aspect to it that's interesting um it's cute I imagine most people know what this game is it's that was the thing for me though it's like I wanted to know what the hell this was because I kept seeing these out of out of context snippets of of people like these Tamodachi these me characters talking about like uh you know but oh I I want to talk about bombing the middle east and like the other candidate and the other characters like i love bombing the middle and i'm like what the hell's going on what is this nintendo game and i was like can you really just put anything in there and like you really can like it's just it's there's no censorship at all it's kind of it's kind of crazy it is a little bit at odds with how how adult it can be because you could just have these characters saying really heinous shit but they're really not allowed to do anything so that's kind of there's a weird like mismatch there but it's cute it's endearing yeah i i i've made it a little bit of a habit of like spending like maybe like 10 minutes every night kind of checking in seeing what seeing what crushes are the crush the the soup nazi has a crush on george uh-oh which is uh entertaining but yeah it's it's tamadashi life you can look there's a demo i think on switch as well also i wanted a reason to use my switch that's been sitting there collecting dust and this seems like a pretty good reason um uh but not much to say about that other than it's it's entertaining and amusing and then i'm also playing mouse pi for hire this is uh the 1930s rubber hose black and white inspired detective noir boomer shooter a lot of words there yeah um i man i like it but i like it way less than i was hoping to like it and i think part of it is like there's a there's kind of a i don't want to say a lack of commitment necessarily because that's not necessarily holistically what i mean but you start the game off and you have your your 2d character and it's like it's it's cool and then there's the 2d enemies coming at you and then the power-ups are 3d and then like these interactables all the interactables are 3d and it's like that's kind of i don't know like there's something about it that kind of feels like a little odd and not congruent and then it doesn't help that the the hitboxes feel a little off and uh it doesn't really like it's there's a lot of talking and it's like i is this a detective game or is this a boomer shooter like i i kind of i don't know i i i want to give it some more time i've only played it for about like three hours or so but like i was kind of bummed out that i didn't want to play more of it because i just kind of felt like i like the style there's a lot in the presentation that I fucking adore like there's like specifically like when it first starts off you get the option to kind of have the diffusion like the like you get to blur the screen a little bit and you get to like have the sound sound like it's coming out of a like an old like you get a lot of flexibility for the presentation and the presentation is easily the strongest thing about it I think personally it's carrying the game and that's not a knock really it's a perfectly competent game but Like this, this style is really, it's really great.

2:21:37And it, it, it feels good to, to inhabit, but also like, I don't know, the, the enemies aren't really that interesting. I feel like the guns don't feel that good and it's a boomer shooter. So I don't want to be like too critical of it. It is an indie game and it's great, uh, by all intents and purposes, but like, I'm not, I'm not feeling it as much as I wanted to. I'm going to give it some more time. I've only got like a couple of weapons so far. I think I have. I just got the. There's like a gun that shoots like acid bombs or something that you get fairly early that I just got. And the death animations are great.

2:22:16Again, the presentation's pretty top notch. I just don't know if I care about all this talking. Because I'm in the I'm in the mindset of like wanting to shoot everything. Because it's what the game is kind of built around. but then there's like these all these conversations i'm like i don't i don't i don't want this really but if i did want it i wouldn't want it to be a boomer shooter either you know what i mean it's kind of like this weird mix of like i want it i kind of want a fully committed detective game like this also and i also want like a fully committed boomer shooter that really takes into account like oh like enemy variety and like the feel of weapons and this kind of feels like it's doing both and not doing either one exceptionally well but the coat of paint that's over it is really really high quality and really cool so it's like it is entertaining and it's pretty good but yeah a little bit softer than i would have liked to be but i'm curious because i feel like i'm an outlier on that seems like a lot of people really like it and i do like it a little bit too by the way but um a lot of people are a lot higher on it i guess i'll pass it over to colin right because you're playing this as well right i am i'm i don't know i might might be halfway through it or something like that i uh i love it i think it's from my perspective i think it's exceptional and um it is a boomer shooter so like you said it's i don't there are i i play a lot of boomer shooters as people know and i have a lot of experience with them and there are better ones than others and i don't think that mechanically this is the best boomer shooter but i think it's totally no worse than good and maybe even great yeah um from that perspective they've never been the most dynamic games to play.

2:23:53It's really about like the experiential thing, which I think this game gets really right, like secret areas and collectibles and rotisserie of weapons and then some kind of modern accoutrements like the hub world and upgrading weapons and so on and so forth. You're absolutely right that the presentation carries the game in a way and that's, I think, by design and it's what makes the game so novel. It's, in my opinion, incredibly charming. and the character designs are amazing like i in my i i love the reporter chick that's like in the bar and she's got like the little pad or whatever and um like the the uh you meet like the vixen style chick that speaks in a french accent at first until you like call her out on it and then she just starts speaking in like an english you know an american accent which is funny some of the villains uh are are you know the bad guys are really cute like the bartender and the fat politician.

2:24:49And then I love like the little you see them and you start seeing them everywhere like just the little characters and animations that they make stick out. Like I love the bats. Have you guys seen the bats in the game that are just hanging upside down in places? There's like snails too. Snails, flowers. It's very cute. Like there's a lot there's a character early on I think it's like the first guy you like you're chasing down. And it did get a laugh out of me because you're in this like airship or something or like you're really high up and there's like engines going around he's like screaming you from across the he's screaming you from across this like large gap he's like you can hear me with with all these engines and he's like yeah so it's it's got some cute writing i like it yeah i want to be clear that i think it's good yeah i i got that vibe from you i don't yeah i audience why not no you hate it chris zero out of ten garbage you hate it you you said something negative you hate it it's not it's not marathon it sucks trash uh i do think there are some really i think strange things about it that i i think they will be able to fix and i think they'll be able to fix it fairly easily a major thing is that there's no backtracking i don't really understand that especially because you have a hub world like well you have a hub world and then you drive to the different locations it's very cuphead-esque in my opinion yeah um and minimap right exactly but it's like so you just dry what's the purpose of having this map if you can't go anywhere there's like little things like that and i look at that and i'm like this should be fairly easy to fix because another problem is that there's in-game currency like money and you use it to spend and and you can get locked out of things and you don't earn enough money and if you miss a collectible it's over like that's the reason why i haven't beaten the game yet is i'm using like a spoiler free collectible guide on each on each stage just to get everything because i can't go back you know so if i like go too far and then i'm like oh fuck i missed something it's like you got to restart the stage and if you get to the end of the stage and save it's over like um so i've been they're very generous with 50 save spots and i've been using them just to be sure that i'm not fucking anything up along the way because if it was a game if it simply had stage replay i would just play it blind but i don't have the time to like dick around with this thing if you're not let me replay it.

2:27:01So a little, you know, quality of life things. I think that a lot of people are complaining about. I think they'll fix that stuff. And, um, there is some choppiness and slowdown, which I don't typically notice in a lot of games if it's not severe, but like when there's a lot going on in the game, it chugs on PS five pro. So there's that, but, uh, but these are, are minor, minor quibbles. I think the other thing is, is, and it's become kind of a meme about the cheese in the game oh i continue to say and you and i talked about this on the stream uh dustin but i'll say it here for this audience is uh i find it charming actually it's a little annoying at first but then it's like it's kind of just endless and it's cute like they have an endless number of euphemisms that all have to do with cheese basically and it's cute yeah you know like falling into a pit of of cheap fondue or something like like weird things like i just think it's I find it charming.

2:27:57And I like, I don't know. I think it's so unique. There aren't terribly unique things going on in the games industry anymore. Right. And a lot of things are sequels or in my own game inspired by something or things or whatever. Like this is obviously inspired by a bunch of things too, but there's nothing like it actually. and it is another one of those ideas because it relies so much on its visuals just like cuphead that it will not be able to be replicated so that's the that's the coolest part is like you're going to be looked at as a complete if you do this rubber hose 30s thing in a shooter you're going to look like a fuck you're ripping these people off and it's just like that shitty cuphead spin-off we talk about right like you're kind of safe and i wonder something i noticed and i don't know if this is reading too much into it is when you go into the trophy list, it just says mouse.

2:28:52And I'm like, cool. It seems to me like that's the series is it's not like this one off game, like they're going to do more. And I bet you with the sales of the game being as strong as they are that they're going to do more. So I'm very complimentary of this game. I highly recommend it. So if you're in the boomer shooters, 100 percent, if you're into like weird aesthetics and unique approaches to presentation 100 if you're obviously into like noir and shit like that obviously you're going to want to check this out although i think some people that was the crux of the ign review right it was like it's not really noir it's like go fucking go suck a dick um otherwise i think it's it's i'm so happy for their success it's very crowded space to release a game unintentionally because you have pragmata that game windrows everyone loves saros is right around the corner vampire crawl or vampire crawlers right that's what's called uh this is a lot so to be able to carve out your space even for a moment i think is really laudable for them and then uh obviously i said it earlier but i i platinum saint saint slayer my own game on uh ps5 so that's episode that's number 206 i think i was the third person in the world to platinum the game And I wanted to ask you this, Dustin, because I think this is who it is.

2:30:09I noticed that on the Saints Slayer platinum list, zero Skirbo. That's the record guy, right? Yes. Yeah. So he's the first person to platinum the game.

2:30:24Colin Moriarty:Yep. Justin. Good dude. But he actually texted me. He's like, I got the platinum. Is Colin going to be mad? Oh, no. I don't give a shit about that. I got I did get the I intentionally did get the first trophies in the game for beating the game which I did want I just wanted trophies with like comically early like I have March time stamps on those trophies which I just wanted for for sentimentality after that I don't care I've been the first of platinum games it's it's fun it doesn't really matter yeah all right so that's it so yeah that's that's a lot pragmata sounds great vampire crawlers obviously mouse pi Tamodachi Life, Saints Lair a lot of good games for people to mess around with and it's just starting I didn't put it in the news because it's not really newsworthy what will come out of it is newsworthy but did you see that Rebel Wolves is having like they're going to reveal the release date of that awesome vampire game what the fuck is it called oh my god why can't I remember the name of it Zero Wolves Rebel Wolves Blood of Dawnwalker yeah there it is oh right very excited about that like that game that game look i saw a little bit more footage of it and i was like this looks phenomenal it really does it looks phenomenal i hope it's as good as it seems all right my friends let's end the episode as we always do with six questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas from the audience over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media you get myriad perks for supporting us over there as you know at different levels and one of them is to submit your inquiries uh in the thread on the news feed each week for the different shows Threads for sacred symbols go live on Wednesdays and are deleted Thursdays.

2:32:02So you have that little time period to get your inquiries in. We have read them throughout the show, but we have six more to end things with. And we begin with Nick Stolte, who has a kind of a tongue in cheek one, but I thought it was funny. Says, hello, gentlemen, you have said that video games cannot exist without capitalism. How do you reconcile this argument with the fact that communism somehow produced perhaps the greatest video game of all time, Tetris? Will you be disavowing capitalism and embracing the warmth of collectivism, comrades? friends. My answer to this is what else ever came out of the Soviet Union from the video gaming world other than Tetris?

2:32:32It's like, okay, you hit a home run. Good for you. And it was Howard Lincoln, by the way, the capitalist that made Tetris famous along with others. So they didn't even know what to do with it on their shitty Soviet computers until it was discovered by Westerners who saw the capitalistic gleam in the eye the dollar signs appearing and so on. So I just thought that was funny. I wanted to acknowledge that. I wonder what others there must be other Soviet games, but I don't know. And games coming from I mean, China is communist. Well, but not really. Yeah, they haven't been. They haven't really been for a while.

2:33:14Yeah, arguably.

2:33:16Colin Moriarty:But yeah, and I believe the creator of Tetris made no money off of it for a long time yeah it was basically it wasn't until um who's the guy that runs the tetris company i watched the whole documentary about bulletproof software uh i'm looking it up hold tight i'm looking it up yep but if you like a page enough is that well that's the creator of um hank rogers hank rogers yes hank rogers he uh it's if you play tetris forever you can get all the background about how tetris came to be and how it was very tense between some of the publishers and all the confusion around the rights and uh the communist government it's a it's a crazy story and the apple tv movie tetris while it is of course uh highly dramatized is an excellent movie really yeah i keep meaning to watch that it's so it's super fun i highly recommend it yeah i loved it the tetris i think is like one of the it not one of i think it it is like pinnacle like a pinnacle fucking video game i i think it's so perfect um to the point where like there's really not much you can do to it to improve upon it other than just give it different presentation so a tetris effect does it's just like what if it what if tetris but psychedelic and like dreamscape and kind of trippy yeah tetris effect added the zone feature which was like a thing where you get to build a huge stack so you could go beyond a combo of the Tetris five lines.

2:34:55Colin Moriarty:Sure. Which was cool. I don't know if it made it better but it made it different. Yeah but it's a perfect video game. The only big advancement in Tetris, there's two advancements in Tetris that I think revolutionized the game that are both very subtle. One is showing you your next piece and the other is storing a piece. Those were the two things in Tetris that really meant a lot to the way the game is played, right? I'd argue there's one more. What's that? The algorithm in which the pieces are laid out changed at some point. I'm trying to remember the exact details, but that's why Game Boy Tetris is much harder than modern Tetris, not only because of the hold that wasn't available, but the order in which it decides to give you pieces changed at some point to make it more playable.

2:35:46Yeah. Shout out to Tetris. Oh, yeah. Really wonderful game. Communism is uniquely inept in marketing and creating goods of consumer value. It's like it is, to be fair, interesting that it came out of there. But I think it shows you everything about that level of economic system where it's like you didn't know what to do with it. A good capitalist knows exactly what to do with Tetris. Dummies. All right. Swiss made menace wrote in and said, Hey, CDC, this one is mainly for Colin since he worked at IGN. I'll be very curious to see what you guys think of this. Can you be fired for writing a shitty review?

2:36:25Obviously reviews are just opinions, but is it possible to be let go of IGN from IGN if your opinion was way off the mark or in bad faith? I bring this up because IGN's review of mouse PI for hire has been getting killed on social media and there's even a YouTube video titled might be the worst review I've ever seen that has 3.1 million views. So is it possible that person could be fired just for having a very unpopular opinion about a game? Anything's possible. You're an at will employee, but I would say no. The reason for this is you don't just publish your review. It goes through people. And really, you have to decide where the buck stops.

2:36:58You are always going to be an outlier. And by the way, didn't they give it a six? Yeah. And it's probably like, what, an eight something on Metacritic. I've been way more off than that. It doesn't mean that the review is necessarily wrong. I read the IGN review and I think it is weird, but it comes from a certain perspective. And I think reviews from perspectives that are blatant are good. This is why I don't like scores. The review, I always bring up Amy as an example, but another example of a review that I think is interesting that I interviewed a game. It was called Under Siege. It was a PS3 game and it was so fucking hard, dude.

2:37:40like in and i think that's what my review is about is like i can't i don't know man like you know like and i think that's the unfortunate thing about a score because that is such a valid review you know but then that you have to attach this new this number this numeral that then gets baked into this other number that matters for some reason that's the unfortunate thing but that's not really igan's fault you know like i'm not saying this as an ex-ign person it's just like It's kind of unfair to say we have a rubric, right? And we have a bunch of people who we endorse to score things on the rubric.

2:38:16You then take it and ingest it, and that's our fault. And I'm like, I don't think so. That's actually your problem. So this is why scores should just be gotten rid of, because otherwise that review would just be a novel perspective on a game that carries as much weight as people want to give the words, as opposed to focusing on the numbers and the pluses and minuses at the end. And I hate that shit. you know so no like i think anything can happen you can get fired for a review i people have i i know someone who got fired for a review at i well first of all uh the guy at ig that we interviewed uh philip mussen was literally fired for a review but when i was there i i've said this before is that i was there i started on us on um right around the time this other guy started, I won't use his name, but he reviewed, as I recall, reviewed the orange box, but something about the review wasn't right where he said he played the game, but didn't, or something of this nature happened or parts of the game.

2:39:15And I think it was verified by achievements and backend access to, you know, telemetry. And he got fired. And I remember that happening at GameSpot around the same time as some dude who reviewed an MMO, gave it a bad score. And then the devs were like, you played the game for two hours. We have all your data right here, you know, kind of thing that gets you fired. But rendering an honest opinion, I gave Dragon's Lair a shitty score at IGN because I think that game sucks. That's like one of the most famous arcade games of all time. It's beautiful. Play it. Go and play it. And tell me it's fucking good.

2:39:48You know, it's certainly Dagan wants to kill me for that because he loves Space Ace and all that shit too. But it's like people were so mad about that, but IGN didn't do anything about that. I was probably four points off the Metacritic. Right. So I just don't, it's always, it's, I've said before, it's nerve wracking when you publish and you give a game a score and you don't know what everyone else is going to say, but you're going to be the outlier once in a while. That's just the way it goes. So no, you're not going to get fired for that. And I think people are being a little dramatic about the mouse review on IGN for as weird as I think some of it is and how hung up it is on the war and all that kind of stuff.

2:40:23It's like, whatever, man, these things have, these things will occupy as much space as you allow them so just look at it that way chris do you think this uh you think this person should be fired for their mouse pi for a higher igin review no no no i mean it's first of all it's traffic now which is uh the only thing that matters right at this point so like it's kind of better for you to have like some weird controversial review than otherwise but But yeah, I don't know. I read a little bit of it and I was just like, yeah, I mean, I it kind of gets into that ludonarrative dissonance thing where it's just like I get it and I appreciate I understand that it's weird that Nathan Drake is is a happy go like we like him, but he's also a serial mass murder.

2:41:10Like, I understand that that's like an amusing thing to bring up. And I do kind of get like and I I was reading the review, though, and I remember being like Like, I don't fully agree with this, but I do see. Because, dude, when I'm when I'm in the detective mode, I am kind of like I do kind of want this to be a little bit more of a detective game. And then you're kind of thrown into this thing that's doom, but it's not quite as I don't know. I get it. There's like there's a bit of a disconnect. I think he's a little bit hung up on the history. Like he brings up the history of like some film noir stuff, like actual like films and stuff.

2:41:41And I'm just like, yeah, maybe doesn't need all that. but at the end of the day he said it was okay which i think is like a completely valid like it's not like egregious it's not like he gave it like a three or something it's absolute trash it's not this is garbage because it's not my idea of noir you know like that would be kind of insane but like the conceit of the review is ultimately that like yeah it's okay and i'm kind of in that pool really like i think it's i think it's good okay i wouldn't say it's bad i think the presentation is excellent i think the the core moment-to-moment gameplay i think is fine um i don't see a huge issue with it i think people are just weird about everything now so like there's no respite and you want to have on people can't have honest conversations anymore

2:42:26Colin Moriarty:that's true yeah people can't decide whether or not uh they care about ign reviews or they don't yeah it's insane because that's a tale as old as time believe me oh i'm sure um looking over and reading some of this review, I'm with Chris where it's like, I agree with a lot of this review, actually. And in regards to the noir stuff, he brings up, it's a goofy Looney Tunes FPS. Why should I care about any of that? And the answer is because Mouse wants you to. It wants you to believe that this is important. And I agree with that, where the game spends a lot of time on its story and talking to characters.

2:43:05Colin Moriarty:And you do get a lot of charm from those characters. As Colin mentioned earlier, the characters are really cool. So I guess the time the game spends wanting you to invest in the story doesn't really lead up to anything that compelling. And I, yeah, I agree with that. And I agree with some of those other points, too, that it is like a very competent boomer shooter, but not much more than that in terms of its gameplay. And that's going to feel different or resonate with people in different ways. I think my thing back to what you were saying Colin is that while I agree with almost all of his points it all depends on how much emphasis you put into different things so like the aesthetics and the charm of the game is what when I did my video review I was like they nailed it because they absolutely when it comes to the charms and the aesthetic of the game something I really care about was amazing in fact like 10 out of 10 in terms of the black and white noir look and style and feel of the game.

2:44:06Colin Moriarty:But that's not going to carry for everybody. So I would disagree with his final scored number of the game. But it really doesn't matter. Unfortunately, it does matter for the game and how people decide whether or not they want to make a purchasing decision. But scores are dumb, as we've always said. Yeah, I hate them. I hate them. They're good for vernacular. they're good for like the quick quib about you know like especially the especially the idea of the seven I think everyone understands what that means but it doesn't mean that it's it's productive and I wish we can get away from it you know yeah the the real bummer I think is that like I think scores would be fine if we were just broadly more intelligent I was about to bring that up Chris is that it's the problem is the people are too hung up on the score the score is above everything else it's the priority that i don't know if i should say we or people in general put on the number above everything anything else it's the problem yeah the the score should should be ideally at least and i don't know how if this is how like people at ign think about it or if like this was the the core of the idea when this apparatus was kind of like constructed but like in my mind the score is kind of like a thing to get you curious about what the review is going to be like you see a review that says like it has six on it and you know that that's kind of like okay or like not as high as other scores you'd be like oh i wonder what that is and then you read the review but most people don't do that and and worst of all the people who do sometimes now um i think go out of their way to sensationalize things a little bit more than they otherwise would be for you know engagement or whatever because we're in this engagement driven culture now so So it's like it's a lose-lose.

2:46:00I think a score is valuable at a glance. Just like, oh, interesting. That got a six. I wonder why. And then you read the review and then you kind of have like a more fleshed out opinion. But like people stop at the review and it's a bummer. Or people stop at the score and that's a failing of a myriad of other things that we do not have time for. What the hell's going on over there, Dustin?

2:46:19Colin Moriarty:I don't know anymore. Fair enough. Just a quick little flash. I wanted to be in darkness. yeah that's how i'm doing the rest of the show like this you're like the uh the the banker in deal or no deal the first time it went dark was because i was trying to turn on my air conditioner so my camera wouldn't get too hot again and i have a little convenient button here on my home screen it accidentally got tapped no i can just sorry if you're epileptic yeah you're getting you're fucking them up later you're fucking them up though it is funny though just to cap this off is because obviously I was involved with IGN beginning in 2002.

2:46:56So I was there for 12 years and I saw it all and I heard it all. I was like, there is this generational problem of people not understanding a publication's review and that it is an endorsement of an opinion that you can't possibly get all of these people together and they all share the same opinion, thus render the same verdicts that can then be indistinguishably interchanged with one another so that everyone at IGN thinks that this game is a seven and everyone at IGN thinks this game is a it's never the way it worked I don't understand what the fuck people don't get about that it's so weird like you have to be a fucking retard not to understand that well truly yeah I mean right right it's so frustrating it's like IGN said this about this and this is I'm like they they what who cares do you have any idea I would be curious I'm sure they can pull the number at IGN it's like how many people have reviewed something it's got to be over a thousand between all the freelancers all the like it's like come on guys yeah and i've also said and i'll just say it straight up and maybe i wouldn't admit this so much if i was there still there it's like i don't even agree with a lot of the scores i gave games now like there are games where i'm like i i underscored this or i overscored this or i would have done this differently and the text rarely would ever change it's just like my outlook on what i said i overscored playstation all-stars 100 like i didn't think i was but i did uh what'd you score it i think i gave it an eight or an 8.5 or something and it's like no there's no way but like that's an authentic reflection of the way i felt at the time and that's all it is so you could just take it or leave it I reviewed it 14 years ago.

2:48:42So things. So I just don't, people don't look at them as like stamps and times from individuals. And the only thing you get every day is different is like, if you had like a Roger Ebert or something. Yeah. It's like, well then you can theoretically have like a cohesive thing or just my reviews. Then theoretically you should be able to put them in order of like how I feel about them. And they should have some sort of cogent outcome. But I, I've been gone from IGN for 12 years and I still get angry about it. Like that people are like still, they're still dealing with that. It's like, Jesus Christ.

2:49:15The one one wrote in and said, hello, CDC. I don't know if you saw the news. Rebecca Valentine left IGN a few weeks ago and joined Kotaku as a senior reporter. This is what the owners of the site said, quote, we acquired Kotaku less than a year ago and are genuinely happy with where things stand. The brand is moving in the right direction. The audience is there. The traffic is going up. It's doubled since we acquired the team. And we're now at a stage where we can bring the kind of senior talent that takes things to the next level. That's what this hire means, end quote. What do you boys think?

2:49:41Can Kotaku be saved? Rebecca was a great reporter at IGN, and it seems like Kotaku's owners are trying to make it a decent gaming news outlet again. But they have a lot of work to do to fix the reputation of that site, especially after so many years, after the golden years, when Jason Schreier worked there. But this does say a lot more about IGN. But this does say a lot more about IGN than Kotaku. If they lost another senior member there in the last few months, I don't know that it says more about IGN than Kotaku. She probably just got offered a lot of money. And that's, that's the move you make.

2:50:07I, I don't know Rebecca Valentine personally. I don't care about Rebecca Valentine personally, but I will say that her reporting, she seems to be a talented reporter that has an agenda. So you're always going to like, you know exactly what you're going to read when you, when you read her stuff and you won't, and you won't read any reporting from her virtually that I've ever seen that's bubbled up. I'm sure she's done a lot of things that have maybe not bubbled up. But anytime I see her, it's all about labor, about something unfair, about something, you know, tawdry or whatever, but never seemingly about other things.

2:50:37So that kind of journalism doesn't really do it for me. I want people that like are willing to report, you know, a variety of stories and are good at it. Because otherwise, I kind of don't trust your political outlook, to be honest, if you're just trying to run a labor story through or do this or that or the other thing. But there's no doubt she's one of the most prolific reporters in the contemporary industry, which frankly doesn't say very much. Can Kotaku be saved? No, I don't think so. But it's funny that I was actually going to reach out, Chris, to Ethan Gok or Gok, who he was the one that wrote the story about us right back in the day.

2:51:15Yeah. Yeah. And we've had a bad relationship with him, I guess, or an even and unsteady relationship with him, but I think I'm pretty sure he's the editor in chief of Kotaku now. And I was going to reach out to him and be like, let's talk about the site. But I think I don't know that he would say yes or not. I don't care about that because I ask people things that say no all the time. That's part of being in media. So that's fine. But I wonder if I could even approach it fairly because I hate them so much, like as a publication and like what they tried to like what I feel like they bent the arc in the industry towards and the kind of bullshit that they infested the industry with for many years that it's hard for me to treat them fairly.

2:51:57And especially after what they wrote about us and the character assassination, I think that was that helped contribute towards. So I don't think that conversation should or will happen. But from the outside, I just think who's a Kotaku fan? That's what we have to understand first. Kotaku had a real fan base in 2010, 2012, even 2015. who's like the modern Kotaku fan now and like who's reading video game websites and is this a place you really want to be in and I wonder like what they paid Rebecca Valentine um to get her to move over and if it'll work I just think that it's such a poisoned brand like I don't think people have any respect for it I know internally at many like people people internally at publishers and developers have hated Kotaku for years.

2:52:47But I'm talking about audiences. I just don't feel like they have one. But maybe I'm totally wrong. They said that the traffic doubled, but that's like Xbox talk, right? Like doubled from what? Sure. You had 10 ,000 views on a story, then you got 20 ,000. That's not that impressive. Not for nothing, you know? So yeah, Chris, go ahead. No, I mean, I just, it's one of the can Kotaku be saved is like a weird the framing is specifically like oh can Kotaku specifically be saved with their reputation I really don't even think their reputation matters at this point it's so like we're dinosaurs by comparison like we like there's shit that I remember or that we remember that like nobody gives a shit about anymore has they've either forgotten it or there's a completely new audience of people who it doesn't even hold any weight to them you know what I mean like reputation especially now I don't know if you've noticed.

2:53:43Reputation doesn't really matter all that much as far as success goes. Really what matters is how good you are at manipulating algorithms and how much traffic you can get. That's really all that matters. That's really kind of the bottom line of it. And if they can do that, then sure, I guess. I would argue that it's less about Kotaku being unsalvageable more so. It's more about the space of video games riding on traditional websites. That doesn't really seem like that big of a growth market. it doesn't seem like where things are happening like i i wonder like what the like what the what the demographics are of the people who go to that website like age wise like i like is it 15 year olds i doubt it could be maybe there's like a maybe there's a huge thing happening right now where like maybe the phone is becoming so obviously toxic that people are trying to like move away from apps or whatever in like almost like a almost in the same way that like millennials or like younger millennials kind of went to like towards vinyl and kind of boomed that like that uh that shrinking market like big again like now to the point where they can get vinyls at barnes and noble now you know because they're that reliable again maybe there's like a nostalgia aspect to it but like i don't i don't see that i haven't heard anything about i haven't seen that wave going on about like all about video game websites so i just don't it's not that i think kotaku is uniquely unsalvageable i just think like the general model of video game website where like you write an article or even just like websites in general where people write articles is the move in a world that's like primarily like tiktok youtube shorts yeah it's a weird place to be.

2:55:31Instagram reels like I just don't maybe you can get a foothold with a lean team and you can make a pretty modest name and you know pretty relatively safe net for you like maybe that's possible but like I just don't I don't see that happening I've been wrong before though so who the fuck knows what do you think Dustin?

2:55:56Colin Moriarty:I largely agree with both what you and Chris said just that uh websites are dying and kotaku has is not uniquely positioned to have any kind of resurgence people are more interested in individual creators at this point like even people groups like us are uh on the way out the fact that we've managed to survive and even thrive in that uh is interesting just because so much of it now is focused on individual creators it's like people ask me like should i start a podcast should i do something like you guys do i'm like probably not you should probably do it on your own because that's what people are looking for is a more they want to find their their guy that they understand their opinions they may not agree with them on everything but they can understand where they're coming from they have that kind of connection where they can understand their opinion.

2:56:55So we'll see.

2:56:57Colin Moriarty:I think websites will largely be relegated to regurgitating press releases. Occasionally you do have outliers where there is actual news and research being done. Sure. But then it just gets turned into videos and podcasts like this. Like we just, we, you know, you don't want to say we're not stealing the content, we're covering the content, but that eliminates and ameliorates the need of an audience to even go for the original content, which they could go to. And that's why I always try to cite my sources and encourage people to go read the things because I want them to. That's a big thing that I want to throw out there as we move on to the next issue is that much like I always tell people to look outside oneself and how with a PlayStation, for instance, like my buying behavior, I wish my buying behavior was the behavior of everyone because then we would have a very different gaming industry with a lot of different games in it.

2:57:48but it is what it is. It's a similar thing with websites where it's like, I wish that it was still Web 1.0. I loved it. I grew up in that era. It's how I got into the industry and I love writing and reading and it just is what it, it truly is what it is. When we bring up, when we bring up to, Chris is going to get a package. You got to go get that. when we bring up and then he gets mad because I bring that up. But then I'm like, well, people are curious, like what's going on? You know, they want to know. They want to know. But. I would love to live in an era having worked on a website for 12 years.

2:58:31And before that on fan sites and everything I got and game facts, I would love to live in that world still. It just doesn't exist. And people ask us sometimes, and I think Matty even and I talked about it because that's kind of where he wants. He's like, what about a website with like reviews and stuff? And I'm like, I just don't think that's a good idea. You know, like. I wish we lived in that world and maybe. things will snap back in some way one day where people want something more quaint. I doubt it, but maybe. So yeah, it's as I think everyone's said already, it's like Kotaku has a bad reputation, but even if it didn't, I don't know that you can really salvage it.

2:59:10It's like Game Informer coming back recently. Like I was so funny and it's cool. Good for them. I'm happy for them and I'm happy people are enjoying it, but like this excitement around it and I'm like, no one's going to talk about Game Informer after two weeks. And lo and behold, it's like, yeah, because Game Informer is even from an earlier era. Yeah. Magazine. Yeah. I love I love Matt like these like, you know, Sandy Bryce magazine. I thought I had a copy over here, but I don't think I do. But like, I love these niche things that are that are not corporate. That's like the only way you can do it.

2:59:41It's like Nintendo Force, Lucas Thomas's magazine that helped publish Phil summer's Mega Man guide or whatever. Like that's like a kickstarted slash Patreon supported Nintendo magazine, but it's a niche thing. That's the best you can do. And by the way, you can make really good money doing that shit. Go ask Lucas, go ask Phil, go ask us, but you can't, it's never going to scale to what it used to be. And I imagine gaming or I mad, well, we know this already. Dustin already says, this is like gaming, gaming ad, gaming adjacent ad revenue is already in the gutter imagine how bad cpm is on ign for banners and shit like so even if you can get people to the sites like you're making a fraction of what you used to make ads used to be so valuable on ign the reason that we had a video like everyone's always like why did you have an endemic video player it's like dude because like the ad revenue on our endemic video player is nuts or was like orders of magnitude higher than you would get on youtube it all it's all based on that and if you don't if you can't sell your inventory you have a big problem.

3:00:43And that's so that's the other question is like, who's interested in this ad inventory? They're barely interested in the ad inventory in the game space on YouTube. They're not going to be interested in Web 1.0 adjacent websites, so we'll see what happens. But hey, they're trying. Tip of the cap to the man in the arena. I mean, cool. Pugh Pant wrote in, said, hey, Colin, Chris and Dustin, do you guys turn on motion aiming when you play games on your PS5. I believe it's a game changer for aiming on a controller, and it helps me a lot during Resident Evil 9. It's also available in Pragmata, by the way, both Capcom games.

3:01:20Most Sony first-party studios and even Capcom are really good with adding it to their games. PS, it only gets activated while aiming down sights. Love the show. Thanks. I see this option, but I've never used it, and I never would want to. Maybe it does work really well. I don't know. Mouse has mouse and keyboard controls on PlayStation.

3:01:39So we're getting into this kind of more fusion approach to things. And maybe motion can become part of that, but I wouldn't want to do that. Personally, have you guys messed with this?

3:01:49Colin Moriarty:I have. Oh, OK. So motion aiming, I'm I'm interested in it. I'm a little hit and miss depending on the game. I first opened the possibility of it being good when I was forced to use it for Splatoon 2. Those games have motion aiming in the controller. And at first it was odd, but I was like, you know what? this actually has an a weird level of i don't know if i want to say mouse-like precision to it but it's actually quite good and i think that it is when you first think about the concept i think immediately a lot of people think of like motion controls we or something it's like i never want to do that again and i get it i totally get it uh but i did try it with resident evil i think i played most of the game that way i may have switched between it's odd because like sometimes i was really into it because it's like man i can really line up the headshots on this uh but i think i i also turned it on for pragmata and it was also decent but i ended up turning it off so but like splatoon i wouldn't want to play it any other way and i think i've tried it with other games too um but none of them are coming to mind but it's interesting it's uh pretty compelling i'm glad to see it's an option on these games so definitely for resident evil it's it's worth trying chris you're gonna play with your playstation move nah man your dildo control good yeah i'm good man you're a filthy controller player for marathon too so that is true you and pork i was commenting that like pork when you guys you can actually walk slowly like you can just tilt the stick up a little bit i'm like nope it's on or off i'm either moving or i'm not yeah it's almost like it's valuable i think look i think um i don't know like to me i i don't like the middle ground of of it you know i i think um i think i only really have experience using it in was it breath of the world or tears of the kingdom or both that had like the gyro aiming for the for the for the arrows both stuff like that yeah so I remember like I tried it on that and I was like I like this but the games that I play that I need to aim I'm aiming constantly like it's first person like it's fine for like short bursts of like accuracy when you like um when you're aiming down sights in like a Zelda game where you have to shoot like an apple off a tree or like when you got a headshot like three zombies in a room like that's fine because then you can go back to being normal but I play a lot of first person games where you're aiming all the time and specifically with marathon and like and just bungee games in general like there's a lot of valuable like hip fire in those games so you want to be able to aim even not even when you're not aiming down sights sometimes you just want to be able to spray and you can you know what I mean and so like having it on constantly I find distracting and I also find it to be this like weird middle ground of just like I'm on a controller let me commit to the controller experience I'm on a mouse let me commit to the mouse experience don't kind of give me this like weird thing that's going to rewire like i don't i'm already used to both of these in their own individual pockets like this is kind of a weird adjustment for me so like i've never really considered it especially for like real like competitive like multiplayer stuff which is primarily the stuff that i'm most concerned with my aiming in anyway um so like nah it's it's cool i like that it's there and it's a neat feature and i do dabble with it every now and again but it's it's always something that i i mess around with and then i and then i i turn it off i feel a sneeze coming let's see

3:05:42Colin Moriarty:excuse me oh oh you muted it i muted it yeah i always me i god i sneeze so much mike has told me like i just i'm a my my therapist told me this is like i just like grin and bear it all the time. Like, I clearly have bad allergies living down here, and I just deal with it. It's like, I don't do anything. I just raw dog it. Like, I'm in the 18th century. Like, I'm a guy living in a cave 300 years ago. Terrace Jerry wrote in and said, hola, amigos. What have you learned from playing video games? I truly believe that gaming is just as healthy of a pastime as reading. I wish the benefits of gaming were discussed more often, especially when the majority of the population is just mindlessly scrolling through social media or passively watching tv instead i would love to see a major player in the space launch an ad campaign highlighting all the cognitive and physical benefits of gaming we can talk about this and get into this it's totally fine i wanted to read this for a specific reason though who gives a shit not from terrorist jerry's question it's an interesting question but why are we so eager to prove ourselves.

3:06:48I've asked this for years. Gaming is this and gaming is that like, listen, man, at this point, if you don't get it, you don't fucking get it. You know, like it is the dominant and it's supreme and essential form of entertainment period. And it makes the money to show that and it has the people by the hooks to show it and more and more every day and every month and every year. I want us to move past this idea of like, and this is not again, Jerry, I'm not attacking you. You didn't do anything wrong. What I'm saying is who cares what people, naysayers think and who cares? You always see things like I would never date a man who plays games.

3:07:24Who gives a shit? Yeah. Okay. You know, like I don't, what is this? 1982? Like we don't have to worry about this anymore. So are there things to learn from games? Yes. Chris and I always joke around about how we'll be, well, I'll probably already be in there and you guys will join me later. It's like I'll be in the old folks home and be playing some stupid video game and will we find out that like generations that played games people that play games are are sharper or i don't know stay more active more or using parts of their brains and spatial awareness i don't know man but like to me i just don't know it's interesting and it matters literally matters but i think figuratively which is what we're talking about it actually doesn't matter at all and yeah i just think of all the times people tried to take out games or tried to, you know, bad mouth them and, you know, Tipper Gore and, and the ESRB and all Dungeons and Dragons and Christian right groups and everything.

3:08:25It's like, fuck off, man. I don't, I just don't think we have to justify ourselves anymore. And I think that that happened years ago. And now what you're finding out is that a lot of people want to be involved in this space, because this is where this is the supreme form of entertainment. Not this podcast. This podcast is is so far from being the supreme form of entertainment. I'm talking about video games. So yeah, what have we learned from them? I've learned so much. I said a major thing when I was a little kid, I learned about football by playing Madden. I became obsessed with football because of Madden and the playbook and all that kind of stuff.

3:09:01Yeah, I learned a lot about Norse mythology from Final Fantasy summons. I learned a shit ton of words. I learned the word quarrel from the legend of Zelda link to the past. Yeah, these like I literally did. But but I'm not trying to justify it through that that space either. And having an ad campaign highlighting that is cool. But I think people that are already in the space understand and know that. And the people that are kind of anti gaming or not into gaming. I know people in my family that like don't understand or give a shit or even trivialize gaming. It's like I'm not I'm not to to prove anything to you.

3:09:34So that's my take on that. Chris, take it however you'd like. I don't know. Like, I think I my mind races because I just don't I wouldn't even know how to not narrow everything down. Like, I know I've learned a lot. I hesitate to even specify because I just don't like it's all it's all knowledge that I take for granted now because I've had it for so long, you know, but I I'm in agreement where I just it's part of where I didn't really love the push for. TV adaptations that we were seeing and movie adaptations because it felt like, and by the way, not even just the adaptations from like games to film, but even just like the emulation of film in video games.

3:10:23And it's why like even things like, you know, Uncharted and The Last of Us, and they're very impressive, you know, there's an emulation there. And I remember feeling like it feels like we don't think we're good enough, really. And it kind of made me, it bums me out because those are great games also. but like it's it's it's trying to be tv you know in a way or it's trying to be a movie in a way and uh god of war is another one where it's just like it's it's you can tell that there's like this is hbo video game you know what i mean it's like it's it's good but like it it bums me out that i feel like it the conversation has shifted in response to games like those where it's just like a game like ball expid is not real that's not a real or like or like bellatro it's like that's mobile right right like it's not you know what i mean and stuff like no no you're like uh this is not the caliber and again this is just like the score situation with the reviews where it's just like this would these would be fine if we were just mature enough to like digest these things as they should be digested but like i do i do think it is just such a superior form of entertainment i think there's just so much that you get out of it i i look sometimes at some of the older people in my family and they're just like they're retired and they're not doing anything and they're just sitting there staring at the TV and I'm like brother you have this entire you more than anybody I know you got the time and you've got like such an insane breadth of experiences like just waiting for you for the first time you're 60 years old you get to play like the most iconic shit in the world for the first time ever like I'm envious of that in some way you know by the time I'm old I'll probably be jaded maybe I'll hate video games because I've played so many of them they'll all feel the same but like my retired uncles or whatever that are just sitting there not playing video games i'm confused by it because like what else what are you doing i know what you're doing you're sitting there watching the prices right over and over again and guess what yeah it is 6.99 yeah you're right play a fucking video game like what my dad's enamored with red dead but he hasn't played it and like maybe i don't know maybe he just can't maybe yeah our parents just there's something like my mom is much more open-minded about it my dad never gave a fuck like i can't convince him and he's and they're so old and they're there's they're in their ways now it's like that's that's fine what frustrates me more and this is what you're getting into is like knowing people that would appreciate it if they just gave it a chance right yeah and there are a couple people that i feel that way about where i'm like just shut the fuck up and like dude i i know my dad would be all over if if he if he had the patience and could get over it the hump to figure it out like if my dad reached like even base level proficiency i feel like i feel like he'd be all over like splinter cell like it's right it's his thing dude like i swear and he's just like he's not gonna watch uh ncis again yeah exactly and And then my mom will be like, haven't we seen this episode already?

3:13:23And he's like, yeah, I think so. I'm like, what are you doing? Yeah, it's it's I think it's intimidating. It's become more intimidating. I get it. I get it. But you also what you have infinite time at this point. Yeah, like at that stage in your life. Well, not infinite, I guess. But at that time, at that time in your life, you've got so much more time than at any point in your life before. Maybe since childhood. You know what I mean? to just be and exist you're retired enjoy it oh my god when i the second i don't have to do fucking anything it's i'm i'm not gonna stop you're gonna have to peel me away to just see my family probably yeah it's it's there's i just don't understand the real like i feel like books have really enriched my life and certainly tv shows and movies but like there's this uh plague around video games where it's like looked at as like a unique waste of time and i'm like if anything it's a unique way to engage someone in so many different ways doesn't trivialize those other things just says it kind of puts them all together um yeah it's all of it together and it's like an ultimate fusion right exactly you either get it or you don't but clearly more and more and more and more and more people are getting it you're peeling more and more people off but i also find in my life like you know a neighbor talk to a neighbor talk to a friend a friend of a friend whatever in there there are a lot of people that just don't play games yeah and but i'm sure they have other hobbies that right potentially keep them busy sergio pina has the final inquiry says hello boy oh i'm sorry dustin i i didn't go to you i'm sorry i just wanted it's so disrespectful i'm sorry good that's okay i don't i don't i know it wasn't intentional but you guys covered the the side aspect that wasn't you know terrorist jerry's

3:15:11Colin Moriarty:main question it was a point he made so it was worth talking about but sure talking about learning things from video games i feel like chris and i in particular we started playing video games uh right when we were learning how to read and i always think back to those early pokemon games when i was in kindergarten and i'm not pokemon did not teach me how to read certainly uh but pokemon did help strengthen my ability to read it was really basic stuff like basic little conversations but um yeah it was a a big boost i think and also like playing games like i feel like roller coaster tycoon like can you put an actual skill no but when i was seven years old did it teach me about uh like basic business sense of selling things it's like it's subtle math lessons it's subtle reading lessons history you know dude it's amazing and even when i was older like I think it was when I was in late high school when I played Total War Shogun 2 it's like wow Japan was really trying to kill each other quite a bit with all these different clans I didn't know anything about that yeah it's you don't need that justification but it is always there it's ever present I yeah I even think about like when I used to play role-playing games and like when I was a kid and Dragon Warrior games Final Fantasy 4 Final Fantasy 6 I would always keep a piece of paper next to me and i would keep track of like the items i couldn't afford and like how much i needed i would add them all up and it's just a little like i'm not i'm not saying it's like fucking splitting the atom but no yeah something you know i think i mean i think i learned how to socialize on like xbox live to be honest like i think like like that was i can see that like yeah clearly but just like being able like that's the thing too it's like dude the just being able to uh i i think it's a little underrated the freedom that that gave to kids like to be like pseudo adults with each other like not like because you couldn't really at least where i was like there was no way like if you wanted to hang out with your friends you couldn't just like hey you couldn't just walk to your friend's house without your parents you couldn't like call a cab you were eight so like being able or like nine you know like to be able to meet up after school digitally and just converse like people which you don't really get a chance to do in school really in school it's all like you know you're you're you're doing stuff that's important but you're not like doing the people thing really and so like having that after school like when you don't when you're not going to be doing anything else for like years and years and years it's like it's a useful tool you know because i was like i was a lot more like i didn't really i don't know i didn't i was a lot more quiet and then like days and days every day speaking with the same people over and over again like a party chat or whatever you just kind of learn how to be a person because you're interacting with people a lot more than you would like if i had if i didn't have xbox live or whatever at that age like i don't i don't i would have only ever seeing people like maybe on weekends or like at school for like maybe like 30 total minutes in between classes which is not a lot of time so like i think it's just i don't know man there's a lot of value um that i think is under underappreciated but we all know that and anybody who doesn't get it is just like they're not going to be convinced by an ad campaign you know it we don't we don't need them um the one thing i agree and the one thing i'm surprised about too is and i've articulated this in the past is I am flummoxed.

3:18:56Logic would tell you that we are more literate than ever. Logic would merely tell you that because we all have phones and computers and screens in our faces all the time. And what you find out is like there's entire high schools in like random cities where like every student is one inch away from being retarded. No one can read. And the average GPA is like a 1.1 or something. And you're and I asked myself, I'm like, how? How? Yeah. Like again, you can be a farmer, a farmer's son 150 years ago and be illiterate. And that makes sense. Sucks. But it's like you didn't need to learn how to read. You were fucking digging root vegetables out of the ground when you were a toddler.

3:19:35And all these things. But like you have this you have these screens in your face and these video games and these phones and all this. and you can't read. Like, I don't even, so I don't even know what's going on out there. You know what's worse is that the only stuff that you have to read, the only stuff that you have to read, like, like medical documents or like legal stuff is written in the most fucking confusing way possible. Sure, that's true. That's what makes it so much worse. This is like, all your optional reading is like so easy and so fun relative. And then like, you get like a, this i don't know some document is like here's jury duty and it's like all you know it's a hell to figure out but i i think the issue i don't know it's larger i guess but it's not that people can't read it's that they can't comprehend or interpret like comprehension so low everybody can read everybody knows what words mean theoretically like in a in a general sense but they don't know what they mean together or like they don't know how to put they don't know how to combine combine things with like greater contexts i remember when i first noticed this going on by the way like it is this might make you laugh maybe but like i remember when i first noticed that there was a real problem was when people when i would see uh people often saying like oh well that's just your opinion it's like yes yes obvious yes that's implied it's it that's implicit to the like that was when I knew and that was a long time ago that was like maybe like 2011 2012 that I remember started I started seeing that I remember being like oh it's over it's over because like what do you mean I have to tell you this it's uh are we are we serious

3:21:21man it I mean yeah the internet the internet has social media has proven the illiteracy is is it's flagrant it i find it disturbing like i am listen i'm just gonna say it i've never been more confident in my life than i am in the top five percent of literate people just based on the interactions people have with my own posts you know no doubt zero zero doubt just reinforced to me i thought i used to think i was a lot more average than i actually am i used to think i was yeah that's what's so funny about it's like i used to i used to think i was i used to think i was like really stupid and the sad thing is it's like i probably still am but i'm but i'm also where you know what i mean in the in that five oh like i am i am still probably just as stupid or as stupid as i was if not maybe a little stupider because there's no doubt i've forgotten a lot of things but everyone has fallen so low or at least like it that's what it feels like online which is not the best barometer no to be fair no and there's also a lot of fake stupidity going around which also takes the fun out of that too so it's all yeah whatever who cares it's performance like i see a lot of like people circulate like reddit posts like look at this reddit post i'm like this is so clearly not real like the amount of someone wrote it obviously but it's not this didn't happen you know the amount of times i've seen the same tweet go viral oh my god That makes me feel like it makes this is going to sound insane, but it makes me feel like I wonder.

3:22:50I wonder if that's how, like, God feels when he sees civilizations rise and fall again. You know, it's just like, oh, you're doing this shit again. Really? You did this again. So it's so great, man. Insane. All right. Now we'll get the surgery opinion. Yeah. It says, hello, boys, Colin. I wanted to remind you of a topic you said you talk about during an episode of Sacred But Never Did. The sadness of deleting friends from your PSN friends list. After you said on a stream that you had done this and there was a weird sadness behind it, I decided I'd try it myself. I went through my friends list and I was always doing so.

3:23:21I decided to check into some of these profiles that haven't been active in years. It made me wonder what happened to them. These are people I remember playing Rock Band and Destiny Online with, talking to, getting to know, but haven't been active in at least two or two plus years. Did they switch to PC? Did they grow out of gaming? One in particular made me incredibly sad that they haven't played a game in at least two years, but were still subbed to PS Plus. It made me wonder if they unfortunately passed away and their subscription was never canceled or their credit card hasn't expired yet. just wanted to remind you to bring up this topic and how you felt about it.

3:23:46Thanks as always. I thought we did talk about this on the show, but I'll take your word for it. I guess we did talk about it on the stream. So I did purge my friends list some months ago and I talked about on the, at the time that I felt this, uh, this, this, Oh, this, I don't know, this, uh, emptiness about how did I connect with this person? Why am I, most of them are people from IGN, like PSN people or whatever that found me over time. But I remember when the friends list was a hundred people, not 2000, which it became with PS4. So like you really got to know like the rhythms of these different people.

3:24:18And then as I stopped paying attention to my list, and then when I realized like I have like 500 inactive people on here and I started going into their profiles and there was a somberness to this person hasn't logged in. I think at some point it says more than a year. It doesn't get any more than that, right? And then it just says more than a year. It hasn't logged in, but you'd go to their trophies. And it's like, dude, this person hasn't earned a trophy in 10 years. or this person doesn't play games anymore. This person like even longer than that sometimes or, and I'm like, yeah, what happened?

3:24:51There is this interesting, when I moved out of my, or my, my grandma passed away and we sold her house on Long Island. We, we, we cleaned it out and she had a drawer, a very Catholic thing, a drawer of the funeral cards, weight cards that you get at Catholic funerals specifically. And I was going through them and they went back to the forties. until like the late 90s or whatever. And I was like, damn, this is like a, this is an ephemeral piece of some history that exists in this tangible way. And in some weird way that the legacy PSN game, because they're not deleting any of these names, even if they're inactive.

3:25:31It's like, they're just like permanent legacies of people that will one day and maybe don't already exist, but will one day not exist. And there's something truly haunting and melancholic about it. I don't know why. I just feel that way. I feel that way when I read old forum posts or usenet things that have been floating around for many decades or whatever. And I'm like, damn, this is ancient and weird and like an echo, a digital echo, very similar to those funeral cards. perhaps a final taste of a person's existence from your own perspective yeah there's something to it and I'll we'll all have those accounts one day and I remember the first company I ever saw deal with the idea that someone dies is Facebook where they have like that they memorialize your page and do shit like that yeah and I was like yeah that's kind of it's creepy and weird so as I was deleting those hundreds of people from my list that had been enacted and I was looking at some of them.

3:26:30I'm like, damn, this guy hasn't earned a trophy since the PS3 era. I wonder what he's up to. So yeah, I don't know if you guys have any reflections on that, but I'm sorry, Sergio. I didn't realize that I didn't talk about that on the show. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I have anything to add. I think I've noticed that sometimes. Like, well, I'll see some of this like last on Xbox. It's like a lot more granular, I think, or it's a lot more specific. So I think it says like last online six years ago or something like that. that would drive me into a fucking spiral if i saw that kind of shit probably yeah yeah i i could be wrong but i feel like i've i feel like that's how it is on xbox they're more data specific but like yeah it's weird especially because like for me i i never added anybody that i didn't know in person or fairly well so like my friends lists are always like very very small so seeing them as like oh that's jenna oh she hasn't played the last game she played was uh uh you know dead space three fucking forever ago and i know she's alive or whatever so it's not morbid or but it's like it's i wonder it's interesting that basically was like he's just like i give up yeah they ruined dead space but um yeah it's there is a somberness to it um especially if you know them you know or maybe if you know them but you don't know what their situation is really like you haven't kept up just like oh justin from high school oh eight months ago hmm the hell were you doing yeah how long and how long are the droughts like do you normally spend like eight months away and then you come back and play some random thing or do you spend years away there's a random blip there's a curiosity that I feel but like I can't if I if I really let myself go down that road I'll be I'll be I'll be occupied for hours it's just another example Chris of us being constantly reminded of things that we wouldn't otherwise be reminded of reminds me of like your exes on the internet like you could very easily investigate any ex look up that person's Instagram account their Facebook their Twitter their LinkedIn like you could know everything about them but back in the day you had to move on And so you're getting insights and glimpses into the rhythms of people's lives that are unnatural.

3:28:52And this is an example of that, which is like, it really doesn't matter when the last time Dave Smith played a video game. But you know that to the fucking second for some reason. And then sometimes that's to the second. And then sometimes you'll know that and then you'll point it out to yourself. You'll be like, oh, cool. All right. Interesting. thing and then you think you'll forget it but no you'll remember that'll take up a useful memory slot in your in your limited brain where like where a password to a really important account should be but instead you know that like you know that dave smith uh stopped playing on august 16th

3:29:372026 you know or 2022 or like it's like what the fuck do i need to know this for and why do I remember it this is dumb it is insane I don't think it's healthy no it's definitely not healthy like I everything I've been really disciplined about not generally speaking especially as I've gotten older like really disciplined about just letting go and like just being like don't go down those roads you don't want to see the the ex with another guy you don't want to see what the person you don't talk to anymore is doing you don't need to know you know yeah but you always want what you can't have so it's like right back in the day you would have died to know you just have to like bother other people to be like have you talked to have you seen no lately you know and it's like now you just have it's great it's crazy it's not it is unnatural i appreciate the neo-luddite movement of trying to get away from all this shit but um dustin anything we want to add you want to add before we move yeah it's just a

3:30:31Colin Moriarty:reminder i need to go delete some more friends from my psn uh because i was adding everybody like you did colin but it uh i feel like i need i'm disconnected from the people i actually know on that platform because my friends list was so full yeah so you can try to add me but i won't accept it yeah i don't like knowing i don't like my lists being full of people i don't know like i just don't like i've never i've had people be angry at me about that too it's like I remember like, why don't you accept people on PSN? I'm like, are you crazy? Relax. It's not that big of a, I'm not going to get a message.

3:31:08I'm going to be playing with the people I know anyway. So like, it makes no difference to you. You can check my profile if you want. You know, I'm playing Pragmato. There you go. I, it's funny. Like, I like it for the anecdotes that I often get from it for sure. But I appreciate what you're saying there because I just had that moment, Dustin, where like, I see all these friends. I don't know who the fuck any of these people are. And then I see my best childhood friend, Mike Pope on there. I his screen name I know his screen name because it was his aim name and I'm like I'm friends with Mike on here you know like yeah what like I don't I don't think I like when did that how long has I been friends with him on here and then uh I was like yeah I don't have any idea what he's doing because I because it's a bunch of people I don't know but I I do like the data shit ton of people playing same slayer I wish that that anecdote was accurate to all players but unfortunately we have a thing yeah it's interesting for data you know if you want to approach it that way like that's Yeah, I love just, I do just scrolling around to see what people are playing.

3:32:03And it is interesting. And then, like I said, you see like pre-orders. If like, Saros probably has like dozens of pre-orders on my, for my friends list right now. And it'll say like, you know, 28 friends pre-order this or something like that, which is cool. It does get fucked up though, because the counter counts pre-order. Like if there's a demo, it counts as a pre-order. And so you'll see some games with like, like Pragmata was one of them with like hundreds of pre-orders. And I'm like, there's no way. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, yeah, there was a program on a demo. Which counts as a preorder on PlayStation Network.

3:32:32It's like, OK, that's it. It's time to go. This is a tight little episode of Sacred Symbols. I didn't I didn't or say good. I guess I didn't mean for it to be that sexual when I said that. Oh, yeah. Let's go around the horn. Say goodbye to everyone. Chris, goodbye to you. Be well. I hope you have a good day. I know you said you wanted to have a good day and I hope you are going to have a good day after this. Yeah, yeah. It's it's looking pretty good. Got a little bit of. I have a bunch of papers on the ground just off screen because I was going through some paperwork just to make sure that everything was like filed correctly but it's just like a pile like I literally just pushed it off to the side it looks like a mess in here so I got to address that for your taxes well it's the aftermath of taxes that I've been putting off I've just had like all this paper on the ground for ages I'm like ah my reward for doing it is that I'm just not going to touch this pile and not think about this for a week or two and uh it's getting i should i should address this pile but uh day's pretty simple for me i think uh pragmata maybe some marathon maybe i don't know so it's a slow day i've got to upload some podcasts too so that's it's just it's an indoor day excellent it's good to see you today with your crash bandicoot shirt looking very handsome yeah he's holding the he's holding the Snapple this this shirt is insane I saw this I was like I have to this is this is one of those I know it's it sounds incredibly cringe but it's like I saw this and I was like this is so me yeah it is it's perfect it's absolutely perfect and it is a cringe thing but everyone feels that way once in a while you know oh Dustin has a visitor a female caller right at the end oh shit look at

3:34:19Colin Moriarty:but look what she brought here. I haven't seen these in ages. What is that? Is that cards? They're one piece cards. Oh, cool. They're they come in like they come in like cardboard now, so they don't get bent up, I guess. Yeah, yeah, that's that's that's good. I remember getting folded up cards. It was a nightmare. It is. I'm just casual about it. I haven't seen these in months. I saw I was at Target and I was looking and there were two guys there and I said to Holly, I was like, oh, they never have one piece. this guy interjected himself into the conversation he's like oh no they come in here and they clear the whole place out as soon as they restock them it's on wednesdays in the afternoon i was like oh okay it just shouldn't be allowed i've said it before like if you're confident that you're going to sell all of them then just have a limit it's that simple yeah yeah and then it's fucking weird it's like it's that it's that simple just have a limit at the register yeah strange it was funny there was like a it was like a big gulps huh moment where i was like well happy hunting boys and then when i walked away and they were like oh we'll see you at the card show i think i told you this call and i was they were like we'll see you at the card show in a couple weeks i was like no you won't uh you won't see me there i'm not a no you're not a dork okay i walked away i walked away in the middle of recording because i got a package one piece cards no oh i bit i bit a little bit of a bullet oh good for you that's cool i don't normally get these but i was like they were they were on sale and i was like okay yeah sure yeah fuck it why not sure i could use it i could use another one yeah i always use another controller well dustin we were saying goodbye to you when you were directed by your female caller so uh what's on your agenda for the rest of the day what's on my agenda my throat and sinuses are feeling worse unfortunately so i'm I'm worried that this weekend will descend into a cold, but that's okay.

3:36:17Colin Moriarty:I've got plenty of highly addicting video games to play and I can just waste away inside while there's beautiful weather. And honestly, I have no problem with that. So I'll be chilling. It was fun show. Good times as always. Yeah. Good to see you. Colin, what are you doing this evening? Oh, thank you for asking. It's the NFL draft tonight. Oh, you got downtown. downtown doing the draft um well it's not going down there it's for the next three days but tonight's the first round so that's the biggest the biggest part of it um so we'll be watching that and uh mike is going to make wings for it um backyard's getting pulled to pieces right now smoked wings yeah i think that's what yeah i think that's what she's gonna be doing um she's on one man i'll tell you like smoked wings low-key they're very good yeah she's so this is the thing It's like, I want to help contribute to her passion, but it feels like buying your wife a vacuum, right?

3:37:17Like I am the greatest beneficiary of this passion. We eat steak and chicken and pork and all this. She's just going off out there, you know? And I'm like, all right, I'll bet you get whatever you want. But then I feel like it's just being self-centered, but she really does love it. She really, she has a passion for this that like, I think is just as passionate as she is about games. um i want to do more to help facilitate that but i i feel like it's very self-serving or it comes

3:37:45Colin Moriarty:off as that way right you're looking at it the wrong way this is a mutually beneficial yeah relationship you know you provide you know you're the sugar daddy yeah totally i buy whatever she'd be like get whatever you want and she gets to fulfill her passion and you get to eat it's funny because she doesn't buy she doesn't spend money at all like i always tell her that I'm like, buy what? Like she's worried about that. You know, I'm like, buy whatever. Like, I don't want to spend it. I'm like, buy whatever you want. I don't give a shit. Holly's like that. You know, she'll ask me about a five dollar purchase in public.

3:38:14Colin Moriarty:And I'm like, come on, come on, come on, come on. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. Come on. So, yeah, we're going to be doing that. I'll take the dogs for a walk. It's 83, but it's it's cloudy. So hopefully it won't be so hot. And yeah, just some other odds and ends. And then I'm recording with Jaffe tomorrow and then it's the weekend. and I haven't you know I've been I was busy obviously the same Slayer thank you everyone for buying it appreciate you uh keep buying it reviewing it but couldn't do without you mouse has been keeping me busy so I have pragmata I pre-ordered it right before I came out to download it but I haven't gotten to it yet so I had this real ambition that by today I would have beaten all of these games and I'm like I don't know what like I don't know how for how many years I'm gonna like set these mental goals and never meet them never it is insane never have I like I've been like, all right, I have 10 days.

3:38:59I'm going to do this, this, and this with the games. It never happens. So I don't know why I keep doing it. So hopefully I'll get the pragmat at some point. I want a platinum mouse. I heard some of the trophies are broken, though, so I will see if that will be possible within one playthrough. And then on to, guys, Saros? Tuesday. Tuesday? Yeah. Is it really that close? Yeah, it's the if you pre-order it. Oh, if you do the... It's Thursday if you don't. Are you going to get, you're going to get a god? I'm getting God and I don't mind. I want house Mark to have more money. So it's like, that's fine.

3:39:30Like, good, good. Take it. So that's it, guys. I appreciate you. Good to see you. My very best to you and yours. Thank you all out there for your love and kindness and support of all things. Last day media, patreon.com slash last day media for early free access to this and all of our other shows. 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 Colin's 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.

3:40:07My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor. Thank you.

3:40:48Antonio C. Asak Paredes. Austin Riley. Betty Ann Moriarty. Bjorn Campbell. Blackjack. Boots. Brad Cooley. Brad Lohman. Brandon Runniger. Brian Williamson. Cannonball Jones. Captain Verde. Carlos Algaret. Chad Lewis. Chris Galvin. Chris Morton. Chris Ritchie. Christopher Devayo. Christopher Moore. Christopher Morgan. Cody Benin. Conrad Pennyfarthing. Corey Beacom. Dan Nolan. Dan Root. Daniel D 'Amour. Daryl E. Naaman. Dave Alvarez. Dennis Usel. Denny Woodnever. Don Lee. Donald Difford, Donald John Vaders, Double Duty Dirk, WTF, Eddie Smith, Electric MD, Ellis, Emmanuel Perez, Enrique Perez, Entishas, Frail Cabbage St.

3:41:29Matthews of the Diocese of Brig, Gabe's New Gabe Cube, Gary Cavallo, Gavin, Ghoststorm 672, Gio Corsi, Grayson Maxwell, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Hush, Jad Rita, Jake C, Jamie Fraley, Jason Arzon, Jay Getter, John Francois Forzi, Jeff Mercado, Jerome Ferreira, Jimmy Rodriguez, Joe McPartland, Joey Gondaliger, John Schultz, John Zile, Johnny Waffles, John Cordero, Jonathan Coates, Jonathan Cortez, Joosh, Jorge Pal, Joseph Baker, Joseph Lopez, Josh Godfrey, Josh Gravelick, Josh McKinney, Josh Schullinger, Joshua Smallwood, JP Lynch, Justin Payne, Justin Wagaman, Cam Wallace, Keith Richards, Kendrick Caius, Kyle Hagel, Kyle Martin, Lizard King, Logan Little George, Madmock Media, Miranda Grubba, Martin Beck, Mason Bouchard, Matt Flowers, Matt 20, Matthew Ash, Matt MGS24, Michael Buffel, Michael Gates, Michael Mash Potato, Michael Vecchio, Mr.

3:42:29Tom, Morgan Ashley, Mr. Finkler, Mr. Molf, My Name is Mayo, Nate Izod, Nathan R, Neil Amon, Nick Amato, Norse Nuts, Ollie Fritz, Omar, Omar Rosa, Orchard, Organic Produce, Out of Focus Bigfoot, Patrick Leslie, Paul Joyce, Peyton Stone, Phil Crone, Qualia Freak, Randall Holsey, Rallo, Relentless Rex, Remington James, Ray Ligia, Robert Byers, Robert Schultz, Roto24, Ross Marenka, Ryan T. Mandel, Saqib Alam, Saul Balcazar, Sean Mason, Shane Brecky, Shane Miller, Shane Rayoum, Silent but deadly. Simon Conception Jr. Sketch McGetch. Spencer F. Steven Glasman. Steven Innerfield. Stewie 108. Sunny Sides Up.

3:43:14Sweaty Magic. Sweet Jones. Terry Tip. The Fandom Traveler. The Shady Mailman. Throw Seven. Toby Ryland. Tony Zuniga. Trelon. Trench Goat. Trey Woodward. Tyler Tremel. Uncharted Shinobi. Vance Cody. Vega the Late. Vitra. Who is Steven Day? Will Williams. William Holbert. Worry-san. Whiskey Sin. Zach Cohen. Zachary Wood, ZenRed, Zman8601, and Zainal Yuichi.