#424 | Think Someone's About To Be Carved

50:01All right, yeah, don't write in for a few weeks, at least. We can't, we can't, I can't. Dustin seems like the wind's been knocked out of his sails.

50:13Get your tickets now for the Dog Stars. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear. Out there, kill or be killed. Jacob Elordi. There are people out there. They need our help. Josh Brolin. Shoot first and inquire afterwards. Margaret Qualley. Ow! Okay, tough buddy. And Guy Pearce. Arm up! The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott. In theaters August 28th. Get tickets now. Rated R. Under 17, not admitted without parents. Evan Barr wrote in. Gentlemen, I can finally report that I fought my way through a gauntlet of muscle-bound maniacs with necks wider than their heads and emerged as a season one champion of the 2026 American and gladiators reboot i'm especially excited because part of me feels like i brought this one home for the whole last stand community you guys were a tremendous source of levity and comfort through a brutal filming schedule and while it didn't make the edit please know that i told the gladiators to stand down at every opportunity what brings me to my question that's awesome by the way if that ever did make it into the edits what brings me to my question will the allegheny hogs be holding open tryouts i'd like to bring my talents to the team anyway i'll base myself in butter and bask in the los angeles sun as i sit back and listen it seems like he is sharing your plate right now, Chris, with the weather.

51:23Yeah. Congratulations. I went and looked this up, and it was indeed your name, Evan. I mean, you did win. That's extraordinary. Congratulations. I loved American Gladiators when I was a kid. Loved it. What a fucking awesome. Did you guys like them? Well, you were. Didn't they bring American Gladiators back previously to this, though? Maybe they didn't. You know what it is, right? I know what it is. I was I was more into, although even even to the effect that I would to the degree that I was into this is very minimal. But like I was more into a what is it? A ninja warrior. Oh, yeah. That's like that was a similar sort of thing.

51:58Because that was all over G4. Right. That's right. I remember. That's right. At some point, I don't know why or when, but at some point it was like I would be sitting there waiting for like some episode of, I don't know, something on G4. And then it would just all be ninja stuff. And I'd be like, oh, this is cool. American Gladiators was fucking hysterical. there was even an nes game for american gladiators but it was it was there was do you guys know what um nick guts is nickelodeon guts yeah yeah so that was kind of like the child's version of it in a way right yeah yeah okay this is like an obstacle yeah i mean it's ninja warrior right exactly but like the american gladiator thing was like there were actual characters and they would participate in the in trying to fuck you up kind of thing.

52:45Oh, I remember that there was like one thing I always wanted. I'm sure a lot of people out there remember there was like almost like it was like a gun that shot tennis balls. And I always want like and they would shoot it at you as you were like climbing. You're like a shock. Yes. And I wanted I wanted so badly to do that as a kid. But anyway, Evan, congratulations. No word yet on the Allegheny Hogs stuff. So we'll see. the ghost of James Sola wrote in and said the average episode length decreased by 24 minutes in Dustin's absence hope this helps now let's think about this an entire episode of the Simpsons and a couple commercials yes does this mean that I only speak for 24 minutes per episode probably my theory jokes aside is the time i was gone was probably the most boring time of the year yeah it was perfect one of the most boring times of the year you were you were busting nuts with perfect timing just immaculate immaculate like immaculate the cleanest timing yeah so that could be part of it but 24 minutes are we are we feeling like we're getting less value with 24 minutes shorter episodes i mean i don't know yeah you decide yeah we just drag on and on and on anyway when i do i i'm on these meetings sometimes like i just met with our people at patreon about stuff and you know like they people like to do these tight little half an hour but we i like when i i speak to a lot of people behind the scenes like off the record and you know it's a lot of just like bullshitting right and telling stories and listening and It's all off the record with all these random people.

54:31But these conversations sometimes go on for hours, which is awesome. And but I'm so used to just recording and just doing that, that like when I'm with serious people and they're like, all right, like, well, we got to go. And I'm like, oh, all right. Like, I thought we were just kind of hanging out, but that's not the way normal people, you know, obviously operate. So got to tighten things up a little bit.

54:55It's like the whole half an hour is gone and it's like pleasant. It's like in the pleasantries days. and I'm like yeah we record five hour podcasts we're just easing into the conversation right now we'll get to what we have to talk about what's the rush where is James Soler in the afterlife right this name suggests according to this I saw him pop up recently somewhere because people were wondering like where is this man also who would update the fantasy draft stuff oh that's hodge where's he i just he messaged me the other day asking for tips on streaming uh so i don't know i have a tip for hodge update the fantasy draft document has has a lot of stuff i feel like a lot of stuff is has there been anything that's out that has that must be because i feel like the last i don't know i feel like there's a lot of slow it really is going to pick up now right beginning now and then into September so we'll see the last post was May 1st from him on the fantasy draft has anything come out Life of Elliot Millennium Tales Marvel Tocon that just came out though Halo I think maybe one of us had Halo Yeah, Halo's probably on there.

56:23And Beast of Reincarnation, is that on there?

56:28Probably. So yeah, it's ready to be updated is the point. But that is the point, isn't it? He's a volunteer, you know? What do you think? Caleb Taylor wrote in. Said almonds need more water than AI data centers. That is all. Yeah, food? But I love almonds. it's also food right like that i don't know to me it's like okay now i'm ignorant yeah as you guys already know do data centers continue to take in more water that's what i don't understand either why wouldn't they just circulate the water that's how most computers do that and also this whole thing about a i'm getting i'm talking out of my ass right now so i might be totally wrong about this everyone's focused on the the water of the data centers i don't care about that i care about the electricity yeah the electricity yeah we that's a real problem that actually materially affects me and i you know that's the only reason i would care right well no uh same no yeah

57:39the uh yeah i don't you know what i've realized about about the ai stuff because i i try to read a little bit more about it or try have tried to read a little bit more about it and try to be a what's going on in Virginia. Like we're getting bombarded with data center stuff here. Um, and to the point where we were making fun of, like, I have told you there's like commercials playing that like seem like they were written by like evil empire Inc. And it's like our data centers help pay for your education. And it's like, you know, keep rates low and invest in your infrastructure and all that. And I'm like, uh, whatever, but it seems like there's like kind of a bounce back effect in some quarters where it's like people are being too dramatic about it now have you seen any of this kind of feedback or like any of these articles where it's like ai data centers started piping up everyone was really against ai data centers and then everyone's like fuck these places and then everyone's like oh well they're not that bad you know and i'm like what's really true this is a classic info war you know it's an and who's paying who right it's like like i i'm curious about about like what is actually real and like what like what is the actual answer to this question because that will like what you said about water and just the end just electricity and all that i think people have this this uh guttural kind of uh instinct now to be like yeah no fuck it i don't want it but now i'm reading this other stuff i'm like yeah what is the what is the actual answer one thing i'm i want to say for sure though is that i hope this all just collapses under the weight of itself like a dying star it's not going to but still my oh, by the way, did you guys see the news about Claude and Anthropic about how they're watermarking the text now?

59:21Oh, I did see that. But like, couldn't you just rewrite? Like, I don't understand how that's going to work, really. It's like some sort of like they're writing and like and encoding like hash passwords in the text, which is crazy and kind of ingenious, actually. so like people were saying like even if you cut a sentence and put it here do this like it's like it might not be enough to to like you'd have to like wholesale rewrite it and i'm not saying like type it again like rewrite the order of the words or the order of the letters that's like what it's and i'm like that's because i gotta say chris unpopular in some quarters popular in some quarters i noted that people have been passing off their their writing is or ai writing is their writing for years and now these people are going to get got and they're not going to be able to really avoid it and they're not going to really even know if they've cleansed their shit of it and i i can't wait you have to understand i can't wait for this i love that yeah i mean it's a good it's a good pr move i'm skeptical of like how effective that's going to be because i i feel like if i really want i don't use a lot of ai really so like maybe i'm just like not too caught up with it but i get the sense that if i if they did have like some kind of code embedded into uh whatever it is that i had it right i feel like it would be fairly trivial to get around that that hurdle that they're putting up it sounds to me like like what do you mean there's going to be a watermark in the text like i don't fully understand like i can't visualize it but like maybe it'll be great i mean it's it's better than doing nothing um you know that's that it is good that they're doing something about it because that also bothers the shit out of me that people just like don't know how to write anymore they don't know how to read anymore they're just like passing it off on a fucking computer but uh it happened i'm sorry i didn't mean no i was gonna say like it seems from like just what i'm observing about like what they're doing it's just like i feel like if i really wanted to i could get around this really kind of easily but what are you gonna I was going to say just when Dustin and I were streaming, we were right.

1:01:34I was trying to write things. And so someone was like, just put it in AI and get this over with already. I was like, ah, fuck. I can't I can't take that. That's people's like instinct. Now, here's the way I as I understand it, Chris, how it works. Right. Sure. And I could be wrong about this. Dustin, you might know maybe more about this than I do. I have no idea. But imagine a paragraph of text. With like hundreds of characters in it. The eighth character is an E. The 26 characters in F. the 30 second character is like a dash right and like in that order like in those places it's it's basically saying like hey i wrote this because the the letters are in are in these places or the characters are in these specific places and it's hidden in a certain order that's how they're doing it so it would require you to like actually rule it because some people like oh i would just type it a notepad and then it's like that's not what it is it's like literally in the character's order and it creates some sort of alphanumeric thing and that's how they know and i was like that's pretty crazy but i by the way yeah a connection to games and what's going on with games remember we keep talking about congress in the eu and the european commission this is happening because of the european commission and and the companies had to sign a compact to do business in europe So it's going to be on all of them except for one company.

1:02:59Elon wouldn't sign it. And so Grok will not have this watermarking feature that everything else will, which is interesting. So trying to kind of remain outside the mainstream and it might injure their ability to do business there. But expect this to roll out with all the major models. Interesting. And I think I think the Claude model, by the way, has been active since the second or something like that. So it's already, I think, going. I wonder what the

1:03:27like what i guess there's like a software then but so this is the thing right so how do you what's you so there's a code baked into like how it's written how do you then decipher the code i guess there is i i read a little bit about this on that i'm i don't i want to be clear to people out there i don't really use ai so i'm not super familiar with it like i have chat gpt on my phone and i talk to it about plants and shit like that and ask you questions like a search engine every once in a while so i don't want to be too over my skis but as far as i understand there is a like anthropic or whatever like these different different companies have like an umbrella of right of apps that interact with each other right and one of them i think is like the key that they'll release alongside this thing that you will then run everything through now i understand yeah this sounds to me like we're gonna make this thing it's going to create a problem and then we're going to sell you yeah the solution the solution to the problem yeah like it almost it almost sounds exactly like that whatever i don't know we're gonna burn your house down and then sell you extinguishers sort of right it seems it seems kind of crazy to me but like all right i mean at least there's a key i guess at least there's a way to get around it i don't know it's interesting to me whatever i just people are really up in arms about this if you read about it like people are really upset about this but i i see a lot of comments which are totally reasonable where it's like if you're unashamed of your use of ai then why do you care yeah i agree yeah that's a it's very silly to me you know and people would say like um i've seen people respond like oh the calculate you wouldn't do this to a calculator or anything i'm like the calculator gives you answers to questions like and it's always going to be the same questions give you the same answers what are you talking about anyway we're way off the beaten path caleb thank you for writing in all right let's get into the news i'm not even going to read this last one because we're running a little or not that i really care but we're running a little all right i have a couple of psas to get into that i thought were interesting people might want to be aware of then we get some news to talk about a lot of official communique from sony this week actually surprisingly not saying anything very useful but letting us know products are coming did something happen and I miss Chris no no no people get so mad when I do this what do you mean when you do what when I notice like someone's someone's smiling or mad or something and I see it in their face and I want to make sure that I'm not miss something oh I'll say something that's you know sexual innuendo or like so you know I know I'm scared no so I was smiling because you said like we're gonna get rid of this guy and now like there's probably gonna be somebody thinking like was that me yeah oh yeah yeah that's fair enough that's fair enough yeah you're a noticer Colin i that's what i think yeah i do know this i do know yeah i like to you know i try to be observational when i can um well like think about it you're like in a conversation with people like in real life and then one of them just starts laughing right yeah there's nothing wrong with that what i'm saying is you're not going to mow past that you're not gonna be like you're not gonna be like oh that's nothing of course you're gonna inquire about that no of course you know but then people are like just go on with the show I feel like I'm out of my mind hurry up I feel so weirdly energized lately oh that's good have you been getting up earlier or no oh no not at all and I would say like not even it's a spiritual thing I just feel like I'm more in the content I'm having a better time not that I'm ever having a bad time you know what I mean though I'm in a good season right now good I think I might be a few more weeks and then I'll come back it's gonna go fucking tank from there I'll tell you what but well by the way we have we have a I'm gonna be bombarding you with a few important matters when you come back but oh yeah well I haven't emailed you about any of it yet because I'm like well I'll just wait till you come back but yeah there are things I we're in a little bit of stasis right now with a few things because I need you you know right but it'll happen when it happens I think I know when I'm coming back fully oh yeah did you talk about this with me yet no I didn't I was I was discussing with Holly like a night or two ago okay do you want me to tell you sure tell me right now I was thinking I can be under your three months not that you ever gave me three months you said as long as you want but you initially said three you're really you're really fixated on this I want you to do whatever you feel like is appropriate I mean it I'm ready I'm getting i'm pretty much ready you're over it now i know this is what i hear from some people that i that this is what i hear from some people that i've known that have been on leave from their companies or their work where it's like all right enough you know listen i i can easily take off six months trust me i'm i absolutely love you know spending time with the baby going to ohio all these things you know i'm saying yeah uh jesus but what about this week Like, what if I just go till the end of August?

1:08:33Yeah, that's fine. That's clean. That's nice and clean. Yeah, nice and clean. Nice and that's perfectly fine for me. One might say. The things that are in stasis are the physical game stuff for Saints Lair. Dagan's done. Oh, we're ready to go. That's fantastic. And then East Asia. That process done before I joined in on the project. Trust me. No offense to Dagan. We love you, Dagan. But I'm glad that is fantastic. Dagan knows. what time it is. Dagan never knew a deadline he didn't want to extend. Right. But he got this one. Like, I really monitored him very little, and I just kind of trusted with him, and he did a great job.

1:09:17It's awesome. But we got to get all that shit printed because East Asia Soft is already on it. We're going to get the game soon, so that's number one. And then number two is, what do we do for our 10th anniversary? Oh. Oh, how soon is that? I guess it really depends on how you identify it. Like, I think. I think it's March 20 is the date that I announced Collins last in. So it'll probably be something like that. Yeah. OK. Yeah. So those are the two things I want you to think deeply about them. Oh, and we'll probably need Holly again for the packages and stuff. She wants to do all that. We might want to even recruit more people.

1:09:56Yeah, that's fine. So it takes less time. Your mom can help if she wants. I know she's she's. Putzing around doing nothing. Well, she doesn't have a job, so. She's doing all of her art. Yeah, she's doing art. She's doing all kinds of fun stuff. Very talented. Productive stuff. All right. Let's see. I think that's it. PSA number one. Phantom Blade Zero is getting a dedicated state of play. this game has been lingering forever at this point it's not really forever but a long time um so the state of play will broadcast monday august 17th that's the day that this podcast will go live on free feeds so patrons will get a little bit of a extra heads up and it's at 10 p.m eastern time that night so be aware that that's happening are you usually late yeah i think it's because it's for a east and east asian audience i see yeah all right that makes sense um because it's 10 a.m um over there the next day right so obviously everyone's going to be in on it and are you guys interested in this game i just feel like i want to just see it at this point like how does it do what is it going to be it's just been lingering for so long and I am eager to see this is one of those things where I'll be interested in people's reviews just on where it calibrates on the souls like meter because there's a certain cutoff for me like stellar blade was getting there going much beyond that I'm like not really interested something like beast of reincarnation is like way on the other end of the spectrum where it's really not at all so I want to know where it stands on that because then maybe I will check it out uh chris are you interested yeah i'm like i'm kind of iffy on this only because i feel like it's been in the public consciousness for so long and i feel like i've seen it so many times that it's beginning to blend into other things to me i also get a vibe i get a rise of the ronin kind of feel from this where i'm like i don't know about it like it looks good like there's nothing about it that looks bad or anything i just question how into it i could really get um based on what i'm seeing again not just that it looks bad it looks it looks cool but it's beginning to blend like i i think i just kind of want to see it out and then just kind of make a judgment call like when it's out and like see like what people are saying about it and then just kind of make a decision from there but i'll watch i mean i'll watch the state of play you know obviously but it's not really excited about it.

1:12:35It is kind of a game in the clear in a way because it comes out October 29th. It got pushed back a bunch of times. Right. So that's kind of if like you got into it, that's right. That gives you basically three weeks before two and a half weeks before Grand Theft Auto. It's not a it's not a terrible place to be. I feel like there's just so many of these kinds of games at this point that they're all blurring together and actually that it took so long to come to market because if you read about it, they were really talking about this game and really starting to get it going in pre-production in 2017.

1:13:05So it took them almost 10 years. I think that if they got it out sooner, maybe it would have even fared better. But I don't know. Dustin, this is kind of up your alley. But I don't know where you are on this one. Yeah, I agree with Chris that a lot of these games kind of blend in my mind at this point. So I am curious about this. It's not like I'm not going to be standing by at 9.50 p.m. waiting for the state of play but i will probably scroll through this and and check it out just to see learn more about it because like i remember the reveal trailer for this game and i know there's been tons of stuff since then but i really haven't kept up with it so uh the fact that it's getting its own state of play seems like sony's taking this game pretty seriously like there could be something really good behind this so that does make me more intrigued so probably tuesday morning when I'm drinking my coffee, I will check out this state of play.

1:14:04Yeah, it doesn't look, because I'm watching the pre-order trailer now that they have in the PlayStation blog. It's like the second video link they have. It doesn't look particularly Souls-like. It looks actually more like an old school, it reminds me of Ninja Blade or something. Yeah, they've got these set piece kind of fights that you don't normally see in Souls games that are more like sandbox oriented. or um kind of arena oriented this is kind of yes this is more this is more my alley i gotta say but they use this term in the uh in the wikipedia chris i think you and i i think we have discussed this on the show in the past that wuxia action role-playing game wuxia which i'll put in the chat is a reference to it's it's uh i guess one of the chinese dialects for martial arts and chivalry is a genre of Chinese fiction and low fantasy concerning the adventures of martial artists in ancient China.

1:15:04So they're there's they're pitching it. So it's one of the game in that brand of East Asian flair. And then they're calling it an action RPG, which souls like typically are. I don't know that in other words, I don't even know if that's what they're leaning into for their their marketing as it being a souls like game or something like that, because maybe they're not. I think that's a razor's edge, like we always say with alienating people it's very attractive to a certain group of people and completely alienating it's why i think i'm interested to see what where where on this the spectrum again like an action game like intergalactic ends up resting right because you could lean crazy into the hardcore shit and do elden ring and that could be huge but you could if it's not quite right but really difficult i think it alienates a bunch of people so yeah i don't know if even if that's what they're if that's what they're going for i think the bigger thing that i'm interested in though with this and you're right about this being a big deal for it getting a state of play and sony obviously is um is i guess acting as the conduit because i think s game which is the chinese developer that's making it is publishing it themselves but this is a big game in china and sony really is exponentially increasing its presence in that country and i think doing a western translated but chinese state of play is pretty crazy and in a good way kind of cool um it's just for a different audience and it's part of my whole thesis recently that it's not so much about us anymore you know the western core right about it's about a bunch of city states now that all exist side by side um so i'll be interested to see how how this does the other thing that remember we brought this up last time we talked about phantom blade when we were talking about how you know the game kind of entered full development you know just four or five years ago and then you know kind of got bounced around or whatever is that phantom blade is an existing franchise that we have like no context into in the west that's another thing that i uh find pretty fascinating right like i think there are several other phantom blade games so we just don't have them and i i wonder if sony's heavy investment in china and chinese games will continue to pay dividends or if it'll start to flatline for them what i want to see out of china and i don't mean the beat you know a dead horse is i want to see like i want to see different shit now you know what i mean like a lot of it does seem to lean into being chinese or chinese history or a certain level of action rpg that's swords and spells and mythologies and all that that's cool but like i want to see the thing that really differentiates you know chinese game development because there's certainly many developers there that don't make that stuff it's time to find those things all right get your tickets now for the dog stars it's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear out there kill or be killed jacob alordi there are people out there they need our help josh shoot first and inquire afterwards margaret qualley okay tough guy and guy pierce arm up the dog stars directed by ridley scott in theaters august 28th get tickets now rated r under 17 not admitted without parents so that's one psa the second psa i just thought this was interesting is that halloween the game by ill phonic i don't know if you guys are interested in the ill phonic games but ill phonic makes like the asymmetric multiplayer horror stuff typically and the hot that this halloween game that comes out september 8th is their newest game in this kind of run of games that they've done.

1:18:43I don't know if, did you guys ever play Friday the 13th? That was probably their biggest, their biggest game. No. That came out in 2017 and then Predator Hunting Grounds was in 2020. That was a PlayStation game, like a PlayStation published game. And then they did that Ghostbusters game, Spirits Unleashed in 2022. And then they did Killer Clowns from Outer Space. In 2024, which I think is still going. So this is their newest game, but I don't know if you guys saw that they had revealed on Twitter that they will not be releasing in Australia and New Zealand because they were refused classification.

1:19:17They wrote, quote, despite every effort on our part, the Australian Classifications Board has denied Halloween the game a rating. The denial was not based on the presence of the iconic slasher Michael Myers or the outstanding kills that could be performed in the game, but rather the presence of a controlled substance. Unfortunately, to our disappointment and certainly yours, this means that we cannot sell physical or digital product in both Australia and New Zealand. Do you guys know what it is? marijuana yeah marijuana so insane that's so crazy now to their credit they're not changing because they could they could kind of fix it for that locality and make it so he's smoking i don't know if tobacco or something or i don't even know if that would be allowed but so to their credit they're just like no we're not going to sell it and uh i like that companies do that it sucks for the fans there but i think it's to try to pressure change from these really onerous byzantine laws and rules and some of these localities that right like marijuana in a game where you can kill people oh and not even like kill people in like a like an arcadey kind of like halo way but like in a real like you're murdering them right right like that's like brutalized just brutalizing the fuck out of them yeah chasing them down and like cornering them yes stalking them and like ripping their fucking organs out and shit like that is a wild line to draw that's fucking awesome i didn't even have a question yeah maybe there's a question for you out there are australian or new zealand audience do you do do you find ways to get around this do you use like a separate like you have a separate playstation account it's a us account or a vpn or something like do people just like oh this sucks but i'll just get around it some other way i'm curious yeah right now that i would love to know that i wonder if it's because australia because you know it's a obviously an island full of just criminals um i wonder if they're just afraid of you know that it might awaken something you know seeing all this crime jesus hey halloween are you guys gonna play halloween no i don't i don't think so i'm so i'm a little surprised that you got you know like you guys have such an open mind for multiplayer and more novel multiplayer experiences i'm surprised that you guys aren't really into any of the ill phonic stuff now i'm not saying i'm not speaking to its quality or whatever it's just it is like a very let's get our stupid friends together and yeah well i did i did play a little bit of that evil dead game that came out um and i did like it but like these are these are kind of like friend slop games to me like in the sense that like i i like them and i have fun with them but like they i never play more than like 15 hours of them and like my multiplayer games i like to last a long time um now if it's like five bucks or whatever like a like a like a friend slop game like i don't really mind it as much but like these are typically i don't know how much this is going for i haven't checked necessarily but I feel like I remember these games going for not necessarily premium, but like closer to premium than, than indie pricing wise.

1:22:29And so like, I just never for the right price. I would, I would probably check it out, but also like, these are the most fun with people that, you know, and a lot of people that I know don't really play these. Like this isn't a game that you can, these aren't games that are best when you're matchmaking with random people. Like this is like community, you know, like this is kind of like you're, you're with friends of yours and a lot of it hinges on whether or not your crew cares to get involved. Most of my guys are like hardcore shooter people. They're like into Gears or something. It is$39.99.

1:23:04Yeah, that's steep. That's a lot for me. I think if Jimmy Champagne, who is the Halloween man, if he asks me to play this with him, I will. Oh, wow. All he has to do is ask. All he has to do is ask and I'll play it with him. i played a little bit of that ghostbusters game because i think we reviewed it at my old site or somebody did and we had code so we could all play uh and it was fun for an evening and that was about it like we i think if i remember right we were kind of like yeah this the way this is designed is like really flawed in some way that makes it really annoying now this game may be different uh but 40 is a pretty steep ask for a game that let's say you play even three or four times with your friends so so who knows maybe it maybe it'll be great though i suspect i suspect like with many things now in modern gaming there is just a core audience of this that loves this shit and makes it oh makes it worth yeah they're wild where i don't think it's doing astronomical plus it is licensed and that's going to really deeply cut into your profit but I think it does well enough for them to kind of keep biting at this apple.

1:24:17Like if you're making a killer clowns game that you have to have some sort of faith that. This obscure late 80s horror movie is going to be able to pull a certain number of people in. And I guess they have that faith. I mean, they still exist. Illphonic is doing. Yeah, they're doing well. They're doing all right. Yeah, I mean, I I got a did they do. Did they do Evil Dead the game or no? No, I think Evil Dead was I thought Evil Dead was a different studio. I think you are right I'm trying to find um Saber did it oh Saber yeah I did like the Evil Dead game for what it's worth but I didn't play it that extensively so it's a genre thing I'm looking at the Steam page and there's a gif where it's like someone walks in a room they're talking to somebody and then shows a room and then three cards come up and one of the cards has a percentage on it in the top corner i was like ah it immediately made me think of back for blood yeah and we were so pumped for that we played it one time we were like no that was such a card that game that i think i think about that game often actually because it's like it's so close you were so close uh yeah so that's for this that's for halloween the game uh dustin on yeah here i'll send you the the link in on this steam page if you go down it shows like all these gifs of all you know going over the different bullet points of the game and it is the the third gif shows card modifiers oh yeah i don't not all games that use card modifiers are bad in fact i like many of them but i don't know there's something about it now that when i see card modifiers i'm like come on Like you're probably overcomplicating it.

1:26:06I might be wrong. But when I see it, it upsets me slightly. It irks me whenever I see it. It really is. It really is kind of like it's like a scarlet letter, dude. Like, I'm just like, nah, man, I'm. I'm good. No, I just say that. Why don't you put cards in the game? No, no.

1:26:33i responded to someone recently on twitter with just uh oh yeah why'd you say that yeah why'd you say that he like said something mean to me i fucking love that video man i went to what i went to cut it out and it's all references to snark tank in the comments if you read the comments some sacred oh yeah but mostly your show yeah we we absorbed that entire video it's like kirby all right hey dutch

1:27:07anyway like i just love to create the random like that's such a it's not a risky thing to do it's like that kind of shit can come off as so unfunny unless you absolutely nail it and they and they and it's totally nailed it because like you can imagine stupid voiceovers like that just being in the machinima style step being stupid as shit ever and that one is just so funny it's so good it is it is good the way it's cut and everything um yeah it's well acted like like the voices are like well like that sounds exactly like these people this is great it's really have you seen the videos chris you'd love these the videos of uh the like old 80s music videos but they take the music out or like oh yeah it's like i'm dancing it's just the foley and stuff yeah and it's like and it's like and it's like someone doing the voiceovers of like them making noises like singing the songs i saw one of the bgs and then i saw mick mick jagger and david bowie uh and they're so and they're so funny they're like so that's classic stuff that's like a creed shreds if you've ever seen the shreds i don't know the shreds video dustin knows you're taking me back creed shreds there's a bunch of other ones too there's like i'm sure there's probably like avenge sevenfold shreds or whatever but like there's they're called shreds videos and it's them just playing i don't even know how to describe it's like out of tune and like they're all fucked up but it's well it's well matched to like what they're doing and it's good stuff it's actually really impressive like sound design actually like it's hard to do in a convincing way so it is actually like a if you're watching with the right eyes it's like there's a lot of skill here actually yeah totally even going into something that sucks on purpose which is i love it the best one this is the title this is how you know it's good creed shreds three you shit here with me live dot avi yeah that is old school yeah that's old that's the one two million views 16 years ago uploaded you brought dude chris that deep pull that i highly respect yeah highly recommend creed shreds there's all the shreds are pretty good but creed in particular like there's something about it that's uh very funny i've already opened it in another window and we'll consult that video at a later date today well it's gonna be really at a later time dude it's it's such good sound design it's crazy it sounds live too it's very good i am continuous though the internet has destroyed my faith in humanity in so many ways i am constantly reminded about how deeply creative people are and how there's just so much funny fucking shit going on and like really brilliant well done insightful whatever good stuff everywhere you just gotta gotta wade through a lot of garbage to find it i was watching this one guy's videos of how he's going to to low end chinese buffets over and over again until he gets food poisoning have you seen this yeah i've seen that yeah and dude it's so funny like the guy is he's so good he's he's he's like brilliant a brilliant performer love that i love that idea so dumb and because he's basically going on and on towards the end about how bad the food is but he just won't get sick he's like why are you guys doing this to me like please you're doing it to yourself buddy all right shout out to the internet guys here's some interesting news the first of a few official communiques from sony this one about ghost of yote ghost of yote of course came out october 2nd last year and sold 3.

1:30:40What was it? I wrote in my notes because they only announced the sales figures once. Yeah. 3.3 million copies in one month. So good. Probably what would you think? Five to six at this point? Something like that. Maybe more. I don't know. Anyway, go to Yote Complete Edition comes to PlayStation 5 on October 1st. This comes including a new narrative expansion, new combat survival mode, and much more. This was written on the PlayStation blog by my old colleague on Podcast Beyond, Andrew Goldfarb, who who has been the longtime comms manager of Sucker Punch. He says, quote, we are so excited to announce that even more new content is coming to Ghost of Yote.

1:31:18On October 1st, we'll have a new narrative expansion, new single-player combat survival mode, new quality of life updates, all coming in Ghost of Yote Complete Edition. So here's the 411. The expansion is called Echoes of, and tell me if I got this right, Dustin, Sekigahara says, is our new narrative expansion. Split between the present day and flashbacks to Atsu's time on the mainland, you'll meet Nagato, a figure from Atsu's past who has arrived in Edzo. In the present, you'll explore a previously unseen valley once inhabited by the snake and his gang of loyal followers, the Vipers. In the past, you'll experience Atsu's time in the Battle of Sekigahara and a key moment in her life before she returned home for her quest for vengeance.

1:32:01You'll meet new enemies and find new heavy weapons, new armor sets, new dyes, and more. So there's that. then and this is what i'm kind of interested in to be honest with you ghost of yote most wanted is a brand new single player combat survival mode our spin on a roguelike you'll accept bounties in order to start new runs where taking down enemies will earn you perks as well as unlock additional characters to play as we'll have much more to show soon but as you can see in the trailer today atsu is a master with the dual katana while yuki sells with the kurt uh kusurigama i think that's you say that right and nagado shines with the yari um so that sounds a little bit like what they did with the last of us part two and donny dog with that that newer mode and uh god of war and god of war indeed i love i love sony kind of investing a little bit in these games and making them kind of fresh and new and keeping people sticking around they must be getting data through these various games that it's working.

1:32:59They put an unusual amount of time into things that a lot of other publishers first or third party don't in terms of just stickiness. So I want to give them a shout out for that. But of course, you're going to be paying for it. If you don't own Ghost of Yoite yet, you can get the entire complete edition for$70. So it's the game as it was last year, plus all the stuff we just talked about. And of course, Legends mode. Legends came out back in March and that's the online mode similar to the Legends mode that was put in Ghost of Tsushima but it seems like it's less notable and it's still going but it seems like it just is what it is.

1:33:31They're not going to update it anymore. So they've added these three major things. The expansion, the combat survival mode like the horde mode sort of thing and then Legends mode and if you don't want to or I should say this in a different way. If you already own Ghost of Yotei, I was going to say if you don't want to buy this version. You already own it. You can get these updates for 15 bucks. on October 1st. And there are some pre-order bonuses and more if you want to check those out on PlayStation Store. New trophies have been confirmed, which is great. There'll be new photo mode stuff, new stamps, new cosmetics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

1:34:10Dustin, any interest in this new content? Probably not, especially just because it's going to be so busy around September, October. but for$14.99 I wonder what the length of the new store expansion is because something about it feels smaller than when they did the Iki Island right from the last game but I it's funny that when they did Iki Island I bought it and then I never finished it because I it was it was like I needed to replay the whole game to get back into the mode of playing it and Ghost of Yote I liked it I didn't love it. So I just am not feeling like I need more of it. But I know I'm minority opinion on that.

1:34:57So many people will be totally jumping on this. And the most wanted mode does sound pretty cool. You're right that there is a reoccurring theme now. Sony games that they are adding roguelike modes to them. And I don't know. I don't think I've played any of them. Now I think about it. The I never played the God of War one. I did spend some time with the Last of Us Part 2 one. and it's really fun. I mean, it's really cool. Like if you're into the gameplay, like the contained gameplay experiences of those individual titles, so the same is going to be true with Yotei, then I think it's going to be right up your alley.

1:35:30And I think Last of Us Part II shines in those combat, like those encounters. So that was a lot of fun for me. Chris, anything here for you that you want to check out? Maybe, I don't know. I am curious about it. That most wanted thing does sound kind of cool. I'm more interested in this roguelike kind of thing that they've been trying lately, especially because I think it works a lot with the gameplay systems that they have in these games generally. I mean, they even added something like that similar to... Although it's temporary to Marathon, and I got way more into that than I thought I would.

1:36:04So, like, I like the gameplay of Ghost of Yote quite a bit. I did kind of... The story kind of petered off for me, though. Like, I did kind of lose interest pretty intensely. Like, I don't know if it was because there was competition or... There was something else that was out around that time or something, but it didn't grab me as much as Tsushima did. But sitting with just the gameplay of it does seem a little bit more enticing. But it is, again, that is a very busy time, dude. Like, that's... I could see this being something that, like, I'll pick up and I'll get to, like, in several months.

1:36:42But it looks cool. I mean, it's a great-looking game, man. It's a great... Oh, it's beautiful. And it is good. oh i loved it i thought ghost of yote was awesome i liked it more than tsushima and um i like you know it's called complete edition it's not exactly uncommon but i mean i think that we can just read into that that they really are this is at the end like uh not of not of ghosts necessarily but of their support of this game i'm surprised based on their treatment of legends i remember i was reading into this in the spring when they were kind of like yeah legends is what it is there won't be like future updates to it we were reading into that being like yeah maybe things are kind of petering out in terms of this post-game support and perhaps they'll just be moving on more imminently to the next thing but i feel like this is always in the roadmap and as you're moving on to the next project it's just managing your team well in my opinion and sony sony does do this well you don't need most of your team on to the next game that's not ready to receive them yet as you're pre-producing and figuring out what you need you got to have some of your designers, some of your narrative guys, you know, you're going to obviously be cooking up some, some, some, uh, prototypes with various engineers and programmers or whatever, but most of your team is going to need to be kept busy or furloughed or whatever, or fired, which is why we always say that it's so surprising that these teams can live in between these projects as they're spooling up the next one.

1:37:59And yet I think this is a clever way for keeping everyone engaged and involved and using all the assets and everything that you've already built. And when you play, I mean, I can't speak for the others, but when you play The Last of Us, it's just very familiar places, familiar enemies. It's just the way that they come at you and kind of the way that they position things. And so there's a real cool stickiness to that that I appreciate. So I think it's a horrible time for it to come out. But two things is, number one, I'll probably not right away, but I'll pick that up at some point. Maybe that'll be like a holiday thing or something.

1:38:30I don't know. We'll see what happens. The second thing is, if you've not played Ghost of Yotei, I really suggest you do. It's very good. Okay. let's see here another official communique this one about wolverine sweeney the kind of guy to hold his piss when he takes a shit wrote in this is one of your people jesus colin please start referring to insomniac's imminent next game as wolverine maybe shorten it even more so it's just w and an n with a mumble in between things i was trying this when i was i was writing this dustin last night and i'm like i don't know i don't think i don't think it works no play play me some of that wolverine you know like i don't think you know you could you could do it a little bit but i don't know if it doesn't work like spider-man or something oh let's go to spider-man spider-man spider-man yeah that works a lot better wolverine's too like uh involved of a word yeah you know like it's it's it's very active you can't like you can't slur your way through it.

1:39:31Not possible. Yeah. You got to just. Whoa. We sound like the diet guy. Yes. His body good quenches that thirst.

1:39:49All right. So enough of that over on the PlayStation blog, back to the PlayStation blog, we go. Wolverine limited edition. PS5 has been announced along with plates and controllers. So the information you need to know here is that you'll have three different options. There's a PlayStation 5 digital edition Marvel Wolverine limited bundle. That's going to be$650 in the US or your local equivalent. So that comes with no disk drive PS5 and the game. You can get a DualSense controller for$85 US Wolverine Wolverine. dual sense for 85 bucks or your local equivalent. And then there are console covers for both PS5 and PS5 pro that you can buy individually that costs$75 us or your local equivalent.

1:40:44Important to note, there are two different stylings. And I don't know that I've ever seen that before. Dustin, can you think of any like where there are two options? yeah was it wasn't there like a genshin impact controller i guess that wasn't console plates those were controllers that were like two color ways yeah i guess i'm talking you're right because there are also been multi-color things i'm saying specifically about a console where there are i guess two different options or maybe it's just the yellow one and then the that you can buy and then you can buy the so basically if people people have no idea what i'm even talking about there There are yellow Wolverine controllers or a yellow Wolverine controller console and plates.

1:41:27And then there are options with a more silverish whitish, like off white, same designs. But you have these two different color options. I did look this up, though. You guys might find this interesting. I saw this controller. I like the controller. I think I'm going to buy it because I just I like to, you know, every once in a while, I like to get a new controller, as we know. So I think I'll get the yellow one. and I was like I don't think there's ever been a yellow controller before ever and I went and looked it up and apparently the only yellow official PlayStation controller that's ever been released was a DualShock 2 released in Japan only in limited quantities in 2002 and it's apparently extremely expensive to buy so I was like yeah there really has never been a yellow controller I would have thought for like The Simpsons or something yeah you would think so like something like that we've had gold you know but yeah i couldn't find any pictures of it and there was an aftermarket controller i'm sorry that was like there's a death stranding controller that is it's like the see-through it's like a golden it looks like piss golden yeah this i don't know what that i don't know uh yeah death stranding playstation 4 oh that's stranding yes 4 controller oh yeah there's like a little bit of uh yellow in there oh i see what you're saying that's a that's a custom one yeah this yeah i see what you're saying here this one is yeah this is yeah this is yellow interesting so i guess i missed that one in my research oh it's got like the death training logo on the pad that's kind of nice cool yeah oh it's yeah and i've never seen this me neither this it's like yeah the see-through and what the hell yeah it's nice anyway i definitely don't need any more ps4 controller so i'm not even gonna i'm just gonna get i'm gonna x this out yeah because i'll do something i'll do something stupid i'll do it but yeah i'm gonna pick up the controller i think are you guys interested in any of this kit obviously we don't need consoles but and the plates don't really do it for me either a nice upset i mean it's a nice way for sony to make a little bit of cash i guess people want to yeah i've said this a million times i know yeah who gives a fuck what the console looks like yeah i don't really i don't really care that much i i like it sometimes like i but to the degree that i would i think i would like this a lot more without the uh image of wolverine screaming on the side of it he's he's making the when you nut but she keeps sucking face he is yeah it's it's a bit because I actually don't mind the scratches.

1:44:11I like the two-tone. I like having a little bit of color there. But like it's a lot of the iconography, I feel like it's just there's iconography that goes like slightly too far. Like I really love the PS4 Pro Spider-Man Special Edition where it's like that red. But then it's got the spider all over it and I'm just kind of like, eh. Yeah, yeah. You know, it just kind of, it makes it too loud to me. but yeah i'm just not much of a console customizer these are as far as i'm concerned these are stealer ps5 oh yeah sure still that's what i see immediately because i'm surrounded by that constantly here in western pa so when i see these i'm like oh these these look like stealer ps5s so you should buy some and repurpose them sell some custom bootleg stealer ps5 oh yeah Bootleg stuff.

1:45:07Yeah, that might... I mean, someone would buy it around here. Put that on Facebook Market. Someone's down. Oh, yeah. I just can't believe... Dude, these plates,$75 for four pieces of plastic? Yeah, that's a big upsell. It's licensed plastic. Yeah, I mean, that's true, too. They gotta share the cash. But we'll see. We'll see. I think I'll pick up the controller. We'll see. I think... So the pre-order is, yeah, starting... yeah starting august 19th 2026 oh okay so september 15th you can start getting these things in limited quantities on playstation direct and then um starting august 19th in certain localities you can start pre-ordering stuff if you're interested i think it looks great i wonder if there'll be a grand theft auto console hmm yeah and or a controller and or plates you would have to assume that's a slam dunk right certainly Sony would want that certainly Sony would make that happen if they're allowed I think so that would be big time at least controller theft auto console

1:46:30i'm trying to see if there has there ever been one maybe on ps3 ps3 had one i think they were bundles but they weren't specific consoles yeah gta's never had uh like a special edition console right like the special edition console but this is a pretty special case also like this is different you got to assume a bundle I would think. A bundle for sure, yeah. I mean, that's a slam dunk. I mean, if the marketing and everything really lies with Sony, then that's certainly part of it. And you have to just imagine that that's true. Alright, well those are available soon if you're interested. If you're looking for a new controller and so on and so forth.

1:47:10I thought this was interesting news. I wanted to just bring this up. It's not a huge game, but I just thought it was random. Especially because they buried something I thought fairly interesting in the press release for this. And Mike is playing it as well. Lord of the Rings, War in the North. did you guys play this back in the day came out in 2011 i actually did um i didn't care for it too much to be honest it wasn't my kind of game i did some deep research on that like like research that i would argue is far too deep about about this lord of the rings game situation because i was a little confused about what was going on here so here's what you guys need to know is that there was a game in 2011 late 2011 that was released called lord of the rings war in the north it came the playstation 3 it was published by wb and made by a studio called snow blind this was their very last game that they ever made snow blind was purchased by wb a few years before to work on lord of the rings stuff and then they ended up getting folded into monolith and of course monolith is no more as of last year as well uh famous wb studio that was known for the uh some of their own lord of the rings games so i was confused about this though because sometimes we talk about electronic arts and their Lord of the Rings games, and you guys might already know this, but I just didn't really know any of this.

1:48:22At least I didn't remember any of it. Is that Lord of the Rings video game licensing rights at the time were with EA if it was based on the movies. And everything else went through Vivendi and Sierra. And they made their own Lord of the Rings game. And something that scratched an itch to me was I remember this was that they released a game the 2002 i think is when when the two towers came to theaters like peter jackson's the two towers and there was a game released a fellowship of the ring game that was released that year and that came it was not associated with the movie and couldn't be and that started scratching something in me so what ended up happening i guess is that ea's rights to the lord of the rings film stuff expired at the end of 2008 and in fact you guys might remember that they released like at the very last minute a game called conquest that year yeah lord of the rings conquest and the pandemic and that game was rushed because they had to get it out before the license expired like the license i think expired like days later um so then everything reverted back and and what ended up happening was that wb ended up gaining access to the films i guess more readily because New Line Cinema was folded into Warner Brothers by Time Warner.

1:49:40So there's like all this weird shit going on. Anyway, I did all this. Nightmare sentence you just said, by the way. Right. I hate everything about what you just said. It's like so confusing, dude. So then Aspire, the port studio, which used to be with Saber, which purchased by Embracer in 2024. these are the guys that do all of the like the tomb raider ports the star wars ports the dais the recent dais export the legacy cane ports that came out recently um and so through all of this labyrinthine shit they now have there's actually another component to this embracer group also purchased uh middle earth enterprises so now through all of these acquisitions aspire will be according to the press release for war of the north this is like the first of more games from this series that they're going to be or old lord of the rings games that they're going to be approaching and doing so it's a very long-winded way of saying i did a lot of research for no reason but um one thing i discovered is that lord of the rings online was one of the games that came out during that vivendi era of non-movie related games 2007 it came out and it's still going huh I didn't know that that's kind of crazy yeah I didn't know that either it's been free to play since 2010 so there must be some sort of fan base that's still uh enjoying that but uh anyway Mike is playing it and she's she seems to like it yeah so it was fine I've never been that into Lord of the like I really loved the Return of the King game on uh the original Xbox I'm sure it was on ps2 and gamecube as well but that game was fire uh and i loved conquest when that game came out it was definitely busted but it was it was fun busted and that was like a that was a pandemic game i think i'm pretty sure um so i have fond memories of that game but yeah war in the north i gave it a shot i think it like i got it for free or something and i tried it out i was like this isn't really i'm not as much of a lord of the rings guy as i probably as i would like to be really i think it's cool but it was never like a i think i saw that i think i told you this like i saw the movies for the first time uninterrupted like all the way through in like 20

1:52:0517 maybe even 18 you know i'd only ever seen clips wow and played games that's so interesting i love that yeah yeah missed entirely i would hope that they eventually re-release the uh like the movie license games that chris was mentioning the two towers and um yeah uh return of the king like if they did a little too even if i mean a two-pack would be ideal but in this economy they'll probably sell them to us separately but those games were really fun i really enjoyed that I've never played War in the North, but I'm probably good on it. But it gives me it makes me hopeful for the future. But maybe with a spire, maybe a spire should aspire to make, you know, Knights of the Old Republic remake instead of bothering with this shit.

1:52:55Yeah, they should aspire to greater, greater things. Yeah. Yeah. They'll aspire to whatever embrace or whatever fucking coal mine embracer puts them in. return of the king man that's the return of the king was such a good game for no reason it was hard as shit it was because i was a kid i can't i don't know i have yeah that's also true i remember it being quite difficult but like i loved unreasonably good like that was back when like movie-based games were like not a death sentence like it wasn't like oh this is gonna be shit i don't know when that exactly started happening probably like 06 07 was when like maybe maybe 08 maybe arguably is it when movie like if something was movie based it was like oh that's probably gonna suck but um early on man some good stuff all right well i can turn the page on all this research i did for no reason we can we can go out to the next the next thing i was just curious about it i'm like what is going on like what happened here and i was reading like these old press releases and these old stories and stuff and i'm like i don't it is interesting it's super interesting that it's interesting that conquest had to make the i feel so bad for them that sucks they had to just like rush for the uh for the license yeah they were it puts into perspective like why it was it was kind of busted because even i loved that game deeply but like it was also one of those things where it's like this is definitely a compromised product i don't care because I'm having a great time with it.

1:54:24But like, yeah, I was going to say that's the first or that's not the last time Lord of the Rings needed to do that because they released that anime movie in theaters that I believe was specifically made and released in order to keep. I forgot about that. It was like War of the Rohheim or something. Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. Oh, I didn't even I don't even think I know. You have to like I mean, you don't have to. But in many of these agreements, you have to exercise your rights or you lose them. It's why Sony keeps making Spider-Man movies. right craven the hunter right and madam webb and and uh why i think they finally oh it was paramount that finally gave up the ghost with fantastic four where they're like we just can't we just can't do this anymore like we can't keep making fantastic four movies just a and a silver surfer movie and all these things or whatever just to keep the ip in perpetuity was the one was the one they did fant fant four stick right it's the one that everybody right right that was that was josh josh trank directed that one the chronicle guy god what that's that actually is the worst superhero movie i think i've ever seen like bar none it's so shit i don't i've never said i said the name of the movie wrong i gotta correct myself i don't want to you know a whole paragraph the anime it was uh the rohirim or hear him okay not the rohime stand down stand down everybody stand down lower lower your fucking wands or whatever it is fucking lower your wands all right what else oh okay i have no more notes for this uh playstation blog back to the playstation blog for new PlayStation Plus games game catalog is being updated this August.

1:56:12This is a pretty impressive collection of games here this month. And in fact, people have been noticing Pario magazine wrote in and said this month's PS Plus games lineup is maybe the most stacked we've seen in a while. How likely is it that this is a response to the no disc, no buy campaign to test that group's will? Maybe these licenses are often many months ahead and locked in. So I don't know that they were that flexible in fact that the big we've known since the spring that the big premium retro game was coming we've known since may i want to say so no huge surprises i don't think but a really nice catalog of games here being added or a nice collection of games being added to the game catalog which of course if you're on playstation plus you can be on the extra or premium tier so that's like the silver or gold tiers you'll get access to these games as part of your catalog a la a game pass if you're a normal playstation plus subscriber like me no access to these games so don't get too excited hell divers too being added in it's a big deal it's going to boost the player base fairly substantially i imagine and it's available right now so you can if you're on the game catalog on ps plus extra premium you can go download it i feel like most of our audience has probably played hell divers already but if you haven't you really should it's a great game it's probably i don't even know if sweaty is the right word for it because it's it's it's pve but it's probably so high end at this point with like if you if you get into certain games people really knowing what they're doing because i only played it that first month month and a half it was still complete chaos at that point i imagine things are quite refined um so it should be a more interesting experience again i don't know why they've never added trophies i find that they've never added trophies to hell divers to like beyond the original core list they updated constantly they've never added more okay i don't know why they don't do that yeah i think so you would be like you should add trophies i thought you were saying like hell divers who didn't have trophies i was like are you serious no no yeah no it had trophies but yeah blown my fucking mind the um yeah i i jumped into hell divers too kind of recently actually because a friend of mine out of the blue kind of was like you want to jump on held i was like yeah okay um and i completely forgot everything like i don't i used to know like all these like really specific like tac tricks right and like i like i knew like i forgot how to change my ammo types and like and i forgot that like reloading before you were completely empty just disregarded the magazine and like these little things i was a complete albatross around that around the neck of that team.

1:58:50But it is still a that's still a very fun game. There's all sorts of new shit in there that. Yeah, I mean, it's they did a great job. It's cool to see it. Yeah, I'm I'm excited for more people to check it out. Another big one. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is being added to this one. That's a nice big. I'm not interested in those games. My wife really likes them. A lot of people at Lockmore really loves them. We have other fans, obviously, in our in our family as well. they're a little too grounded for me i think especially watching micah play the first one which i watched her play it on switch just fucking i can't like unimaginable like a crime against humanity but just even what you're doing in the game i'm like i can't fucking i can't yeah i can't do this it's i want to get into like i i have kingdom come deliverance 2 i got kind of into it i know what's appealing about it and i think it could work for me but like i think at the time i was like the combat in particular i was like i capital h hate this and i know it like you're supposed to get better at it or something like like it gets easier as time goes on but like you you suck so bad at combat in the beginning of that game where i'm like i don't i don't know if i can do this but i have a fantasy about getting back to that game because i i do know that that's a special game that i want to wrap my head around but that's gotta be a i don't know i gotta have time and there's like there's gonna be like no time yeah it's a bad it's a bad time to be looking around right now and wandering eyes as we prepare for this onslaught vampire survivors it's cool it's really cheap so i don't know that it's that big of a deal of being on there but i think it's all the expansions and there's a shit ton of things added to the game so those are also really cheap i think the expansions like 50 cents each but it all adds up robust yeah very robust vampire survivors is awesome I really like Vampire Survivors.

2:00:48All the stuff we've said about the setting and stuff aside. Hell is Us is here. I bought Hell is Us when it came out. Me too. But I never played it.

2:01:00So that's why I have it. It's useless for me. I got to get into it at some point. Hell is Us will be available August 25th. By the way. Let's see. Helldivers is now. Kingdom Come Deliverance is the 18th. vampire survivors is the 18th next up is and this one's for you dustin umamusumi pretty derby party dash on ps4 that'll be available august 25th a colorful cast of pixel art umamusumi are all in line and ready to compete in the slapdash grand prix a school festival featuring four zany events like something you would enjoy do you know about this series at all no i don't i'm scared it's a it's a game about like horse racing but instead of horses it's anime girls you like make bets and train up your horses it was very popular I bet yeah I'm done Two Point Museum also available August 25th it's a well regarded game not my kind of game that's a holly classic right there holly ass game yes let's see metro exodus will also be available august 25th dying light 2 august 25th might be the best ps plus extra drop ever yeah yeah probably for for some people not for me because i own all these fucking things yeah i own what i would want here so yeah it's nothing here for me either yeah i have dying light i have Metro.

2:02:38Maybe I'll be. I mean, you've intrigued me about this Uma Misumi game. Maybe I'll be picking that up. It's it's gotcha slop. It's well, I don't know what this this is some spinoff, but when the original one was going viral, I tried it and it was very, very boring to me. Well, Dustin, to cleanse the palate, two premium games available this month as well. We knew this was coming. Capcom said it was coming a long time ago. Onimusha Dawn of Dreams, the fourth Onimusha game on PS2 and the last game in the series, basically, that we ever saw until the one that's coming up. That will be available. Or is it?

2:03:18Yeah, that will be available on the 18th. Excuse me. And then this is a random one. Disney's Atlantis The Lost Empire. Yeah. PS1 game. Eurocom and Sony did this game together. and this will be coming as well so not so bad i'll be playing dawn of dreams i gotta find a way to play it you know get it in there uh it's like a kind of a spin-off because the the original onimusha game was or the onimusha games the trilogy was all pre-designed to be a trilogy but then they wanted to do more so they created an entire different continuity or spin-off of things so it's a little bit disconnected i don't know if in other words i don't know if it'll even be very relevant to the new game, but I'd like to play it in any case.

2:04:03It's too bad we can't get the third one. Yeah. The Triumvirate from the original trilogy. All right. So all those games are there. Nice collection of games that you probably should have played some of these already, though, but I'm sure many of you haven't. Just thought I'd throw this out there. Strahl Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two, appeared on CNBC as he often does for an interview. And he noted that, and I won't get into everything that he, you know, we don't have to get too quote heavy in terms of what he actually said, because he said a lot of different things. I just wanted to note that he had said that the$100 edition of Grand Theft Auto 6 is selling better than the$80 edition in pre-orders.

2:04:50how does that make you feel that sounds about right yeah that makes sense to me it's like i mean like the way that i look at it is like this is like you know it's uh how much how often do you get a gta game pretty much never at this point like once every 20 years seems like this is a billion dollar game people are excited about it people are expecting a lot out of it and why why would you want to compromise i guess you know if you're looking forward to something like this like why would you want any part of it to not be available to you um i think that's the math people are doing you know yeah he he i encourage people to watch this interview just because he says a few really interesting things like very very how do i want to put it like very constrained in terms of not reading too much into it like for instance when he says like oh the the premium edition is selling better than the standard edition he's like but this might be reflective of the enthusiasm of those who would pre-order our game kind of thing right as opposed to like we don't expect that we're going to sell more of these than those what i think dustin is more interesting here though is just the idea of testing price tolerance i've said this a lot is that i think people it's not even pocket watching it's just people assume what other people's monetary situation is and or what they will spend on entertainment and i think people assume that these high prices it's why i'm really kind of curious about the new hardware in a way of like well it's obviously not going to do ps4 ps5 numbers just naturally but like will it be as constrained as you think or is dropping a thousand dollars on a console fine for the most core player and it seems like those that pre-order digital games which i find strange as i've said many times in the past they skew more towards this hundred dollar skew but i like that he's kind of a little cagey on if they expect that to continue on the natural market once the game comes out in november do you have any thoughts on this yeah i'm not surprised that the hundred dollar version is the top version i think that overall when it comes to a mainline rockstar release people know that they're getting quality they're getting quality and quantity which is rare uh and the other thing about gta is that he's right that the type of people that would pre-order um and the ones that are just really excited about this game it's like they're gonna invest a hundred dollars because they know that they're going to spend hundreds of hours in this game like a lot of people still play gta as we know people are playing gta 5 still like crazy gta 5 sold almost a million copies on ps5 last month right uh there are some people that bought gta 5 where are these people coming from i don't know i don't know there are people that bought gta 5 on xbox 360 or ps3 and they have been on and off consistently playing that game since then and so for them looking at it's like well sure nope i i know how much i'm gonna how much time i'm gonna spend in this game i want the complete experience hundred dollars is small price to pay in some people's minds so the big question and you're right colin is will who else is going to try to do it i mean we see a hundred dollar editions of games all the time all the time now uh so that's nothing new an 80 base version the only person other team that's really done that is nintendo with uh mario kart world well oh they try xbox tried with the outer worlds too right they tried and they backed off so someone else you're not that guy along there yeah they're gonna try to be that guy mario gta in the outer world yeah see the outer world was not that guy yeah no it was not that guy really was not and yeah we'll have to we'll have to find out but because like i was thinking about like it would be interesting no one i personally don't want to do this but be interesting for someone to make a youtube video that's like i played the 80 version of gta 5 or gta 6 was my experience compromise you know i don't want to do that though like this is just a huge game it's like i don't want to play the compromise version for content so but a hundred dollars to me it's just really i i guess i trust rockstar so much that it's just like that's fine not a lot of other companies would have that though no no doubt yeah it's also just like it's a bit like yeah i mean price value is subjective there's always the people who talk about like the hours per dollar or whatever the hell that's always been silly to me but like i mean there's games i would pay a hundred dollars for right now oh if they had if they had if they took the the the raimi spider-man 2 game and brought that forward i would pay a hundred dollars for it earnestly i'd be like why is this why is this taking so long what are we doing yeah people i people are gonna take contention with this whole conversation but like yeah what if judas was a hundred dollars oh my god i would get that without even thinking about it i don't want it's one of those things where i don't want to encourage the executives to be like yeah increase the prices on everything like that sucks obviously but you're just one person dude the market will dictate this you're you saying something is not gonna oh it might it might set a seed in someone's mind but it's not gonna execute the idea on the market it's like that that's you know what i mean that's to be clear a game like judas being a hundred dollars would probably i haven't played it so i don't know would probably be worth it to me as a fan of ken levine and seeing the trailers is like probably worth it a hundred dollar version of judas for a general market is not a good idea i don't think judas is that guy no i don't probably not yeah i don't think judas is not that guy no it's that guy for us yeah yeah exactly uh that guy is that guy right that guy is that guy for someone right right um it's just that gta happens to be that guy for almost everyone right well that's exactly right and i i did pull this up too is just that they won't they're not going to share numbers and they probably will in their next financial which will be before the game comes out so we'll get maybe some sort of window into this but Strauss Zelnick said in a different interview that the pre-order numbers are quote-unquote unprecedented and astonishing that's crazy now again I've been nailing this the last few weeks like these guys can't really lie lie again these are quantifiable numbers ultimately and he's going to look like a liar if their numbers come out later and it's not true so I'm assuming things are looking pretty good and that's not a huge surprise again i find it a little puzzling not that the pre-order numbers are good that but that like people are pre-ordering digital games to this extent i just don't get it they teach their own i the one thing i do remember though is i when i was a kid dustin and i used to pre-order games physically you're obviously worried about the limited nature of them at your local store but also i like to just get that money off my books and i know some people like to do that so i i appreciate that in other words like yeah i'm gonna buy it now and it's spoken for and I don't have to worry about it six of one half doesn't the other but some people like to operate like that so I do get that but other than that it's like you know fuck with these companies a little bit that's what I say buy it like uh but buy it later yeah good I felt like if you buy concert tickets a year in advance the day of the concert comes and it's like oh this is like I'm going for free right like it feels like right you paid for it so right ago and with inflation I'll tell you you know yeah has has any of the three of us pre-ordered gta6 no I haven't I have not done it neither have I what's funny I'm going to pre-order it yeah like two days before it comes out yeah probably right beforehand but once that little wheel icon appears on PlayStation it means that it's ready for pre or for pre-downloading I think yeah and at that point that's when I'll buy it yeah sure yeah but I wonder if they'll even do that like I assume they will do a preload I think they might even said that they're gonna do a preload but I think so i think they even said that preload might go live fairly early like i think i remember that's that sounds true to me like because i think it's going to go live early for um certain people maybe i don't know i feel like i remember hearing something about like early in november they'll go they were going to go live for preload here's a question i heard that will psn go down when gta you would have to imagine you would have to imagine sony is gonna if they use like aws or whatever they which it seems like they do you imagine they're going to go and be like we need x like anything you got basically you know like yeah because when you're doing this you have like the idea is to offload all this everyone knows this to you know to a third party and then you have a certain barometer of of bandwidth and like usage and so i imagine they'll just go buy a shit ton of it and then that won't happen right right well and i guess i'm thinking of steam where if you download if you preload a game on steam it needs to do this decrypting thing playstation doesn't need to do that right like you just when you pre-download it you can have it on the screen in the moment the clock hits midnight it will it will load yeah and i think that that's why they like not releasing things on pc at launch is because they can kind of get things distributed and a lot but they're still kind of locked down to the architecture or whatever like it in other words you would expect like a pre-download would be dangerous because someone would figure out how to crack it but i actually don't think you can i don't think you can i don't think you can on pc either haven't people done it though i think that there have been instances where publishers have made mistakes oh i see and a game gets leaked early but i think that like a basic a steam pre-download i i can't think of an uh of a situation where that's been decrypted in order to leak a game early but so maybe maybe i'm wrong about playstation network going down because the worst time is when that preload starts yeah everyone is gonna right but if everyone is preloading across a week or two then it should be fine the good news too i think i mean this is i don't know how fungible in quotes all of the data distribution would be in terms of like bandwidth but there will be no grand theft auto 6 online and no it doesn't seem like it's going to be available it might i think jason schreier might have been talking about it somewhat recently or something where it's like it seems like it might be a little ways after because usually it's a few weeks to a month later but it seems like maybe it'll be even later than that so that and and i think people will be so disconnected from other online games that would ravage psn combined that maybe it just frees things up so it'll be fine i assume that they understand what's about to happen and because you just imagine though it's potential i mean the game is so big that there could be millions of people on the playstation store at the same time that night which is not really what happens right like everyone there might be tens of thousands hundreds of thousands at a time when a game a big game comes out or something just ever perusing so i will see we'll see how that all how that all goes it's gonna be huge it's gonna be this is gonna be huge for playstation huge the fentanyl laced senzu bean wrote in said greeting cdc i'd like to issue a firm stand down to all the penny pinching cry baby broke boys regarding grid.dodo 6 first it was the 80 to 100 price tag for the game i hate to break it to you but if the additional 20 is such an issue then should you really be spending any money at all on this hobby then came the announcement of the extended look premiering on netflix which by the way you will be able to view for free on YouTube a mere six hours later.

2:16:46It seems too many of you want to have your cake and eat it too. There is a price for admission for the biggest piece of entertainment ever released. And if that's too much for some of you, then quietly go and play Roblox and Fortnite on your PS4 and allow the rest of us to enjoy this moment. I'll hang myself proactively before the torch lit mob comes for me and listen. Thank you. Wow. Tell us how you really feel. What do you guys think about this Netflix thing? Did we talk about this last week? Or did it happen after the show? I feel like I know you and I talked about it Colin right I can't remember if it was the episode or on streaming it was on streaming I want to say but I don't I don't recall anyway I have no problem with this so just just throwing it out there six hours who cares yeah yeah it was on streaming because we were talking about whether we wanted to watch it independently or like someone had written in saying do you want to like stream it and I'm like no not really but but oh that's what it was we we said because it comes out on a Friday I believe or maybe a Thursday but we'll do a Sacred Symbols Plus episode for it that will definitely do late August so keep an eye out for that all right a couple more things to get through top downloads on PlayStation Network for July I thought we would another official communicate from Sony I thought we would go into these real quick and just see what's what Call of Duty Black Ops 2 and Call of Duty Black Ops were the first and second biggest selling games on the PlayStation store for the month of July.

2:18:10Black Ops, of course, is a 2010 game. Black Ops 2, a 2012 game, both on PS3 that were recently ported. The word is, is that it was 8.1 million copies of Black Ops 2 on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in the month of July, which is preposterous. Number three was college football. Not a huge surprise there. Number four, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resync. None of us played that. I don't think, but people like it. People are doing well. Yeah. ea sports fc 26 number five not a huge surprise halo campaign evolved number six a lot of people are saying that it didn't sell well i think that's pretty appreciable power world one uh that's 1.0 right uh seven nba 2k 26 minecraft in there escape the back rooms up there what is the mound omen of cthulhu because this game was here um at i don't know why they don't number these one two three 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

2:19:05Number 12. Four-player co-op game. Hmm. Yeah, it looks like a first-person kind of survival thing going on. I don't really understand what I'm... Yeah. 007 still hanging on. Great game. MLB The Show 26, of course, doing it. Avatar Legends, the fighting game. That's a new release. That came in at 17. it's called the fighting game Avatar Legends the fighting game yes indeed so that's the top games on PS5 PS4 games a little less glamorous Black Ops 2 Black Ops 3 Batman Arkham Knight Red Dead 2 and Black Ops 1 what's up with Arkham Knight Arkham Knight I feel like just probably is on sale and just is a perpetual seller yeah you know PSVR 2 I Am Cat was number one Synapse number two, Beat Saber number three, Job Simulator number four, Walking Dead Saints and Sinners number five, and free-to-play games.

2:20:07Roblox number one, Fortnite number two, Marvel Rivals number three, Rocket League number four, and Warzone number five. Nothing really interesting on the list. I was reading Roblox's financials, and they only lost$120 million for the quarter, so their losses are lessening since that would be about a monthly loss for them in previous quarters. So, but I don't know if you've seen like, uh, there's some consternation around Roblox. Like they kind of implied that it's funny. Like they imply that their fan base isn't making games that are good enough basically. And that's like why things are stagnating.

2:20:45It's very, it's very funny. That's great stuff. Good stuff. I highly encourage people to go read that stuff. And then just a few other things I thought I would note it note here. I have this written here, but there are a few other things I want to talk about. So just some odds and ends. Our friend Reese Elliott at Alinea Analytics notes that Spider-Man 2 has sold 300 ,000, 316 ,000 copies on PS5 since brand new day, the new Spider-Man movie launch. So just a little bit of evidence of the cross media potential of these different things. And I think Spider-Man 2 gets a lot of shit and it's certainly an imperfect game, but I think it's awesome.

2:21:19I think people hate on that game a lot, in my opinion. It's yeah, it's. it's more than it deserves i get i understand that that first spider-man game is like really quite immaculate in a lot of ways like i can't think of anything really wrong with that game two has a lot more it's trying to do a lot more and so there's a lot more obvious faults with it but it's still like as a video game it's very fun you know it's it's arguably like mechanically more fun than the first it's such a thrilling game to play in my opinion like just the swinging mechanics and just going around. And I love I love it.

2:21:56So, yeah, it's the wind tunnels that kind of make the city look a little ugly and the there's writing issue. Like, I get why it gets it's no less than it's no less than great. You know what I mean? Like Spider-Man 2 is fantastic, but. It's a lesser piece of art, I think, than the first game. And by the way, we should have probably brought this up earlier, but Insomniac's Wolverine's previews are out and people seem to be really into it which is not a huge surprise I don't think right I'm really looking forward to that game and uh I recently uh talked to Sony hopefully we'll have someone on they asked me if I wanted to go you know like if I get one shot like would I want to talk to someone maybe before or after and I'm like I'm not really a Marvel guy so I don't think I'm a great pre-release interviewer for this game but I think once I've played the game would be fun to have someone on to talk about it so hopefully we'll be able to i think it'll be marcus smith we'll see what happens the director yeah um so there's that and then i just wanted to bring up a couple other things too that i just saw people kind of circulating over the last day or so i hate the news cycles in games because people don't research things that have already been announced this is why i think search engines are really important it's like a hogwarts legacy 2 was acknowledged in wb's financials and so everyone's like oh it's in development and then it's like they announced it two years ago that they were making it it's not news so in case you feel like that's missing that's why and uh and obviously they're making i don't know if it's a big surprise hogwarts legacy 2 is coming game sold like 50 million copies i would imagine now you're gonna get a lot more than just one so there's that and then um we're gonna talk about that game big walk but it's sold a million copies already i don't know if you guys had seen that but wanted to throw them a congratulations and that's above and beyond the player base on playstation plus so awesome yeah so shout out to them all right my friends it's time to get into what we are playing how do i want to do this this week i guess what we'll do is dustin let's start with you you talk about big walk first then you kick it back over to me for token because i have a letter to read about it then you talk about token then we go to chris talking about token then he talks about his stuff then i'll finish off how's that make some sense sounds good all right so you begin starting off big walk i talked about this last week but uh since then my group has completed the game and even went and did everything we 100 of the game if i had played on playstation i'd have a platinum trophy oh but instead i'm on i was on steam so we were all playing on steam though i think it is cross play so you got that little ribbon yeah it's just not exciting it doesn't No, it doesn't feel the same.

2:24:39But this game's awesome. It is super, super awesome. Actually, I guess I don't want to repeat myself too much from last week, but maybe you didn't listen last week. This is a co-op game with you and up to I think it's like 12 other players, but it's primarily designed for two players, three players or four plus. and uh it is a game where you're on an island solving puzzles with your friends and the beautiful thing about this game is the discovery aspect of it because the game doesn't tell you nearly anything it's actually cool because the game doesn't tell you what anything is called either so for example you need to collect these red like egg gourd shapes things and now that i've been done with the game for a while i've been like seeing what other people are talking about the the game everyone has a different name for these things some people call them gourds our team called them eggs there's different towers around the map some people call them watch towers or you know they're color code in different ways so it's interesting seeing how everyone throughout the process of playing this game has developed their own language on how to play it uh another neat thing that i don't think i mentioned last week because a lot of people ask me about this is like is this fun with two players can i play with only two players does that work um or is it split screen it's not split screen the game would fall apart if it's split screen it's designed completely around its proximity chat uh it's essential actually because if you use discord or playstation chat or whatever it would just totally break the game and you met like not all of its puzzles but almost all of them um so uh in terms of two players the game actually when you start playing it asks you how many players are going to play and it changes the puzzles based on how many people are playing so i think it's two players three players or four plus so i thought that was neat it's very accommodating two different group sizes and i haven't played it with only two players but i was seeing online that many people didn't had a great time i will not spoil it at all but the final challenge of this game is awesome uh and surprising in a lot of ways and it is worth seeing it through to get to that final challenge the final challenge had us thrilled it had us congratulating one another it also had us deeply angry at each other like uh the team was me lock ben brad and our friend justin all together we had jimmy played the first night and then he got wrapped up in the gears beta oh was jimmy part of the team at all no hard to say i don't think so he didn't he wasn't there in the end when we he was wall hugging or whatever the fuck they call that stupid yeah, bouncing wall bouncing.

2:27:49Yeah. Oh, I was watching gameplay of this. I'm like, I cannot believe that this is this is it again. Can't believe it. Yeah, but that's what it is. Sorry. Yeah, I highly, highly recommend this game. It's probably one of the best games. It's certainly one of the best co-op games I've ever played. Certainly. So it's free. If you have PlayStation Plus, there's really the only excuse you have not to play this game is if you have no friends. to play it with well but uh to 100 the game it took us where's my copy here it is 18.8 hours so base almost 20 hours to 100 the game so uh took us about probably like almost a solid week of playing every night for a few hours so but that's it so that's big walk and that's available yeah on ps plus right now for everyone on ps plus anton k wrote in and said what's up my clankers any of you playing marvel token i'm loving it magic is badass what do you think the chances are we see playable playstation character in future dlc who would you want to see first i just want to see them represented in this art style thanks and colin was right if this was a playstation character fighter it would have been even cooler i just wanted to read that to annoy everyone so that's a nice precedence for it um you're playing marvel token chris's as well Sony reached out to me and asked if we wanted codes.

2:29:14I declined, but I got them for you guys and for Brad. So worth noting that I declined because I don't want code for early access. I also wouldn't play token anyway. It's just not my kind of thing. Right. And it wasn't early access. No, no, they didn't. They didn't give anyone early access. Yeah, they waited until the servers were open for everyone to play. So, yeah, a few things worth noting there. But otherwise, I leave it to you to talk about Marvel token fighting souls, which is I heard token means fighting souls in Japanese. so it's marvel fighting souls fighting souls oh interesting uh so here's my thinking when you offered this code saying like hey this is available i was like yeah should i do it because i'm not a fighting game guy but then i thought about all the people they're like oh we don't have any fighting game representation no one ever talks about these games so it's it's maybe a little bit of be careful what you wish for because i have played this game i've really really tried uh but i'm terrible at it i'm absolutely terrible at it did you go online i did i was playing casual matches i played the first casual match i played i won oh and since then i've played i don't know maybe seven or eight more casual matches the other night when i was playing and i just got destroyed every time uh but what i can talk about at least is that the as uh anton writes in the art style of this game is pretty sick and i really like what they've done with these characters and it's it's neat to just be like okay well we have this very we have the american marvel comic books right which is like quintessential american style comic books but of course comic books also known as manga in japan is maybe even bigger than the american comic book market now so it's like what if we took these american characters imagine them in a japanese manga style and it's it's sick i love like the iron man looks like like a gundam almost in a lot of ways which is really cool uh there's a bunch of characters like he the right in menton's magic i don't know who the fuck magic is who is penny parker she's like is that spider-man's sister is she the japanese one yeah she's like she's in spider-verse one the the first spider-verse movie uh and she's in she's also in marvel rivals okay this is how i know most of these people is like is like oh you're in because magic i think when she first came to marvel rivals i was like who the fuck is what is this yeah now we're getting into territory like i have way beyond me uh i did yeah i played some of the story mode which i think the story mode is divided up by some of the different teams to see i don't know if it's from different perspectives i only played some of the one like the main i think i just started like the main avengers team and the cut scenes are really cool like a very manga animated manga style of them uh there's so many modes in this game too because there's more of like um i was playing a mode where it was like a grid where you have to go and do different battles then there's modifiers for each battle there's of course all the online stuff the casual play the characters uh as i mentioned there's a lot that i didn't know but some of my favorites so far have been spider-man is fun of course as always in these types of games uh carnage i realized as i was playing carnage that i don't know anything about this man i don't know who he is who is this man i don't know i'm like he's kind of like venom but he's red and kind of scary he's scarier in some ways uh but his moves are sick he has like some ultimate moves that are awesome green goblin also i guess i've named only spider-man characters uh green goblin is cool storm in this game there's no character that i see that i'm like oh that's a boring design like they all seem pretty cool so i'm as i said i'm really bad and i don't like i understand how to play fighting games what my problem is that i start to try to like be i go into a match i'm like okay i'm going to try to use the moves i know i'm going to try to be strategic and then it just gets thrown out of the window and i start button mashing just every time so i still need more experience but i'm always dude i'm always panicking uh i also like the the angle and maybe other fighting again this is coming from a totally ignorant perspective but it is neat that when you queue up to play a match you pick forward fighters uh or is it three no it's four because you unlock the other three as you play right um it's four fighters and i think you can pick like any team lineup you want and as you play through the match you can unlock those other fighters to come in and do uh like co-op moves with them you can switch out to them and it's pretty neat pretty to me it's unique i have no idea if it actually is it seems like people like it but yeah but i guess um for this kind of game i'm surprised how in depth it is in terms of the different modes to play how awesome the graphics are uh it just visually like i think that's the main thing that keeps drawing me back is the visuals, which is not normal for a fighting game.

2:34:45But again, this is what you get from me trying to check out a fighting game. But it has me more interested. But Chris, you're more equipped to handle something like this. Maybe not. Well, I have a lot of friends who play fighting games. And to be honest, I've played a decent amount of this game, but none of it on my account. I delved into a little bit of it. and then friends of mine were like oh we have it as well and so i came over to their house and got demolished because they have like freaking these are people who have their own fighting fight sticks you know what i mean like so i i already know i'm walking in to just get your body you know i'm a mark um i had it was a trial by fire just getting good at smash brothers for as long as it took me yeah uh but i so i'm more familiar with like the how the game plays and like the the tempo of matches and like what the character like what characters are best for what and like you know these how to organize a team and whatever um as far as like the modes and stuff like i haven't delved into the story mode really at all i don't know what else there really is we were we were kind of in a a mode of just kind of doing the same type of match over and over again and like it was a bit of a bracket but uh i i gotta echo a lot of what dustin said man like it's a gorgeous looking game like the style of it is really quite um enchanting it's like i like this i like the there's a simplicity to the menu design that i quite like it's like very like there's a lot of white but it's still like very colorful and there's something about it that's like it's it's quite nice um the redesigns of a lot of these characters are really cool the green goblins is one of my favorites like i love i love that the glider is there it's like it's such a cool like because he's never because that's a character in particular that's never really been playable in in in anything outside of um there's like kind of like a special mode that you unlock at the end of the first spider-man 2002 game where you can kind of play as him but it's like not even that's not even really there's a whole weird thing about that um but it's it's a I mean to me as somebody who like I play fighting games or I used to play fighting games quite a bit like I was all over the Dragon Ball games in the PS2 era Marvel vs.

2:37:07Capcom 2 Tekken but it's been many many years since I've really been into it this does feel like there's elements there's flashes of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 in this when I play it like I it's not always and I would not even say that it's quite as good because i just have such a deep fondness for that i just the music in that game and the stylization of that game and the pixel art and the just everything about that game is i think um art and there are flashes of it here um i still think i have to put a little bit more time into it to because again i don't know what the story mode is like i don't really know a lot of like what that presentations um trying to get across so i want to put more time into it but i like what i've played so far i'm not that good at these games anymore i get my button combos mixed up all the time i'm always like overthinking as to whether or not i've pressed buttons too quickly for the game to register it you know like oh i've pressed xxy but like do i have to wait for the first x to finish before it registers the next x like these like things that i haven't thought about since i played a lot of fighting games back in the ps2 era um but presentation wise like they didn't slack at all here man like it's it's it's quite good there is that arc system works you can see this a little bit of in dragon ball fighters where like the characters will talk but like there's not lip sync necessarily um so there's maybe that might bother some people i'm quite used to that especially in anime where they're always making the same like puppet mouth thing anyway like it's it kind of lends itself a little bit better here but yeah my main takeaway from this game is that it's like visually quite stunning and and it plays really really well I don't know how the deeper fighting game community is going to feel about it I the sense that I got from the people that I know are that they like it but it's a far cry from being like a top of the line kind of thing.

2:39:20So I don't know, but I like it and I'll definitely be playing more of it. But yeah, that's kind of my read on Tokan for now. We will do a show about Tokan. I've already talked to Vincent Genito, my old friend from IGN, who's an expert in fighting games, and he can definitely speak to these sorts of things. So I'll have him on later in the month, hopefully, to talk about it more in depth because I do think as a second party game, it deserves our attention. Yeah. But yeah, we are not necessarily the people, at least I'm not, to speak on it alone. Definitely got to call in some help. Right. What else?

2:39:57It says here you're playing Spider-Man, 2002 Spider-Man, and then E-Day as well. Yeah, yeah. I'll end with E-Day because it's more, I guess, relevant, I suppose. But yeah, I'm kind of in a weird hole of playing a lot of old stuff right now just because I know the next month is going to be so... We're going to be so hammered this next month. There's so much to choose from. And especially if any of us are going to delve into, at the end of August, into Metal Gear Solid 4, which I kind of have this romanticized notion of maybe doing. So I've only got a couple weeks of relative freedom left. So I've been kind of delving into my old games.

2:40:37And I picked up a 360 a couple weeks ago. maybe even a month ago at this point, as I mentioned on the show. And I realized that I had a bunch of my old Xbox games, but I wasn't sure exactly which one of them. Like, I know there's like a very hyper, like there's a very specific list of back compat games that were like original Xbox two, 360. It wasn't all of them, but it was a quite sizable amount. But I remember that there were some that didn't really work. And I remember just kind of, so I wrote it off a long time ago. And then I realized that like, oh yes, Spider-Man, the original ramey spider-man games work and those are games i have an immense amount of nostalgia for and i'm i'm kind of curious to play them again because i've been feeling that spider-man's kind of been in the air lately the movie um obviously big part of it but so i'm playing through that and it's it's so funny man like this game is hysterical to me like there's this it's right at this this territory it's right in this territory where you've got toby mcguire and like willem dafoe in the like in the booth delivering some of the corniest shit and i i love it like i there there are certain barks that the npcs have in particular that that are ingrained in my in my the the deep recesses of my brain that have never gone away like where the the thugs walk i'm just like looks like the freak wants to play circus in town like all these all these fantastic it's like i love this so much but that like the first spider-man game is like a kind of like a beat-em-up kind of it's more spiritually i actually forgot how close they are to the original neversoft games or um like those like i i didn't even because at the time the graphical leap between ps1 and ps2 and you know and xbox was so was so dramatic that it felt completely transformative like it didn't even feel remotely the same to me as a kid but looking back at it it's like oh yeah you're still swinging from the sky there's no physics quite yet it's still this level-based beat-em-up with like very specific um you know layouts and it's it was interesting to look back at it from that lens it's like oh yeah this really is built off of the bones of of those of those original games in a way that i didn't really see when i was young and so that's been kind of cool to experience it's hard too man like these spider-man's a wimp like you get there there are missions where you're just surrounded by guys and they're all shooting at you and and this is pre-Arkham so there's there's not really an elegant way for you to deal with multiple like they haven't figured out like the press b to dodge and it's like elegant it's more like you just kind of have to tank it and like the way you have to dodge is like you literally have to like run away or jump over them or so like it's it's not like an integrated mechanic and so that's been kind of interesting been messing around with some of the cheat codes as well bruce bruce campbell is in the game as well which is cool he does like the tutorial stuff so anytime there's like a big question mark icon which is so funny to see again because that that's completely gone but like bruce campbell will come on and he'll like this is how you do this and he'll and he'll antagonize you in ways that i actually feel like are uh like a lot of it wouldn't fly today like he'll say shit like what are you handicapped yeah it's like i i don't know it's not that line specifically but like stuff like of that flavor it's like yo this is awesome i love that this is like this but i'm just kind of having a good time with it um it's been unfortunately like my spider-man 2 disc is in new york so i made uh i made the uh the judgment call to just pick one up immediately because i was like especially now with all this physical game stuff happening i'm like i don't know how much longer these things are going to be sitting there yeah the going's good right now a lot of a lot of things that i typically was like i'll get to it when i get to it i'm like yeah i'll just i'll grab it so i'm going to be moving on to that at some point because this is that's this is the one that i have an absurd amount of nostalgia for but i quite like it it's a it's a fun charming game it's definitely nowhere near the quality of like spider-man games that we get now um but But there's a charm to it and an elegance in just how well it's done for the time.

2:45:09Even the textures still, to me, look like this is kind of quite good, actually. But that's Spider-Man 2002. And I did take part in the Gears E-Day multiplayer beta. And so I put about 20 hours into it. well i reached i reached the max level for pvp which i did not expect and i put about i got pretty far into horde as well which which was very very cool but like it's it's i i really loved my time with it i thought it was great i thought it played very very well like the new like is there something you can like jump now and um the vertical you can climb things in ways that you haven't which which sounds like nothing but like it's actually really transformative to the way gears plays if you know gears it's very gears is typically very staple to the ground it's very you know it's it's very two-dimensional in a lot of ways now there's like this layer of like you can climb on stuff and like shoot down at people and it's it's pretty cool like it's it's very transformative to like how the game plays active reload is still so satisfying i don't know why more games haven't done this it's just such a no-brainer way to keep your brain engaged and have like a this this little bit of dopamine when you're not doing anything it's it's so smart and so cool uh wall bouncing is not as bad as i remember i think they did i think they've made an effort to tamper down on it a bit um so you're not like you're not seeing people like do that anime dash you know at you anymore it's like it's more like no you've got to commit to your animations a little bit more now than you did before so it's not as egregious but it's dude man point blank point blank shooting somebody point blank shooting another player with a shotgun and watching them explode it's just simply satisfying it's the worst feeling when it's done to you it makes you scream because you're just like i i don't understand the rules a lot of the time but it is a satisfying game to play horde is is quite good too i i hope that there's a a classic horde but like the way it's set up now it's like there's like multiple teams on a big map and you have like different objectives and you kind of do them and you you kind of incur wave after wave and sometimes other players can come in and help you or sometimes they'll just completely leave you alone and there's a bit of an extraction shooter mechanic in the sense that you're not leaving with like weapons or anything but you're leaving with um so you're depending on how many optional missions and how many main missions you do in the horde sandbox if you extract successfully you extract with a certain amount of weapon parts which go to upgrading your classes and your guns which is kind of cool like so you can get like a better scope on the sniper or like increase your healing if you're the medic which is kind of new um there's not really a class system in in most gears games so that's that's kind of an interesting twist but um yeah i i like it a lot dude like it it it plays really well it feels really good it looks really great there's definitely some bugs which i assume i mean it's a beta but like there's some stuff where i'm like i remember i fell in a hole like like one of the holes that the locusts come out of and normally you can't do that in old games like there's like an invisible wall preventing you from doing that but because you can jump over shit now and jump into things now you just fall in the hole and i was just like in this void of white throughout the entire and i couldn't die and i didn't know what was going on and then i could not live i could not die it was truly it was it was purgatory and then my team left me and then i just didn't really get anything for the round i was like all right well this things like that have to be squared away but yeah but i i quite i had a great time with with that with that beta man um and i liked the pvp a lot more than i thought i would because typically i'm so shit at uh gears pvp i've always just been like ah that's i'm more pve and i still think i ultimately will be more pve but but that versus mode it's there's there's something about it like i could feel myself getting better at it and that was like kind of an addicting feeling because you were slowly learning it's like oh this is like the proper distance to to do this and like oh this is how far away i have to be from cover before I slide into it.

2:49:42And like these little things that you learn over time that was quite satisfying to learn. But that's really it. I'm looking forward to it. It's crazy to me, though, that this is going to be a$400 million game and it's not going to come to PlayStation anymore. It's like that's... Because I feel like it would hit, actually. It's quite good. It feels expensive. I'm keenly curious on how it does.

2:50:08Seems... I mean, I think the campaign looks great. I like Horde mode. Horde mode is right up my alley. Yeah. So yeah, I would have played it. I'm not going to now, at least not anytime soon. Yeah. You just wait till it comes. It'll come probably at some point, I would assume. But by that point, I don't know who even cares. I am more interested. I'm much more disappointed about Clockwork Revolution, to be honest. But right. Because I really have done an amazing Matrix-like Neo job of just dodging everything that matter. Like, I don't give a fuck about Activision. i don't give a fuck about ubisoft i don't you know with some rare exception there's things happening with these companies are like i'm fine ea going to the saudis i'm like i don't buy it literally immortals of avium and plants versus zombies are like the two ea games i've played since dead space probably you know and actually dead space was in between so that's like three games in four or five years dead space so that would have that would have been a that would have sucked like dead space if dead space remake came out like now or like like after the the deal that would have been a really sad one for me hopefully they'll end up selling these ip you know um because i'm not entirely sure they're interested in a lot of these things anymore all right so that's all of that and then i'll uh i'll finish somewhat quickly here with beast of reincarnation hugo falco wrote in and said hi colin can i have a 10 minute rant from you on how wrong most of the reviewers are about beast of reincarnation i finished it a couple of days ago and i had a blast i really enjoyed the combat exploration and story it's obviously not perfect.

2:51:37It lacks a variety of enemies, but besides that, I don't get the strong criticism of the story and many calling it soulless. The game has a 73 on Metacritic. A 73? Are you kidding me? I really don't care about scores. I buy and play whatever looks interesting to me, but many take reviews and consideration to decide if they buy a game or not, and unfortunately, I don't think this one is going to sell well enough to grant the sequel. That's a shame. Are you going for the platinum? I'm halfway done with New Game Plus. That shiny trophy will be mine soon. Keep up the good work. So yeah, I have seen that people have been a little soft on this game, and I'm going to be on summon signs soon so i'm going to go into i've taken extensive notes about it i can get into it deeper there but what i will say is that i generally agree with you who go i'm surprised by how people how soft people have been on this game and i i'm quite smitten with it i must admit there are problems with it no doubt it's not perfect it i would describe it as a high-end double a game really but it more low-end triple a somewhere in that space dustin says that it's I say it's reminiscent of Stellar Blade, which Dustin says is reminiscent of Nier.

2:52:39So I imagine that's kind of in a sequence of those kinds of games. And I understand why people say it's soulless if you're going into it looking for a very specific thing. But I actually find, much like you do, you go a lot of life and energy in the world. The idea of it is really cool. As I said earlier, it takes place in the early 4000s on Earth. I think it's specifically in Japan. or like what was Japan. There are these enemies that are like bastardized creatures. So backing up a little bit, it's kind of like Horizon meets Scarlet Nexus meets Enslaved. Maybe meets a little bit of Front Mission just in some of the mechanical designs and stuff like that.

2:53:23What's funny about it being very similar to Scarlet Nexus in some of its in some of its presentation is that those games were kind of concurrently developed in development so one wasn't necessarily influenced by the other but like this idea of like the post-apocalyptic rusted iron and metal enemies that have flowers all over them and plant and you know uh plant matter and leaves and it's a really interesting aesthetic and so there are the enemies these corrupted enemies are called malefacts and they are corrupted by this stuff called the blight and i don't want to get too deep into the story because I don't want to spoil it for people, but it's really quite clever because what you basically discover is that there are these robotic creatures called robotic entities like machines called golems or golems that are, um, that are humanoid in nature.

2:54:19And what you discover is that when the blight occurred early on, people that had means abandoned their biological being and went into these machines to hide from what was going on, but were never able to like extract themselves. And this has been going on for like a couple thousand years or something. So it's kind of this neat idea about this machine run society where there are humans still, will make many humans but the humans are the underclass because they can't afford to escape the realities of this blight infested world that they live in so they're always in danger while the robots are not in danger of the blight and so it creates this caste system and the the the leader of this group this post-apocalyptic group is called the administrator and he's like a robot he almost looks a little bit like um what's the lightsaber wielding droid oh uh uh grieve grievous right like a little bit like like there's a little bit of that going on with with him and you play as this character emma who is this 18 year old woman like girl who uses a katana and she's a warrior or whatever but she has a special ability where this is where the it's kind of the lord i think again i think the lore is like the strongest part of the game that's why i'm so surprised when people people dismiss it there's like this every hundred years there's a new blight and the blight only one blight can exist at a time because they like kind of they have this like uh like evolutionary competition of like which one will survive.

2:56:01But she can deal with all the different blight strands, which is kind of cool. So she can like employ them in different ways. And there's this, it's just really neat game. This action role-playing game, basically within all of it. Separated by, it's open world-esque. I would call it non-linear, but it's more like Borderlands where like the spaces are connected to each other or a Tales game. So it's not a huge map. It's like these locations, these zones. and you have this walker called the cleanse walker that looks a little bit like a front mission robot but like bigger and like you live in it and it has a pilot and you like travel with a cook and all these different things you have a companion wolf named ku that fights alongside you i think one of the things that the game kind of struggles from is it is too systemically deep i think actually there's a weird tempo to it in that there i think there are just a one or two too many systems upgrade systems cooking systems crafting systems conversational systems relationships to manage it's a lot there's a lot a lot going on and i think skill trees and experience points and dumping your points into different schematic you know are different statistics that then give you skill points.

2:57:22Then you use the skill points on your skill tree. And then the skill tree unlocks these skills. Then you upgrade the skills. And it's like, it's a little, it's a little much. That's, that's my biggest problem with the game. The other big problem I have with it is it is a very vertical game. It's really cool. If you hold down X, she uses like her hair and like some other, like to make these roots that like drive her up. It's got a, it's got a mild Spider-Man kind of quality to it. Cause she can like swing and do all this kind of stuff. so the game the game for my in my opinion the game has inconsistent rules in terms of blocking players from going certain places and doing certain things like i'm always surprised about the things the game lets me do and then i'm surprised by the things the game doesn't let me do so for instance like i'll jump up and i'll keep jumping and keep jumping and i'll end up like on the top of a mountain and lo and behold something's up there like but then i'll then there'll be like a big gap and a bridge and i'll try to jump it and there's just a there's just a wall it just fall and I'm like well why can't I do that and I keep asking myself that as I play the game I'm like why can't I do this why can I do this but not that why can I do that but not this and that's my big complaint with it I I can tell you that is not I haven't played this game that is the type of thing that will knock a great game down to an entire 10 points for people the that feeling of like inconsistency and not really like having rules communicated to the player in ways that are like consistently applied like that ruins a lot of things that are otherwise good like it's i can i think about like games that i played before where i'm asking it's like why can i do this but that was um what the fuck was oh my god that game the the monkey one um oh black myth black myth wukong right yeah that was like that it was like there's so many invisible walls in that game and i remember feeling like a similar thing where it's like i'm a monkey i can't climb this like why like I don't understand like this feels like inconsistent and it completely pulled me out of it it's like the uh people always make fun of it like a resident evil it's like I can't go through this door there's a mattress in the way you know right it's like you can deal with that like every once in a while but yeah this game has a lot of that and yeah it's what's strange too is like the verticality is kind of sometimes I can jump off of a thing and just land like I can just fall for seconds and land then other times i'm like why i jump and it just resets me back to where i wasn't like why can't i jump there why can i be in this water but not this water why am i drowning here but swimming here or like walking through the water here like there's a lot of that yeah that that to me is because i i've read some of the criticism of the game and a lot and it's like a lot of lack of enemy variety and all the rest i have seen that already but i'm also i'm like 15 hours in so there's a lot more to see i don't know where it goes but that's fine but to me i'm like this is the big sticking point to me is in terms of the gameplay but it's the i want to say these are minor quibbles they're not minor quibbles it's it's certainly not game of the year i but i do think it's uh i do think it's really good and i it's fun to see game freak do do different things they don't you know there's like uh what was that what was that 3ds game dustin Harmo night that they did.

3:00:28Remember that game? They very randomly rarely ever do anything. Right. We talked about Tembo recently, right? Like it's so rare for them to do shit. And so like, it's cool to see outside of Pokemon for people that don't know what I'm saying. So from that perspective, it's exciting. And I think this game has a lot of style. Some people are saying it's like. Reminds me of Studio Ghibli or whatever, and like Princess Mononoke. And I'm like, not really. it's a it's like a samurai girl with a dog i mean that's about the biggest connection and it's japanese i mean that's the biggest connection but yeah i i think it's uh uh you do shower with your dog well okay hmm what do you mean you literally when you take a shower like you go in your little little home the atst kind of home and then you just go to the shower and you press x and then you and the wolf get in the shower together together.

3:01:28so there's that also i love i love how so it's like so this mike i think this is really funny as well the driver of your your your craft is this human character and everyone's got like interesting names or at least like little like emma's not so offbeat or whatever but you know you have your dog's coo and this and that and the enemies are the new sheet but then your driver's name is brad we just thought that was funny not because we know a bride but just it just seems like such a weird name for a japanese game to uh yeah it's like like christopher just being yeah that's very weird it's like you must beat the malefax and the new she and and rid yourself of this curse go talk to brad go talk to reggie yeah go talk to her so i uh i recommend it i really do i think it's i think it's a good game i'm still i still have not gotten i'm not very far and i'm in the third zone i am trying to um i i want to be judicious with my time so i'm just kind of playing it blind but then I'm going after I'm done with an area I'll just go and look at a map on the internet to see if I missed anything and then usually I haven't and then I just move on to the next spot I'll miss like a campfire or something it's very souls like in that regard where you like use campfires and then if you opt to heal yourself and save then it regenerates everyone on the map and all the rest so yeah it's out there I don't think it's doing very well doesn't seem like anyone really gives a shit about it but I like it alright All right.

3:03:01Six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas to end the show as we always do. Patreon.com slash laststaymedia for your inquiries on the thread on the news feed each Wednesday. Deleted Thursdays. We'll hear from six of you now, and we've heard from you throughout the show as well. We'll begin with Zagdar, who says, Howdy. With all the discussion on digital license management, I have a thought experiment to consider. What would your digital rights bill of rights be? If you were working for the ESRB, what would be proposals you would have that would show consumer friendliness but not fully involve government action?

3:03:33Or as a government, what would be a tangible requirement you would pass into law? I think we have a lot of feelings on the idea, but I don't hear actionable thoughts. Well, to be clear, the ESRB is not what this model would be. We talk about the ESRB just in that it was created under government threat, which is, I think, what this new thing we would have created would end up being. So to underline my own point of view, because I think some people are confused about this, I don't necessarily want the government to do anything about it. I want them to threaten it as an actionable thing and saying like, you have X amount of time to figure this out on your own, or we're going to come back and revisit this.

3:04:09That's how the ESRB was made, as we know. And it worked out great. And the ESRB serves an exceptional function and it's completely operable. And in fact, it's pretty ironclad, like the publishers and the and the and the hardware manufacturers are so on board that you literally can't publish a game on their platforms without an ESRB rating so you want something similar that everyone buys into a covenant as it were pardon the pun because we've been talking about halo recently dustin what do you want in a digital bill of rights how simple or complicated should it be for you well I think I mean there's a few things a lot of things we talked about on monday actually on the stream but like i think first of all is that you should be entitled to whatever you purchase regardless of your standing on the network so if i you know whether i mean whether it's rightful or not let's say even not like if i get banned on playstation network because i was in a solo round of marathon and i said i said a slur like that guy that wrote it yeah that's rough uh and let's say i got banned from playstation i think i should still be entitled to all the things i purchased on that store i mean i use the example and people really like this on sacred streaming that's like if i uh main level games our friend evan over there if i go in and i don't know i punch him in the face and he bans me from the store that's totally fine but that doesn't give him the right to come and take everything that i've i've ever bought from him right agreed you know agreed so i think that should be true with digital goods as well um another thing is the ability to pass on your digital goods in the event that you die in some way uh or like an account combining thing because like if i if i die today tomorrow whatever uh i guess holly would have access to my account but it would only be on my account like there should be some way to pass things on if that makes sense yeah i um yeah i i agree i fundamentally agree that like that the foundation of it should i love what you said about about evan right like yeah once the the transaction has occurred and you're outside of any reasonable you know like the game doesn't work like a discount kind of thing a scheme like steam would have where it's like you played it for two hours or you waited x amount of time it's final and the transaction needs to be retrievable at that point yeah yeah what would you add to this chris i really don't know i think the the one thing that i was thinking of was like there's so there's games that i think about some of the pc games that i own that um for whatever reason i can't get into because there's like some weird drm thing for or like there needs there's a check that needs to happen uh with a service that no longer exists like this this is a couple of games that i have have this issue um particularly stuff that's linked to old older launchers like you play and stuff like that like there are games that they just kind of lock you out in my opinion if you if you're gonna stop service for these things then they should there should be like a universal unlock to the point where i actually think it should extend to the fact that you can like proliferate this at this point like it should be like almost like an mp3 where it's like all right well if you're not going to if you're not even going to allow me to authenticate the copy of this game that I legally purchased that I have owned forever that you're just arbitrarily like revoking from me now?

3:08:08Like that shouldn't be possible. In fact, if you are going to do that and remove the ability to authenticate, these things should be then unshackled and then be allowed to, you know, you should be able to burn and copy and do whatever the fuck you want to do at that point. that's a very hyper specific thing not a lot of games have that problem a lot of PC games on disc have that problem where like there's a code that needs to be authenticated and the service is just no longer around this is true for games like from the late 2000s early 2010s and even like mid 2010s some games have this issue but I have some titles that have that issue and I'm like this is fucking ridiculous because I bought this I own this and I own the license to it but like what you're just that's still kind of insane i think the spirit of ownership is it should should be really reinforced basically like we need to have a conversation what the spirit of ownership is like i understand i understand that i'm purchasing a license but like that's not really what we're doing here that's not what i'm paying that's what you're willing to sell me and that's what i have to do to get the thing that i'm trying to buy but you know what I'm trying to buy.

3:09:26And I think we need to just have a more honest conversation about what that means and more honest terminology. Yes. I think I've been thinking so much about this, obviously, and. I think a lot of it, like it comes down to it comes down to the stakeholders and licensing and making the licenses irrevocable and transferable, I think, are the words that I've come up with. So. Yeah. And again, it might just be a thing of moving forward, like certain things, certain games, certain films, certain music, whatever is just not within this new covenant because of different rules, but that we try to get as much into this new style of this new approach of how we're going to do things.

3:10:08And I agree with what you were saying completely, Dustin, like companies have a right not to serve you. And we don't want to get too crazy with twisting their arm about this. This is kind of. Actually, we'll get it. I'm not going to say because we're going to get into some of this later with some other stuff that's going on with Sony. but I think that like it's reasonable to say we have to figure out who the license is through who's licensing the game and I wonder if this is solved in some way by even having publisher or developer level licenses that are you that consoles and even pc uses proxies wherein like if playstation goes out of business or sony goes out of business you have a license to a game x and it's also happens to be on pc so you can claim it somewhere else like I it it's what I was saying I think we were saying this on the stream maybe or last week I don't remember but the reality is this is extremely difficult problem and I think because it's so difficult to solve and so heady in all it requires to consider people just don't want to tackle it but it it are it is conversations like this and and instances of trying to put on the table like well what do you want that I think are really important and so I think at the very least you want irrevocable transferable licensing of games that you purchase licenses to.

3:11:24And once the deal is done, as Dustin and Noti did, the deal is done and you should be able to retain them, even if Dustin drops a bunch of racial slurs and gets banned permanently on PSN. He should still have access to that stuff. And by the way, as far as account level stuff is concerned in account management, I think that's part of it, too. Like and I don't know exactly how you would put it into words, but there needs to be an idea that there are no dead ends. There should be no such thing as them saying, like, can't do anything for you that that simply can't be the case and i think that there's too much flagrant lying even about what can and cannot be done we were talking about this specifically with that microsoft thing recently where they're like your pictures are gone your one drive's locked there's nothing we can do about it and it's like that's all a lie they're lying to you they clearly can do something about it because they fucking did right you know what i mean so i think that there has to be you don't even want to say a human element where it's like i need someone to talk to it's just like there's got to be a resolution.

3:12:22It's even, as I said, when my account got boosted, some sort of snail mail, notarized paperwork resolution. It's too serious and too real at this point in the digital ecosystem and especially moving forward for us to just be so flippant. No more. That's another big part of this covenant, I think, that needs to be in it. That might even be more important at a systems level than any individual item is about just your access to the general things you have. And I even came up with the ideas. And again, this is where it gets difficult about having some sort of consortium where everyone's kind of on the hook for these shared licenses.

3:13:02If one of their companies goes down. Some sort of small tax on every item sold that goes into some sort of fund that can't like escrow fund that can't be touched unless something happens. Like big problems require big solutions. so that's where my mind is on it we'll certainly we'll flesh this out as time goes on greg wrote in and said hey symbol wizards i don't have a problem with the ps6 being digital only what i would like is the ability to play ps4 and ps5 discs on my ps6 external drive possibly ps5 at launch had a big selling point of being backwards compatible with ps4 games and now with the new generation we're backing away from that function for disc gamers i have over 300 ps5 discs and 500 PS4 discs.

3:13:51And that's not to say I'm going to play all of them, but to be able to jump back on these with a new console would have been nice. Dustin, what's to do? I feel like I feel like I just don't know about this because, again, we said this a week or two ago. I feel like if they introduce a disk drive,

3:14:09then people are going to be like, well, just make the fucking disks like it's Blu-ray. It's a Blu-ray drive. There's nothing particularly unique or special about it. you know what I mean so I just feel like that's a danger for Sony to even acknowledge doing that unfortunately we have a game we have a console for you if you want to play PlayStation 5 games right honestly I understand that conundrum but it would be I it would be a reasonable compromise to me in that it's like okay we're out of making discs we know that now they've already said so that they are done uh but you know my biggest issue during this whole thing maybe not my biggest issue but a main thing is just like what about my investment and it is true that in previous console generations there was never an expectation of backwards compatibility but it's a weird kind of like halfway situation where it's like okay well assuming the ps playstation 6 is going to play ps5 ps4 games unless you made that investment on disc over the last since what 20 what 14 ps4 ps right 2013 yeah 2013 like oh yeah all all that investment you made sorry you can't take that over now uh but if you bought them digitally we'll we'll be happy to take you i just feel like one of two things which i don't know if one of them is possible there's been lots of talk about a disc to digital program on the xbox side i don't i was talking to pork about it at one point i was trying to research a little like apparently some xbox discs like xbox series discs and some xbox one discs maybe all of them i'm not sure but because they were planning on that drm version of the xbox one they have unique disc indicators on them on the inner ring so that makes sense why that would be possible there does playstation have that is that a even a possibility i don't know um ideally a disk drive that's separate on playstation 6 for that for those older games that's that's what i want personally i totally understand that some people are going to be a bitch about it and be like we'll just make the playstation 6 games it's like i understand that you want that i want that too but i'm kind of just trying to take what i can get here like just at least make sure that all my my giant collection i want to be able to take that forward i don't want to just have my playstation 5 set up forever and that's part of the reason why when it comes to investing in my library in the future it's like yeah well i'm going to be thinking about that i'm going to be thinking about what you did to me and my my my previous investment because all of those games that i bought on playstation that now i can't take with me to playstation 6 i'd be able to play them if i had them on steam i could bring them forward with me but you guys kind of fucked me so i'm not saying i'm not getting a playstation 6 uh but it definitely has me reconsidering multi-platform games certainly uh just because it i don't know maybe because it's all digital in the future it's like well you won't have that problem going forward but it's like yeah but you still kind of fucked me didn't you yeah and i will remember that what do you what do you think they're gonna do what do you think they'll do i i don't know man i really don't know like to me it seems obvious it's like release a disk drive sell for a hundred bucks can be an ugly little thing that sits beside your pristine playstation six and it will uh appease people like me but i think you bring up a really valid point that it's like they kind of just want out of that completely at this point it's too much explaining you know what we say about when you're explaining you're losing right i just i just think yeah i don't i don't know i again we're all so like surprised by the whole situation but i think they're just going in a direction and that's what they want to do i do wonder if there will be some sort of digital solution like you said it's is it possible that's the first question and is if it if it is is it possible on ps4 and ps5 probably not ps4 maybe ps5 the discs and then then you ask yourself do you want to do it or not i feel like sony seems like they want to just ride this out there's really no evidence or sign to the contrary at all like not even an inkling of it that they that they are going to move so i don't know do you have anything you want to add chris no i mean well the reality of the economic realities are something to take into consider take into consideration as well because i do think if the economy wasn't so shit a disk drive would be more likely because the ability to just set aside time and resources to build these things wouldn't be so they wouldn't be so much of an ask in comparison but i do wonder if like because i think the smart thing to do would just be to do the disk drive you know i just don't see a reason why they wouldn't because they are still out of it really they're not they're not making any ps6 discs or they're not going to be so like there's really no danger in any like miscommunication on that front you're not going to get like a ps6 disc that doesn't work you know what i mean or anything like that like you're kind of in the clear as far as explaining and i think anybody who needs a ps5 disc reader explain to them wouldn't because they wouldn't be looking for it you know like if like no casual person is going to be looking for that like that is going to be an inherently hardcore kind of thing for people looking to bring their library forward if they're even looking to do that it means they care enough about this to probably know on site what these things are for so i think they have that benefit kind of built into it but yeah maybe they just want to keep it simple i i actually think that they'll do it um it might be for a ridiculous upcharge i think they'll probably try to squeeze as much money out of that as possible certainly um but i think it's just too crazy of a thing to like so many people have invested so much in physical discs on ps5 not not the overwhelming majority maybe but like it's not a it's not an it's not a small enough number of people i think over time to ignore if you want to court all that audience for moving forward you know yeah um now it depends on whether or not that that's what they're trying to do it could be that the console strategy is shifted um because things have gotten so expensive because there is this expected kind of harmony between multiple generations at this point that didn't used to exist it could be that the goal instead of getting everybody to switch over to ps6 is just we're going to make a really hardcore machine for really hardcore people we're going to sell it for a lot of money and and the people who want to be a part of it will be a part of it and we'll we're not going to sell it at a loss and we're not really concerned with bringing people forward because as long as people stay on ps5 they're still kind of in our ecosystem and contribute contributing anyway um but this is going to be for people who want to move forward in the immediate sense and over time And people naturally will gravitate towards it anyway because things will come out that can't run.

3:21:49It's that at that point is when the standard cycle will pick up deep into the PS6 generation. And maybe that's the strategy. Maybe they're not even necessarily looking to bring all the disc people forward. Maybe they're just trying to build a premium bespoke machine that is more powerful but not all that different. to bring enthusiasts and tech people out um now i don't know i don't even know if that necessarily makes sense i just know that the old strategy of expecting everybody to jump over and abandoning your old hardware like that's dead in the water like that's not a feasible thing to do anymore and so naturally your thought process between generations has to shift and i think we kind of got a bit of a half measure during the ps5 i think we got like we got that whole we believe in generations thing which obviously no yeah not really yeah they ended up backporting things for the first time in probably ever that i can recall i so i think they understand that what's important is that people are involved in their ecosystem and and that people spend money in their ecosystems digitally for sure but that might be just what this new thing is for no options so even if they are even if there are let's say like millions of fewer consoles sold the people on those consoles are going to be spending objectively probably more money and more of that or more money more of that money is going to go in our pockets because they can't go to box retailers to split that cost so i don't know it's a big question uh i think there'll be a this drive though we'll see we're gonna find out not too soon but we'll find out next year by this time next year we'll have a great idea of what's going on yeah not in the machine by the way i mean right right external like like almost the way that 360 did their hd dvd yeah i see it that way too like a little bot like a little rectangle that you would plug in with a usb cable all right i moved this question up actually because i guess it makes a little bit more sense here sony wants your mom wrote in and said misinterpreters of sony's codes and boxes i used to work in packaging design and i disagree that sony will sell codes to try to appease the physical audience they clearly don't give a fuck about them anymore sony wants to sell games as gifts a busy mom buying spider-man or on christmas doesn't give a shit if she's getting a disc or a code as long as she can find it at her usual store and wrap it up that's also why sony will use blu-ray cases over flimsy little nintendo cards cases are familiar easy to spot cards literally have no shelf presence should they might not even look like fucking games to someone who isn't in the know the physical crowd can crawl to the PSN store.

3:24:29Your mom only shops at retail. Sony knows this. And I bet there's a fuck ton of moms. Thank God I'm not designing packaging anymore. I'll listen. I certainly you're right about partially, but I don't want to, I don't want to be. That's not why they're doing this. I just want to, I want to make sure people understand. It's like, certainly there are benefits. And if you're, so in other words, if you're going to do something, you want to do it as best to your best of your ability. So you put it in the codes, you want to find your customers, you want people to buy it. There's no doubt. All those things you're right about.

3:24:57They're doing this so they don't get sued. Period. Right. And in fact, you already see, I didn't include it in this story, but like there is some, some lawsuit going on in the Netherlands right now where Sony's being sued for like half a billion dollars for monopolizing the sale of games through their own storefront, which you and I, we've all discussed this in the past, I think is kind of preposterous in a way. Like it, it's what I feel about Apple and Epic. And we've talked about this where it's like, I feel like if you have a closed down piece of hardware, you have every right to sell things through one conduit.

3:25:30I don't understand why that would be any different. But there are many municipalities, especially in Europe and other places around the world that are much more pro consumer in terms of flexing the customers wants and forcing them upon companies, which is fine. And we talk about how this is going to be useful for us in the future with some of the things that we want. but I truly 100 % believe that the impetus for this for this scheme was them saying we're going to get sued if we do this by in certain places we might win we might lose but we can simply just sell codes and then say like well actually we don't monopolize the sales clearly and that would be the end of those lawsuits so while they definitely want to find their customers and while there's definitely an advantage to selling codes in cases or on cards in stores.

3:26:18There's no doubt about that. You have to understand, just think about it. The biggest cost to selling games in retail is the split with the retailer, not the creation of the game. So if they're still willing to eliminate some of the cost, but not most of the cost, then there has to be a real reason for it. And that's the reason. That's my interpretation of it they're never going to come out and say that because then they're going to beg to be sued so but but it is certainly a defense there's no doubt in my mind about that so i wanted to say that i appreciate what you say i think you're right people are going to buy stuff this way they don't really give a fuck they're not you know no mom out there buying a game for their kid isn't as a physical game enthusiast maybe some so yes good good point but i want to be clear that the code thing is is to defray lawsuits and and when this thing if it goes forward in the Netherlands and in other municipalities, that will be their defense.

3:27:17And then you'll see. We'll be like, any of our partners can sell their games on car in cases on Target and Walmart. Anyone can do it. We're not forcing anyone to do anything. They're not stupid. They're annoying. It's two different things. d rock wrote in said howdy duty boys one thing i love about rpgs is visiting new towns seeing the new landscape meeting new npcs advancing quests hearing the new music and visiting shops all lend to the feeling of great a grand adventure do any of you feel the same way what are some standout locations that have stuck in your head after all these years doesn't necessarily have to be from any rpg of course as many different genres have awesome spots two of my favorite towns of recent memory are port bryle haven in metaphor and cosmo canyon village in Final Fantasy 7 or Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

3:28:10Where are you on this? Doesn't anything come to mind for you? The number one thing that came to mind for me was Traverse Town in Kingdom Hearts. To me, it's like the quintessential. I don't know about quintessential RPG town. It's like the nostalgic town. It's got great music. It's kind of where the game really starts to begin. And I hear the music to it today and I'm like transported back. to being in second grade playing kingdom hearts for the first time so i'm trying to think if there's any other ones though shout out traversed town yeah traversed i mean colin you know about it yeah you get to know your way around it it's funny that's what i love about there are certain examples of towns that are really memorable for me i always think of my city and final fantasy four that's like the wizard's town um and the music that plays when you go there is awesome and i love porham and palham those are like my favorite characters in final fantasy four so that's where they're from narsh and final fantasy 6 like the first town in the game like the industrial mountain town is very notable for me there's a lot of different places but i do agree with what he's saying in the main of like finding the new location having respite going to the inn healing getting that save in exploring the weapons and armor shops and the accessory shops and the item shops seeing what's there when i was a kid i used to even write down things in pads like these these are the items I want.

3:29:31This is how much everything costs. And now I got to go grind out this amount of money. Speaking to all the NPCs, I had recently shouted out Beast of Reincarnation for doing a very small UI quirk, which is putting a checkmark next to a UPC when you're done talking to them, like when they have nothing left to say, which some games do, but many games don't. Oh, that's nice. So always like repeat talking to everyone, seeing if anyone has anything new to say, doing side quests, getting your new instructions for your new quest or whatever, the new leg of your quest. There is something very satisfying about finding those locations in games.

3:30:06And so that just resonated me with a lot. Anything come to mind for you, Chris? I mean, I'm definitely less of an RPG guy, but the things, the town that comes to mind, which is like a really basic answer, but like Whiterun sticks out to me. Just because I remember that being such a big deal. Like I remember that like in Skyrim. I just remember like, oh, that's like the first spot, right? It's the first place you go and it's got like the big wall around it. It's got like that kind of vertical kind of climb up to the castle. It sticks out to me just because it's like I remember that feeling of being like, oh, this is distinct.

3:30:50And what's interesting about it is like. There are games that I have played since then that have towns integrated into the open world. like i think about like zelda uh or breath of the wild where like typically like in older zelda games like these towns would have been like their own levels but like in in breath of the wild they're just kind of like naturally placed and there is something cool about that but like there is something like there is something about in a game like skyrim when you walk you're in the overworld and then you walk through the big doors and then there's like that loading so that that loading screen that layer and it's like now you're in the town there is something about that that works to separate in a way that actually i i think doesn't necessarily harm the immersion of a game like because you kind of feel like okay i'm in this town now and then when you leave like now you're in skyrim whereas opposed to like i remember feeling in like um in breath of the wild as much as i like that game i remember feeling like this just kind of feels like a bunch of buildings like thrown into a place it doesn't feel like its own like it's telling me i'm in a town now but like it doesn't really feel that way because there's no separation and i remember that feeling like oh that that's not the feeling that i thought i would get in fact i thought it would be the reverse that the loading screen would be like the immersion breaking part of it right but in reality from from my brain anyway it's it's actually somewhat somewhat of a reversal but yeah I mean that's the one that sticks out to me the Citadel also in Mass Effect 2 those fucking elevator rides yeah the elevator rides and like the the white I just like yeah these are the ones these are the places that stick out to me I haven't played too many RPGs or delved deeply into too many of them but those are the ones that stand out Mark M.

3:32:48Rodin I said, hey, boys. I don't understand why so many people feel the need to defend some of the wealthiest companies in gaming nickel and diming their fans, e.g. the Drandtlft Auto 6 Netflix reveal. I understand that decisions like these make sense, but for fans, they suck. I'm not even a rock star fan, and I feel bad for the diehards who don't have Netflix after years of waiting. When I go to Disneyland, I expect a better experience than when I go to the airport. Catching Snow White smoking a cigarette isn't a big deal, but it sucks because what's the point of Disneyland if not the experience?

3:33:15Gaming is the same. I want things to be fun, enjoyable, and player-focused. I understand there will be give and take here, of course. Someone has to keep the lights on. I just don't understand why so many of the commentary and player base now talk more about armchair executives and shareholders than players and fans. Let's stick with you, Chris. What do you think of that? I mean, I kind of understand. I don't think it's necessarily that there's a defense going on. It's just that we you've kind of. You kind of have to understand what's going on or why certain decisions are made if you're going to if you're going to offer any meaningful criticism, I think.

3:33:52Like if you're just kind of coming at it from I don't know anything about the executive space. I don't know anything about, you know, why they might be making decisions that they're making. I just have a problem with it and I'm going to yell about it. Like you could maybe get, you know, you'll probably hit on some things that are true and it's probably not even that necessary that you understand where they're coming from. But I do think it adds validity to your commentary if you just kind of can sit in their shoes for a little bit. Not in an empathetic way, just in a way to understand like why things are happening.

3:34:28Doesn't mean you have to be a fan of it. I think it's dumb personally. like I don't especially because I don't I just don't believe so here's what I think I think it's dumb for Netflix to have paid for that in the first place because that shit's gonna leak immediately like I don't know what the especially it was like a six-hour exclusivity window like I don't know what incentive Netflix had to even pay for that I wonder how many I wonder what percentage of Netflix viewers are avid gamers to the point where they care about this kind of thing like I that's all questionable to me but if I were a rock star um and I got a deal for that like yeah I mean especially because they've spent so much money making this game like what like anything that you could do to get money really is is going to help well granted they've they've already made a shit ton I don't know I don't know if this is true or not though Chris is is because I haven't read too deeply about it but there was some suggestion that Strauss Zelnick was asked about the deal and wouldn't even confirm that there was any money change changing hands in it and i wonder if now i'm not saying that they didn't they didn't buy it but i wonder if the deal is simply like it's a stunt yeah like netflix is like we get the action for a little while you guys get your game on the splash screen of the biggest streaming platform in the world sure quid pro quo you know yeah maybe yeah i don't know i don't know if that's the way it went but i think i can imagine in a situation like that either way it's quite uh it's quite it's it is it is a little crazy but it's but it is yeah and i agree with you it's like what does netflix really get out of this how much because you have to ask what would they have paid for something like that and then if it's it couldn't be that much and then so like why would it be worth it for rockstar to even do it so i was wondering if there's some other deal no no i'm glad you said that because that is also probably valid i i yeah i don't know i i just think um it helps to know it just helps to be able to sit outside of yourself even if you don't necessarily agree with the position that you're trying to inhabit or trying to understand just to have a more nuanced and more grounded in reality or substantive I should say critique of what it is that you're trying to talk about you know I think there's value in that I don't think everybody has to do it but i do think it's a smarter way of engaging than just kind of going off of gut reactions although your gut reaction might be right yeah i think i think colin that it's definitely from a marketing perspective like it's annoying that uh like the idea of like oh the commercial is paywalled for six hours is from that perspective yeah it feels really stupid but i do think that you're right about the fact that netflix is the biggest streaming platform and this is the game that applies to everyone you know this isn't a bubble game this is beyond like well beyond even a normie ball and gun gamer type game this is the game that like uh some guy that he's like oh i played i played gta 5 when i was college i really liked it he's not tuned into the gaming sphere He's not even going to see it on YouTube pop up for his algorithm, but he does log into Netflix every night to watch show.

3:37:47Yeah, it'll be splash. And then suddenly it's in his face and he's like, oh, they're making another Grand Theft Auto game and that's actually coming. Or maybe he heard about it. He's like, oh, maybe I'll check that out. Maybe I'll get a PS5 for it. It is. Maybe I'm back. That's exactly right. And I it's funny, man, like we talked a little bit about on the stream, I believe, Dustin earlier in the week. but this wish casting and this idea, it reminds me a lot of what was going on at the Odyssey. It's like, if you're going to make your entire personality of this game not doing well, you better fucking get a different personality.

3:38:17Real quick, because you're setting yourself up for disappointment. I just don't know what else you want me to say. You're going to be fucking blown away when you see how well this game sells. And I wonder when they're going to say, when they'll even reveal data. It might be after the first day. We'll see.

3:38:35I understand what Mark is saying but I do think there is an instinct in certain circles to assume the worst about everything and to seem to want the worst to be the truth and it kind of gets away from reality a little bit for me so the way I would say it Mark is I never I really just try to shoot from the hip right? It's not even really the right way to put it. I try to shoot straight. I'm not telling you what I think you want to hear. I'm certainly not kowtowing to any corporation of which we have relationships with none of them, you'll remember, in any meaningful way. I don't get money from any of these companies.

3:39:18I think that when I say something, it's because I believe it. And that's a hard thing for some people to deal with. because they they want things to go into this this singular direction but in fact sometimes the companies are right that's just reality we don't have to like them we don't have to like that reality but we do owe to the audience to uh to acknowledge that reality and the netflix thing is a mountain out of a molehill like yeah to it not only did chris say it it's going to leak immediately there will be people live streaming it none so like immediately it'll leak yeah but it'll be on twitter moments in moments it's like you won't even have to wait yeah it's but but but even if it wasn't even if it was some sort of lockdown thing it's six hours and it's an ad it's a fucking ad it's an extended look at the game but it's advertising i just think you have to like kind of calm down and you said it too chris it's like is it that big of a surprise that they're gonna ring the fuck out of this thing for money by the way everyone was asking when are you gonna show it when are you gonna show it when are you gonna show it how are you gonna do it what are we gonna see where will it be well it's like here you go yeah this is not what you asked for for me i think that the the mystique of never showing it i love that and they would never do that i know i get it i know but i love the mystique of them saying like nope no we're not going to show it yeah even the commercials like 15 second spots during football sunday night football river just the logo the date that's right you yeah generally i don't know i i think people have to be um what's the word i'm you're probably not going to find a more anti-corporate person than me probably i mean you probably could literally but i think just because something is corporate doesn't necessarily inherently mean it's wrong and vice versa i think i think it's there's a certain sheep mentality that is equivalent in in the anti-sheep you know what i mean like the person who like doesn't believe like if the government says the sky is blue you'd be like well no well it's just like well no sometimes the government's just correct right and sometimes a company is just right and sometimes uh it's literally just uh not a big deal well other times it is right and you know it's important like everything's nuanced so i just think um people just got to be a little bit more uh involved with how they talk about and how they communicate and how they ingest a lot of this information well i was thinking about this espn i don't know why they do this but you'll you'll know because we've talked about it so many times on the show during one day and football occasionally they'll just be like we're and they'll during the second quarter there's gonna be a fucking commercial for star wars you know something like that and it's like well you have to pay for espn you don't just get it no one is busting anyone's balls about them working with these different networks to show a commercial at a certain time or during a certain broadcast they could show it to you whenever they want they can upload it whenever they want but they don't what is really the difference it's just people got to calm down a little bit i think everyone's too everyone's wound up like a fucking top right now man it's it'll be fine this is a game we should be excited about I don't want to say we should be celebrating it we'll worry about that when the game comes out and we play it but we should be looking forward to it I'm so looking forward to it more from a curiosity standpoint than anything else in other words like I don't yeah I want to get lost in the world I want to get immersed in it I want to experience it but I really just want to see what it is yeah like that's that's the thing for me right now all right final inquiry my friends fictional let's play wrote in and said hello everyone i have a simple question how do you guys discipline yourself on focusing on one game with so many constantly coming out i can't help but start one game and then constantly switch to something else i'll be in a big retro mood and would want to play bubsey 3d i don't know why the fuck you want to play bubsey 3d but then here but then uh but then here you guys talk about the newest games so i don't want to keep up to date on the latest releases and then see someone talk about the new xenoblade coming next year so i'd want to knock out that series before then i want to play everything but because of that i never get far into anything any advice this is an interesting question isn't it dustin yeah here's my own take on this and i'll leave it to you guys i typically try to split my time between no more than two games at a time and if there are two games they have to be different fundamentally often 2d and 3d is what i try to do but sometimes they can be two 2d or two 3d games And I think that coming to my, I don't want to, I don't want to, you don't want to put any hard and fast rules on yourself necessarily.

3:44:11I've done this to myself, but there are just certain things, as I've said over the years where I acknowledge, I'm like, I'm never playing that. it's just you just it's just too much man it's just you have to you have to come to it it's why i don't like this whole backlog tracking thing it's like you got to at some point accept that you can't do it you are making you are setting yourself up to be disappointed and to be annoyed i used to have a whiteboard in my bedroom during the ps3 era with games on it that i was like i I got to platinum these. I got to do this. I never got to this. And it's like, what am I doing?

3:44:47It's too much. So to me, I feel like go towards what you gravitate towards and also understand that right or wrong, I'm not saying it either way. The numbers and achievements and trophies simply speak that you're not unusual. This is the way people play games. And honestly, it's kind of the way people have always played games. Yeah. that's kind of the reality like people bounce we just didn't have trophies and achievements and we weren't tracking things like we didn't know but i just bounce off shit all the time so i think you just gotta you gotta be where you want to be and i think you have to have realistic expectations that like you want to catch up with xenoblade well if you want to do that that's hundreds of hours what is that going to be like 500 hours of your life i mean if that's what you want to do that's probably half of your year that would be like half of a a hardcore gamers a year is that what you really want to do if so then understand that that comes at the sake of x y or z it's it's that simple so i would say give yourself the flexibility of playing more than one game at a time but try to like stick with what what you like and try to be more deliberate that that's all but you're going to do what you do i used to buy games and not even open them

3:46:03so oh man it's crazy what do you got any insight for him no not not for him not for me i love my favorite like because i i play games because i like interacting with the software that these people have created and i like feeling like the different because to me even just the the ways that people like identify with the emotions of like a narrative in a game or like a story in a game like I feel that way but with the with the gameplay and like with like what emotion does the like what emotion does the swing in Spider-Man feel like you know what I mean like that's the emotion that I like or that I care about more than like oh this line delivery or xyz you know what I mean like so I play games for as long as they're entertaining to me and for as long as I get emotions out of the gameplay experience and then like sometimes something else will come out and I'll bounce off and I'll come back I'm still playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas underneath all this stuff that I'm kind of fucking around with so I always generally have like something consistent that I try to work through and I try to finish but in the meantime I'm kind of I don't know dude I'm I was playing Super Meat Boy last night like out of nowhere like you know what I mean it's just like so I bounce around a lot and I I find that it helps to just have at least something that I'm working on in the background as like a foundational, kind of like a bedrock game.

3:47:27It's like, yes, I'm making progress and I'm slowly chipping away through that. And that's the commitment game. And then everything on top of that, I can just kind of, I'll play through half of this game and then I'll play like a multiplayer round of this game and then bounce off. i told you i i was talking earlier about how i played hell divers for like an hour and a half with some friends and then i uninstalled it just because it's so huge and then i went back to playing other things so it's like it's i think having at least something that you're working on right as like a baseline is like a good it's it's like a good thing because it means you have the freedom to bounce around as you please and like follow your gut and follow your instincts or follow like what feels right to you but you also understand that it's not really jeopardizing anything because you still have this thing that you're committed to underneath it all like that's the way that i operate that makes sense that makes sense to me do you have anything you want to add dustin before we exit yeah it's this is a tough one because i when when things get busy is when it does where you really have to pick and choose and figure out what you want to play uh you're definitely right that no more than two games at a time because i've tried to do more and it just never that's tough like that's tough eventually you're going to enjoy one of it one of them more than the others and the other one's just gonna fall flat uh sometimes even happens with two games i'm worried about this happening in september because wolverine comes out and then a few days later or within the week uh five uh fire emblem comes out fire emblem right uh the new one whatever it's called and it looks fucking awesome so i'm going to be playing both of these games at the same time and it's no disrespect to wolverine but i'm probably gonna like fire emblem more what say it right wolverine wolverine thank you um i don't know what i'm saying sorry it was worth it was it worth it no emped this man i'm sorry i apologize my fault i apologize september's gonna be a big september's gonna be the big one man because like that's going to be like there's so many things on top of each other that like there's definitely just gonna and i agree like definitely like you can't have two committed games at the same time like you cannot like be working through two games consistent like that's that's crazy i don't know what i'm gonna do dude next month we should probably try to strategize a little bit yeah like like what are we because there's gonna be stuff all over each other so like what are what are we more likely to like what are what are you looking more forward to in one week that i might you know what i mean yeah yeah that's not a bad idea because it's the thing that really sucks for me is that when when capcom pushed onimusha up it put it right on top of dawn walker because before it was gonna they were gonna be really separated and those are the two i'm most excited about that month and they're coming out a day apart so i i i think i'm gonna play dawn walker first and then probably go into wolverine and then probably go into control and then i'll probably have to get back to some of the shit that i missed in october because things will things will slow down at that point but i don't know i don't i don't know like it's it's i am actually i don't want to say i'm distressed about it that's a little dramatic but it's like i think that's on my mind where i'm like what are you gonna do like this is an unusual a fairly unusual situation not that there's a lot of games coming out but there's a lot of games speaking specifically to me you know where i'm like this is a tough i've been waiting for this month i think that i have to go back to the list i think there's six games in total that month and it's like wow that's a lot for me here's something that's been hard for me to come to terms with over the years is that there can be critically acclaimed 10 out of 10 games that i don't care for and i don't need to or I can tell that I'm not going to care about them and I can skip them.

3:51:25I don't need to give it a try. I know myself, but there's part of me that's like, but it's supposed to be a masterpiece, you know? And sometimes I do check it. Something like Baldur's Gate three is a game that was like, I'm not going to like that. I should just skip it. And then I played it and I ended up loving it. But like, uh, Dawn Walker, blood of Dawn Walker, you know, the come of Dawn wanker. Yeah. Uh, Jesus. the game is probably going to review really well and i watched a couple different videos on youtube and i'm like i can tell this is going to be a great game i don't think it's a game for me though you know i just i think and especially during this time i just need to let it go like even i like there's part of me that normally would be like if that came out during a non-busy time i would totally play it or check it out at least to see if i like it but in this case with all these games September it's like I'm gonna just let it go I don't need to check out and know if Don Walker's from me especially at some point I will well especially because and this is also the kind of thing that's underpinning all of this um there is going to be so much at once but in this climate in the climate that we've existed in for however many years at this point the longer you wait the better game you're gonna be getting because there's gonna be patches it's gonna maybe it's gonna maybe go down in price like by the time we're you know by the time we're done with all the stuff that's going to be coming out that you know so like yeah it's it's yeah man it's a tricky time it's it's getting it's getting dicey for me too chris because it's what we're recording from the 13th i'm playing beast of reincarnation and then i have on my cross media bar like uh control uh on ps5 alan wake 2 on ps5 and then onimusha comes out on him for and it's like i don't know i don't i don't know how this is i don't think i can thread this needle like i i think it's going to be tough like i'm going to have to it might even come to be that like by the time i get to control i'll probably play alan wake two and then i'll probably play control one and then control two when control two is out already so things are going to start getting dicier and wolverine is going to be a wolverine i am extremely intrigued by just because i love insomniac so i'm gonna play that immediately so that's also going to be like an interrupting thing I don't I don't know I don't know it's gonna be tough out there it's gonna be good though it's a good problem to have it's and it's not always about the games that are available too I just felt that way about Crimson Desert earlier this year where I'm like yeah you know yeah that's a huge game that I remember thinking like I remember flirting with the idea where I was like do I wanna and then something just like wrestled me out of it I was like don't do this to yourself people like people loved it hours i'm sure it's good but yeah you have to you have to make concessions you have to yeah it is funny this whole conversation like and i get it if you look at it also it's like oh no how am i gonna consume all this content yeah i know i know the content oh no but i mean i'm there i'm totally there if we market for i I am concerned.

3:54:31It's the free market of content.

3:54:37Calling it the free market voices is one of the funniest. Like it's an underrated moment, I think. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one for sure. My friends, that's all we have for this episode. It's a good one, though. Good to be here with you guys today. Let's go around the horn and say goodbye to everyone. Chris, goodbye to you. Good to see you as always. Be well. Any plans?

3:54:58Today, it's pretty normal. so like i don't think well the gears beta is live again i did put a lot of time into it i don't know if i need to see much more of it i think it's just going to be more of the same so i'll probably i mean i think my friends will probably get me on a little bit but today not really much going on i think i'm going to try and cook some stuff today i want to i want to make pork chops i haven't made pork i don't really fuck with pork chops really that much like i like them like a lot but like that was really like a thing that my parents would make and like when i started living on my own it was just like it's chicken and steak really is what i felt like pork to me or like the the pork chop that are just like their patties right but i love the pork chops with the with the bone in it oh i love that i love to eat off the bone dude it's so good and it gets like it's when it gets the crisp oh yeah i'm gonna try i think i'm gonna try and fuck with that today because i've been craving it for some reason it's been years since i've had it so like i think i'll try and do some cooking but normal normal thursday for me cool dustin goodbye to you anything you'd like to share before we go hmm well i can i can tell sometimes when i'm sitting here at the end of the show i can i can start to smell dinner oh yeah it's a nice feeling yeah you know it's kind of a nostalgic feeling for some reason like when you're a kid or something you're upstairs you smell dinner so looking forward i don't know what it is so i'm looking forward to that probably watch some more midwest safety to bring this episode to a full circle i'll be doing that i didn't know that gears beta was open now for everybody today yeah maybe i'll check that out at some point and then i don't think i have any plans this weekend at all so we'll be able we've been trying to take leon out a bit more for him and for us just getting used to taking him out getting a stroller out you know he we took him to after after our stream calling on monday i said i had the the chilies right for with my grandparents he was he was a perfect angel the whole time we go to target because we need to pick up some things and he just unloads when we're doing the self checkout but it's it's bad like i can it's it's it's pushing through the leg of the diaper man so rough you know we got to work on that yeah you can't be shitting yourself at target i know we've all been there but you know keep that to a minimum timing's off timing is off so yeah just hanging out seeing seeing the baby after this little boy the little boy he's starting to smile a little bit so he's he's working he's working on it yeah he's getting there he good he hasn't he hasn't yet learned that there's nothing to smile about yeah let him be happy while he can all right well it's good to be here with you guys yeah for me i'm gonna i got some work to do here and then i'll work out go in the pool probably for a little while i gotta mow the lawn but it's just too fucking hot out can't do it um can't do it man sorry can't do it man sir oh you know what i forgot preseason football on tonight jets play tonight you know it's hard to it's hard to get too excited about preseason football because it is truly meaningless but you guys don't know this it's like usually your good players don't play in the preseason it's the players you have a roster of i'm gonna put you to sleep now of 90 players during preseason and you cut it down to 52 so you're really trying to play the other people like the fringe players so the outcomes are meaningless like everything that's happening is kind of meaningless because it's not the real team but it's exciting that we're getting close so i'll be tuning into that that'll be fun um all right my friends and then back to beast of reincarnation of course Game of the Year.

3:59:15All right. 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. Neil Amon, Ross Marenka, Morgan Ashley, Michael Vecchio, Daniel Diamore, Patrick Leslie, Donald John Vaders, Steve Innerfield, Smokeless Joe, Neo Sapien, El Sarutobi, Colin Davenport, Stephen Bonnell, Cuddy Black Sow, Sad Clam Man, Caffeine Addict, iMike0, Zman8601, Trench Goat, Brad Lohman, Kevin Young, J.P.

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