#428 | Fetch the Anesthetist

17:54Colin Moriarty:Really? I think it's I actually think it's safest to do it. Like that's that was I think I told this on the show where like I sometimes if I have a trip planned for September, I try to fly on. Oh, yeah. You try to fight. Yeah. Because I just feel like it'd be so tacky of them to do it twice on the same day. It's like, yeah. And also like to be imagine being the, you know, the TSA guy that lets that slip through on 9-11 again. Like you have to feel like on that day, they're particularly like maybe a little bit more astute than other days.

18:27Dustin Furman:The Islamic terrorists like dates, you know, like they do. They're symbolic. So I always just thought it would be interesting because you're right. I mean, it's obviously going to be nailed down. People are going to be paying attention. but it would be like from their perspective like imagine doing it again the same day something else something else you're not going to do that that's not going to happen but something else remember they went after the world trade center twice the the planes were the last resort they tried to blow it up in 1993 it just didn't work um in the and you know in the parking garages or whatever oh yeah well you guys were young well you didn't really we were like i was like infants exist i didn't exist i think but yeah they sure they like planted bombs in like the parking garages as i recall and then we're trying to collapse them so the planes were the next best thing and somehow it worked 9-11 9-11 what went down with building seven that's the uh yeah do you know the guy that does this is obscure chris but i think you might know this dustin you might know this too there's a guy that does like the sam ash compilation videos that you know sam ashes

19:31Colin Moriarty:it's like a music store i heard that before oh yeah yeah and he does this thing where he just

19:37Dustin Furman:goes around on like tiktok and youtube and everything and like finds like ridiculously bad or like personal music videos and like bands playing and just put stitches them together and i think he calls them like sam ash practice sessions or something like that and it's like volume one volume two volume three and one of them opens with a dude that's singing 9 11 9 11 what went down with building seven and that's like the opening of the video and then it just cuts to the next one if you have not seen I gotta find it because you guys are gonna I like lost an entire evening watching these videos these are amazing videos

20:13Colin Moriarty:what's crazy is like all the insane coincidences about because there's like George Carlin has like a famous I think I might have brought this up on the show years and years and years ago but George Carlin has a famous because i think he taped an album called uh it's like it was a comedy album called i think i i kind of like it when a lot of people die and he recorded it on september 10th 2001 and so they had to like shelve it for like years i think before they finally put it out there's like a lot of stuff like that too like there's like and there's a lot of twin towers imagery because it was like a classic it was like a new york staple so it was always like blowing up and stuff so like there's a there's like all these x-men cartoons with like the twin towers exploding and it's like weirdly like surreal now because it's it's just like you have like magneto staring at 9-11 before it happens i learned about this the other day i'm going to send you guys a wikipedia link uh so i learned that the band dream theater oh yeah live album on 9-11 and it has uh the cover art right yeah the cover art has i mean it has the new york skyline on fire but it it's it includes the twin towers yeah it's like they were probably like i mean like they're like come on how could this be how could this possibly happen me

21:38Dustin Furman:but i'm putting the uh it's the channel i found it's called canatonic youths for people out there that want to look it up it's so funny like you're gonna love that you're gonna lose your fucking mind watching this shit. I know both of you are going to love this shit if you haven't seen it before. It's like TikTok. The series are called TikTok Music is Good. Weird Dude Energy is a really funny one. That's the one with the 9-11 one, I think. Maxed out Sam Ash credit card volume one. Very good. You're going to love that shit.

22:07Colin Moriarty:Who is what went down in Building 7? That guy's got like a Phil Collins kind of quality to his voice. It's like mixed like genesis oh my god it's just so funny man uh you're gonna love it um the papyrus font good lord

22:28Dustin Furman:here we are yeah happy 9 11 to everybody happy friday or monday it could be any other day of the week really you're listening to this because it's a podcast it's not like we're like live on the air on the radio and it's like you know july 2nd 1963 and it's just gone forever like it's just going into the air and no one's recording it if someone's recording it they're gonna they're going to overlay it with an episode of general hospital or something you're never going to

22:50Colin Moriarty:fucking hear it again yeah it'd be so fun to live in that world where you could just be it would you know without a sense of permanence i do think it's weird that we have this amount of permanence and like the things that we say it feels unnatural yeah i think about i think about that like sometimes with like my text messages where i'm like i should have no access to the shit that I was saying to my friends like 10 years ago. Agreed. Why do I? Why?

23:17Dustin Furman:I don't even like looking at that stuff. No. You know, sometimes you go into your text and you search for something because you're looking for something and then all this shit comes up and you're like, oh my God, like why do I even have a record of this conversation? Yeah, like what? Yeah, it's not good. It's not good now. Well, it's fine. I mean, it's convenient, I guess, but but here we are. What an episode. This is going to be interesting one indeed. let's get into it let's introduce the show of course uh sacred symbols play uh playstation podcast goes live each week you can get it three days early and ad free over on patreon patreon.com slash last day media we appreciate your support over there and could not do it without you supporting us get you early ad free access to all the shows in our network including defining duke the xbox podcast punching up the nintendo podcast summon sign the gameplay podcast etc etc you can submit inquiries to all the different shows and their threads in the news feed each week our threads go live on wednesday and are deleted thursday and you'll hear your inquiries throughout the show.

24:12Dustin Furman:You had a lot of inquiries this week. I just ended up as like, all right, I can't do any more of this and I just deleted it after a while. It's like I can't read 150 comments that are saying the same thing. I'm sorry. Just can't do it. Discord access, RSS access, Spotify access, and more. And of course, Sacred Symbols Plus, our weekly supplement to this show, an additional episode of Sacred Symbols every week for our patrons. Usually deep dives, game discussions, etc., etc. and so on. We'll have a bunch of game ones coming up. I might just have you guys do... I might just dispatch a group of people to do Wolverine without me just because we can get out of the way.

24:47Dustin Furman:And then because I won't play it until next week. And we'll talk about Wolverine deeply later in the show. Blood of Dawn Walker, I'm sure we'll do something with. Control, I'm sure we'll do something with. Animusha, I'm sure we'll do something with. Yeah, maybe Silent Hill. So a lot of those coming up as well, but we got to organize those. And you have to be patient. We'll probably not get through everything until November. as far as recordings are concerned. But I recently spoke with Moore's Law is Dead on the show about PlayStation 6 and a bunch of other things. That was a really great episode, a fun episode about the disc movement, about just everything that's going on with Xbox and so on and so forth.

25:25Dustin Furman:I had the guys from Stop Killing Games on recently by popular request. My friend Kiwi Talks, the game dev interviewer, we had him on recently. I'm going to have Rick Hogan this coming weekend so this will be the next episode to talk about some legal happenings in the industry. including the idea like, can Sony really be sued to continue to create discs kind of thing. And a bunch of like lawsuit style, things like that, like the white house. Now the white house released arcade.gov. Have you guys seen this, these games that they released? And I was actually wanted to play them on stream, but since so many people have just unmitigated TDS and can't see through, which is fine.

26:05Dustin Furman:I'm not blaming you if that's what you have, but like, you can't just do anything and disassociate from it, you know? Like it's going to be like an endorsement, like an endorsement. But I was like, it would just be fun to play these games on stream, you know, but we're not going to do that. Instead, we're going to talk about, can they be sued? I know the Tetris company is not happy with them and some other stuff. So some cool legal happenings, we'll get into all that. I think that'll be a lot of fun. If you're a huge nerd. Actually, Thomas Connelly wrote in about this and said, Hey, secret crew.

26:32Dustin Furman:Can we get some commentary on the white house's decision to add an arcade section to their website, which includes ripoffs of popular retro games, such as Tetris and snake, where the player has to build a border wall and deport illegal immigrants.

26:56Dustin Furman:We'll get into it. I don't know that they have a lawsuit on some of these things, and I think that it's also bait. So, and I think the companies have to be aware of that. Who are you suing? You're going to sue the federal government? for a Tetris clone. I don't know. It seems like a waste of your money, but we'll see. We'll get into all of that. Sacred streaming continues as well. We streamed last week's completely underwhelming state of play. Dustin and I shot the shit on Labor Day for a few hours. That was a lot of fun. The Madden NFL 27, very popular Madden NFL 27 Jets season stream. Part one is live.

27:35Dustin Furman:You can check that out. We'll get back to that later this month. We did Gamescom ONL as well. I don't know what we'll do next. we'll figure it out we we probably should get back to um jeopardy or you know see if we can get um brad on in the next couple weeks do something like that i don't know we'll figure it out my

27:51Colin Moriarty:jeopardy game was either mostly complete or is complete when i made it three months ago or more so you can go next yeah um so we'll see what brad's schedule is in the next couple weeks we'll figure things out we'll take it by we'll play it by ear merch at last day media store

28:09Dustin Furman:t-shirts, sweatshirts, stickers, hats, etc. Nathan Urquidez wrote in, or I don't know how to say that. I think that's right. Says, hey, CDC, one of the Geico guys writing again, just wanted to shout out the guy at the UPS store. I talked to him a bit. And when I started to leave, he said, nice shirt. I looked down and I was wearing my sacred symbol shirt. He goes around the corner and I say, hey, stand down. I hear him chuckle. You might recall this is how I met my fellow Geico friend Cody with the same sacred symbol shirt a few years back. UPS guy, don't let people talking to taking too much time off at your expense.

28:37Dustin Furman:Hopefully you're hearing this be well. that'd be interesting if you can make another friend with the same shirt very interesting timing what happened doesn't you look very urgent my screen just turned off and i was like oh shit

28:49Colin Moriarty:did i lose everything but uh no it just turned off that was really weird here's my question for nathan if you randomly tell a man after he tells you he likes your shirt to stand down i feel like a possible response is to just chuckle a little bit yeah right right right don't read too much into it in other words like maybe he was like man this guy's fucking nuts like why would he say that right now so is this ups man actually a listener we need to know you got it from a goodwill yeah he has no idea what the fuck it means oh that's funny yeah that's a

29:26Dustin Furman:good that's a that's a good point doston that's a fair point but let's be let's be positive about it yeah they're gonna be best friends oh probably not no one has any friends anymore everyone's best friend is their phone now

29:42Colin Moriarty:yeah the little black obelisk in your fucking pocket that's making you afraid of everything dude did you see the uh is it they have that new apple event yeah i did see the the foldable i watch it phone yeah i mean there's other companies that have been doing that for a while

29:58Dustin Furman:i did i mean i did see this i guess it was huawei or someone released there was a video i saw because i think it's what they're doing where it's kind of cool where like it turns into a mini tablet and then you can like snap things to the corners so like the dude on the bottom half of the game the third thing the dude's playing a game and then in the top half like left he has like a text message going on in the top right it's a real brain rot shit he has like a youtube video

30:18Colin Moriarty:going oh my god you can literally watch family guy and do subway surfers like in like in the like in the videos right right it'll come out just in time for oppenheimer you put the oppenheimer on the top not Oppenheimer sorry Odyssey Odyssey yeah Odyssey on the top Oppenheimer is so much funnier of a movie to use some like slow plotting drama very slow plotting like no action at all that's good stuff oh man

30:50Dustin Furman:so I did see a tweet that I thought was true though which is like there's a crease in the middle of the screen and like not on Steve Jobs watch I'll tell you that much

30:59Colin Moriarty:not you know people say that steve there were plenty of things that steve was a part of that were uh had some slight questionable design i think and the crease it's better than any other crease out there i'll tell you that is true like i on camera it looks pretty good i i like foldable phones i like the idea of them anyway but i want the clamshell like i don't really want like i don't yeah i don't want a pocketbook i want like i want a clamshell so whenever they figure that shit out maybe but like i was looking at it because like my phone like literally a couple days ago the uh the charging port on my iphone 14 just doesn't it just it doesn't work that sucks i have to i have to keep it on uh like a charging pad oh to get any juice out of it and it's just like all right i guess it's it's 14 so it's like that's 22 2022 i think so it's about of time but i was just like god damn it i hate i hate buying new phones i'm not recommending this

32:00Dustin Furman:because i don't know anything but i have seen videos where people put hot glue hot glue in the in the port you know what i'm talking about and then you pull it yeah i have seen that needle

32:11Colin Moriarty:down there too i don't know i don't want to fuck this thing even more than i already have yeah that makes sense i don't i've you said i have i don't know anything here's my advice is great it's a great yeah it's a nice preface as opposed to me just saying it no it's good i just i like i'm

32:30Dustin Furman:gonna start saying that all the time now don't take anything i'm saying seriously anyway here's my advice yeah i don't know what i'm talking about but here's what i think um that's pretty much this entire show to be honest for years now so um but everyone believes it so it's not a lie if you believe it as george would say um yeah i haven't had i got what do i have the what's the new one they announced the 17 you just got a 17 so i think i have a 16 yeah no no they you have

32:56Colin Moriarty:the 17 i think you said you got a 17 oh i'm 17 the 18 is the the 18 is the one they just announced

33:00Dustin Furman:that's what i was saying like they just said they were he said that like these were my mom and i got the last two that they even had in the store because he was saying that they were like just not even shipping them now because they're waiting well so the seventh they didn't update the standard

33:13Colin Moriarty:iphone they only updated the pro the stand the the iphone 18 will come out early next year but Colin you got lucky yesterday they raised the price of the 17 by 100 really oh interesting

33:28Dustin Furman:I want to say I don't know if we got like I don't think they do subsidies at these stores anymore but it's like both I bought my phone and my mom's phone and I think it was 1600 bucks yeah like 800 each and I'm like I'm pretty sure that's cheaper than my iPhone 4 was like yeah I was actually because I was just ready to pay whatever I'm like you got to have a phone i'm gonna use it for years i take decent care i take good care of my phones i was i was afraid i was gonna jinx myself with the t-mobile place because i was like i've never broken a screen like i've dropped my phone down like face down a million times not a million times a dozen times in situations where you're like that's the one and then you go and pick it

34:04Colin Moriarty:up and it's just totally fine that's the one like on a concrete surface or something like that's it

34:10Dustin Furman:and then you pick it up and you're like holy shit like uh so so but barring any catastrophes what i do have to get are new i don't know which ipods these or i what do they call these airpods airpods i don't know which ones these are but i got to get a new one because they it has the old apple charging port still on this one now and i i and so i need to have

34:31Colin Moriarty:a cord just for this lightning the light like right and it's like i gotta get some yeah that's what my phone has which is like annoying yeah my old phone did too and i was

34:40Dustin Furman:totally used to it but now it uses you so i have this this one charger here that i at my desk that i always use but i'm like it's only good for my headphones so there we go but i got and apparently they dropped the price of the earbuds is that true to 129 from 149 i think it was which is

34:56Colin Moriarty:interesting no that might be for the non-pro oh okay model just a regular airpods but so i got

35:04Dustin Furman:to get those as well to unify the cords you know yeah i appreciate them getting well they they were forced to by the barrel of a gun but um i'm it's cool that they got rid of those cords now you can

35:14Colin Moriarty:just use whatever honestly thank god i hated lighting they were so flimsy always i always hated them but yeah yeah it's worth i always find it funny that people that i mean everyone has their own budget i get it but i feel like a lot of people like you spend more money on things that have less value to you than your phone maybe not all at once but it's like your phone you carry it around with you everywhere you go yeah you're addicted and you're probably addicted to it you probably use it more than any other computer in your life i'm not saying you need to get the fold like buy the best phone possible but you know it's it's better to just buy the good recent one now yeah yeah and have it last and spend the money on it yeah the foldable one's like three

36:02Dustin Furman:thousand dollars right which is two two oh two thousand that's crap i wouldn't i wouldn't personally spend that much not not because it's like oh i'm sure it's worth it you can afford it whatever it's just like i don't know man it's a phone i don't need to get that crazy with it i i feel like i'll have this phone for years as long as you know nothing untoward happens

36:19Colin Moriarty:with it i am probably going to get the fold because the plan i'm on gets really insane discounts on new phones with Ben. So I don't know what it's going to be, though, on the discount. Maybe twelve hundred. Still a lot, but I've been a good well, my phone isn't as old as Chris's, but I have the 15 pro and the battery is starting to get bad.

36:43Dustin Furman:Yeah, my battery sucks. Yeah, it's crazy that I'm in I'm in the exact opposite situation now where I'm like this battery doesn't die like because I'm used to using my old shitty phone that I had for years and it was just you had to charge it like three times a day at this point. you know yeah or just keep it plugged in and now i'm like damn you don't have to mike because mike was telling me this about hers when she got a new one like you don't have to charge it at all for like a couple days and it's fine and i'm like damn but i will say this since i've got on my you know so i i just was like i'm not gonna post on social media i'm trying to like remove myself more from it um you know how you get those little things those little pop-ups where it's like you you've used your phone an average of some obscene time this week per day and it used to be like six hours for me right like you know something like that and like that's insane and now it's like two and i would argue that a lot of it is just my phone being open because i'm using youtube to be fair that's also a lot of it when it was higher as well you know my phone just stays on oh yeah yeah but uh i was like oh okay good it's good good to disconnect a little bit you know i'm trying to like segue myself back towards using a computer because i feel like it's more annoying and you want to do that almost by intent remember when you started like using laptops and how exciting that was laptops existed since before i was born but like when they really became ubiquitous and wi-fi and all the because i remember my friend had it was so funny because my friend had a laptop in the 90s but you had to plug in a phone cord to it to like a phone cable to like use the internet so you weren't like that disconnected it's kind of like a novelty yeah

38:16Colin Moriarty:there was something special like you know chris chris and i are like the last generation where i remember going to school in ninth grade and it's like you get home and it's like oh i'm excited to like check in on right on the internet yeah i'm gonna have a nice little time on the internet see what's going on and then you're done and then you can just go play halo 3 for a little for the rest of the night uh not think about all this crap but now here we are yep yeah now we're so seven it was oh seven is when that's when everything kind of that was when the phone became like that was when the iphone came out it was like early early enough where like it wasn't spamming you with notifications and it wasn't this thing that had that had to have you tethered and hooked yet but it was like the beginning of the end yeah at that point i think i got my first smartphone in 2010 i think it was a droid me too did you get the sliding horrible yeah yeah horrible dude i thought it was horrible i thought it was so cool at the time though and then like at the time i was like this is so sick and then i found it recently when i was home like in the last couple months i was i found it in a drawer like the screen was smashed i was like oh shit i slid it open and like i like used the keyboard a little bit just to see like how it felt and i was like i can't believe that i used to think that this was even even close to okay mine the keyboard like detached from like it was like bubbled over before even two years was up like i couldn't use it the full two years dude that's like the motorola razor like how like the buttons were literally stickers yeah if you had your motorola razor for long enough you would notice that like because they had like a it was like a that was back when they had like the circle dial with like up the arrows and then the select button in the middle you could just move the select button around because it was just a thin sheet of like whatever that they glued onto the face of the phone and it's just like oh my god it is so funny how cheap this shit used to be indeed thank you apple yeah people are gonna get so bad yeah i know yeah

40:31Dustin Furman:our scene wrote in said colony you're gonna get got by the new megaman amoeba 100 oh is there a new megaman and proto man um 100 thank you for asking i think you said megaman and

40:46Colin Moriarty:oh no take let's woo what are we doing here kinkson will appreciate that i'll text that to him

40:57Dustin Furman:ASAP Biggie wrote in and said, hey, CDC, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be doing this write-in, but here I am. After eight years of marriage, another listener, me, is getting divorced. My wife came home last week. She said she wanted the divorce and left. Never saw it coming. I thought we were happy and based on our Christian beliefs and what we always told each other, this was never an option. I've been listening to Sacred for as long as our marriage was, so it only seems right to write in. I'm 28, selling my house and restarting my life, moving to Richmond, Virginia with my little brother, also a listener.

41:24Dustin Furman:Shout out, Nathaniel. Any advice for someone starting their life over both in career and romantically? Thanks, guys. And I appreciate you making the worst week of my life just a little bit better. Crazy enough as it is, this was the happiest of the sad ones that we got this this week. There were so many deaths. Like and where I'm like, all right, I can't. I'm sorry. I read your stuff. I appreciate you guys. I'm sorry. Yeah, we're depressed enough, dude. It's 9-11. Yeah, we got to talk about fizzing. All these. Yeah.

41:54Colin Moriarty:Yeah, it's a rough time, man. You know, like all the bunch of cool people are dying to like Tim Curry's gone. And like, yeah, it's like it's all sad. It's just like everything's everything's a major fucking bummer right now.

42:09Dustin Furman:Yeah, it really is, dude.

42:11Colin Moriarty:I don't know what the hell's going on.

42:12Dustin Furman:You know who died? You guys wouldn't have any idea what this person is, but it's big deal in my circle is Barry Melrose died yesterday from when we're recording. he was a famous hockey commentator known for his like snazzy suits and his awesome mullet um he was the coach of the kings during when they almost won the stanley cup with wayne gretzky

42:33Colin Moriarty:but uh that one hit me yeah because he was like a part of my life for most of my life

42:39Dustin Furman:and uh i was like he had parkinson's and he had kind of we had kind of known he was going to go on this trajectory for a few years but it popped up on my screen and i was like fuck man like well barry melrose so yeah it's a sad it's a sad uh it's a bunch of people just a bunch of people

42:54Colin Moriarty:that you recognize you even if you don't really like yesterday uh what is it the the guy the guy who played like master roshi died or whatever i was like man just like what is going on time and age yeah time time indeed but this but this ride in like i don't know man uh you're i don't know you're 28 that's not it's really not that bad actually that's like it's a pretty good time yeah you have another chapter you know another chapter you know yourself pretty well like you you're arguably kind of going into what a lot of people would say is kind of prime time

43:28Dustin Furman:um late 20s early 30s is is prime time in my opinion yeah for a man so yeah so don't get too

43:35Colin Moriarty:stressed out about it i mean this i mean reading it this is the kind of shit that scares the shit out of me i'm like i'm not because dude if i get married i'm like listen i'm not getting divorced like we're just not doing that so we better just like it will just be in separate houses or whatever but like i'm not i'm just not going through this shit it seems it seems everybody that i know who's got through it like it looks so stressful that i think i would rather just die yeah there's a lot

44:02Dustin Furman:so like if you don't have a if you don't have any like agreements in place like like prenuptial agreements or anything like that it could it could be very it could be very unclean um yeah like Yeah, I just just from a structural point of view, like. Even if you don't have things like getting a prenuptial agreement, it's sad because it's like it's anticipating the worst, but you just don't know what's going to happen. It's something I think I want to say smart people do it, but it's like it's a reasonable thing to say, like, you don't have all the control here. You don't. Yeah. In the world of no fault of worse, which is fine.

44:38It's like you got to assume you don't want to assume you want to prepare for the worst. and so like he's selling his house probably because they have to split the money so either

44:49Dustin Furman:someone has to buy their way out of the house or you have to just split the money and it's like that sucks that happened to someone down the street from me actually um i was friendly with these people a few houses down and then one day their fucking moving sign was or selling you know selling their house in their yard i'm like what's going on and they're like well we're getting

45:04Colin Moriarty:divorced oh yeah i mean it's i don't know again though i think i i do want to reiterate like going through it at 28 like in your 20s probably like the best time for that like it really is like in your like 40s and shit like when you're like way older and then like oh i'm going through the voice it's like well now well now what the fuck you know because that's a crazy that's a way crazier time you're you're well positioned and to have a house to even sell in the first place is like at 28 is a pretty good indication that you're probably going to be all right yeah yeah yeah i would say what's interesting he says my wife came home last week said she wanted a divorce and left and never saw it coming so that's interesting uh because my advice would be like now is a good time for some before you just dive in to the world of relationships maybe have some self-reflection it doesn't necessarily mean like reflect if you did anything wrong but reflect on the relationship figure out what was good what was bad could you have done anything better but from what it sounds like i don't know it seems like came as a surprise But, you know, I think too often big things like this happen to people and then they just like try to quickly move on to like avoid the pain or the realization of needing to change.

46:22Colin Moriarty:But, you know, take that time to to reflect and make sure you're ready or else, you know, the if you're not ready and you try to bring someone else in for a relationship, then it's. Might not may not do well.

46:36Dustin Furman:Yeah, you don't want it. You don't want to. I think rebounds are fine if you understand what it is. That's all. You just have to understand what it is. Go get that sliz.

46:47Colin Moriarty:Oh, God.

46:49Dustin Furman:But understand that it's just a temporary patch. This is not going to be your next wife or whatever. Yeah, you got to sit. In my experience in relationships, which is fairly extensive, I'm 41. I'm married now, very happily. Yeah. You go through some trials and tribulations. You got to find your way. The only way to really know ultimately is to put yourself out there. And then you, the only thing that I wish I was better at was managing my time. Much like everything in my life, I'm not going to, I wouldn't want to change anything because it worked out. But you look back and you're like, I didn't, I didn't need to be in this dead end relationship for this long.

47:29Dustin Furman:This is a complete waste of my time. You know, why was I like just being like, yeah, it's fine. I have other things to worry about than breaking up with this person. you know, so definitely want to monitor those things as well, but you're, you're going to be with your brother. Richmond's a great town. You know, I live 30 minutes South of Richmond and, you know, there's a lot of young people there, like good, good bar scene. You know, it's a cool play. You'll, you'll, the world really is your oyster, but like Dustin said, you have to just kind of sit with it for a minute. I mean, you were married and so you want to, we want to sit with that and your wife,

48:08fuck her right i mean you know she just comes in out of nowhere and just

48:13Colin Moriarty:is there more to the story that's i didn't want to be we don't know they don't want to be there's usually usually someone doesn't just leave for no reason but sometimes they do yeah you know so there's always a chance who knows tell you what go out have yourself a fun have yourself a celebratory 9-11 go out on the day this podcast shows live you can hear anybody go out to the bar have a nice yeah with the other 9-11 drinkers you know I'm sure that is a fascinating as I'm saying it I think that's what I'm going to do tonight I'm like selling myself on the premise of like I think I'm going to go to a bar tonight yeah just go in just by myself just to see like what's the seed like on a on a on a thursday 9 11 night at a bar that would be do you guys know the meme that goes around every once in a while the guy that bowled a 300 on 9 11 there's like you know like i'll have

49:14Dustin Furman:to send it to you guys that you know like at bowling like local bowling alleys if someone rolls you know rolls a 311 or 300 they'll usually a 311 a 300 they'll usually like take a picture and and there's so there's just like one place somewhere where like it's the guy's picture and it says it's like 300 9 11 01 or whatever damn dude you gotta take it because you know 300 is hard if not impossible for most people to ever get oh did you find it yeah this poor guy yeah this guy bill morrow he was trying to get away from it all he looks so now here's the thing about

49:50Colin Moriarty:this right he must have done this at night right you would assume yeah presumably nobody bowls at what is it 7 30 on tuesday or whatever whatever time it was so like 9 11 happened he was like i think i'm gonna go bowling yep the same day it's as the clouds as the clouds are still dissipating as the as the asbestos is still raining down on the city this guy's at a bowling alley bowling a perfect 300 that is hysterical to me it's just like image it's it is an awesome image because

50:24Dustin Furman:again like he is probably aware that it was going to be weird or is weird but it's like i did it i gotta take it like i bowled the 300 you know like i gotta that's what is that's 13 strikes in a row isn't it as i understand by the bowl so it's like that's not or is it 12 strikes in a row i guess it would be knowledge it comes exclusively from we bowling right well because there's 10 there's 10 uh rounds or whatever right and then so strike strike strike but when you get to strike the last on the 10th round you get another roll and then you get another roll if you get a strike and that's called a turkey i think and so i think the maximum score you get is 300 because you get 12 strikes however that works out so that's pretty impressive yeah on 9 11 or any other day i'm

51:10Colin Moriarty:pretty impressed by that have you guys heard before there was like a rumor for a long time that uh in the 2002 classic movie the master of disguise the turtle club scene was shot on 9-11 i think it's been clarified that it was that that scene was not shot on 9-11 but uh that was their first day back shooting and so there was a moment of silence and uh Dana Carvey may or may not have been in his turtle suit. His turtle suit. The turtle club outfit. The turtle club. I remember that in the commercials. That's so funny. That's one of those things where like, I understand that it very well might not be true that they were filming on 9-11, but I choose to believe it.

51:56Colin Moriarty:Because it's too good. Yeah. It was a Tuesday, right?

51:59Dustin Furman:So yeah, like everyone was just... They're working. Going about their business.

52:03Colin Moriarty:God. That movie sucked. Yeah, it was a terrible fucking movie.

52:10Dustin Furman:Well, Al-Qaeda sucked the fucking spirit right out of it when they were filming it. I mean, it's Al-Qaeda's fault.

52:16Colin Moriarty:It's Osama bin Laden's fucking fault that Master of Disguise didn't turn out better.

52:22Dustin Furman:I love that. We've talked about this before, about how bin Laden was like somehow Western culturally aware. Like, I wonder if he knew the story about the turtle suit, you know? like when spec when the spec ops guys went and like took all of his shit and like you know we've talked about everything that was on his laptop it's like you knew what was going on like it's

52:43Colin Moriarty:like weirdly savvy right like yeah he was um i don't know i'm not gonna get into this i was about to bring up like the cia and i'm like i'm just like all right let's the recovered media there's a list of video games in the recovered media yeah final fantasy 7 devil may cry that's so funny man counter strike animal crossing final fantasy 7 being in there is very funny yeah it is like that's the gamecube animal crossing

53:17Dustin Furman:like that's the that's like the one where you had to have codes and like send them to each other on game facts was he on game facts who knows that's insane man just living in that

53:30Colin Moriarty:compound in pakistan he's playing final fantasy 70 he was like that's me i'm cloud yeah yeah that's right he was inspired by their echo terrorism oh god people were pointing out that there was uh this was the compound and there were many children there unfortunately but who knows who who knows who was playing him again like the master of disguise i choose to believe i choose i choose to believe that shit not because it's true but because it's funny yes it's it's simply to the image of osama laden playing final fantasy 7 is too funny like that is that is an all-time like peak hysterical kind of image yeah it's ridiculous it's completely

54:12Dustin Furman:ridiculous one day with the muha jadeen or whatever the next day he's casting knights of the round

54:18Colin Moriarty:you know you never know he's humming he's humming one-winged angel or whatever

54:25Dustin Furman:what are we doing i don't know man josh harris wrote it and said what to do colin if a sick child used their make-a-wish to request that they be on an episode of sacred would you do it got to be the full four hours and the main show none of this matinee slot sacred symbols plus business extending this question also to chris and snark tank um dustin should we go into the do you know what i'm gonna say here i do remember there's there's a lore here i did do an episode of my old podcast with a make a wish kid uh it was in canada it's called children's wish there the kid's wish was for greg and i to go to canada and record it up with him and we did we went to toronto this was in 2014 i think it was after we had quit but before we had told anyone and it was actually after the last or the that psx in 2014 we flew it was in vegas and then we flew directly to toronto we didn't sleep at all we were completely delirious we met this kid and his family in toronto in like the suburbs of toronto i remember he was a huge maple leafs fan um and his parents were really sweet they were immigrants i think they were either italian or greek or some mediterranean thing and they were feeding us all day um sounds awesome yeah it was cool and the kid was really sweet and um yeah like we we and brian altano was there as well and then we immediately flew back to san francisco we were there for like we were in canada for like 12 hours or something and one of the things i remember is we had a driver and like a nice like black like lincoln car or whatever like you know like some sort of suv and uh he was like who are you guys are you like a band because we also had a a camera guy with us so there was four of us and we're like no we're like some podcast for some reason this person used his his wish to ask for me to come here when he could have gotten anything you wanted so we've done i've been there i've done that and it was a fun experience it was surreal just because i'm like are you sure

56:26Colin Moriarty:it almost felt like someone was playing a joke on us it did yeah i remember when i was told we were

56:33Dustin Furman:asked like can you guys make this happen can you do this and i'm like are you fucking serious like of course i'll do it but like that's your wish you could meet anyone yeah like they'll make

56:42Colin Moriarty:it happen for you like whatever you want you can have weird al you know at your bedside as you know you're you're surviving literally and you chose you chose colin moriarty and then um yeah how morbid can can they get with the makeup like can can you be like i want weird al to watch me die how weird are you gonna get with it yeah that's a good question i don't know i just i wonder what their line is with with some of that stuff that is a crazy i can't that is a crazy thing that's a crazy thing that you that you actually did that yeah there should be videos of it i like i we um i don't really i don't i remember the house like i don't remember the

57:28Dustin Furman:specific content we did with him but we did do stuff and we recorded it and it was it was i think actually as I recall I think we like sat in a circle like a semicircle in his living room and I kind of recorded a show and yeah it was really cool and he was really sweet I was very happy to do it it was a very surreal experience like that I got to do that like there are certain surreal things like when I was on Rogan a couple times we've talked about that like that was just surreal and weird like this is another weird thing where it's like oh like you're way out of your lane yeah here like you're you're you're punching like echelons above the same thing with Rogan it's like you don't really belong here I'm probably one of the most obscure people that has ever been on that show when you really look at it.

58:02Dustin Furman:And it's like, yeah, I don't know how the fuck you got sucked into this weird warp. You know, but the same thing with that as well. So Josh, got to catch up on your Colin lore ASAP. Wall of Dudu wrote in and said, hey, fellas, when you are perusing thumbnails on YouTube, are you more inclined to click on the ones of the content creator with his or her eyes bulging and mouth agape like they're about to eat a fat schlong? Now that I think about it, it's usually guys who do this as girls have a clear advantage and don't need to resort to such asinine behavior. It's very strange. There are scientific reason behind this that makes the video more appealing for viewers when the host looks like a fucking carp.

58:42Dustin Furman:I actually find it irritating and make a point to avoid or hide channels that use this freakish tactic I wonder if others feel the same or maybe if I'm in the if I'm in fact the imbecile going to hang up now and beg the president of the United States for help as the police bash in my windows and drag my disillusioned ass from the vehicle I hate that it works too but I don't know the science behind it but it works so that's why we you know Dustin forced us to eventually play the game remember when i used to make the thumbnails i just what i would just do is i would pull up a set a 1280 by 720 block on photoshop and then i'd go and find an image that was bigger than that and then i would just position it attractively as i could in that and then i would put the logo over it and then we would fucking send it right i think we have only

59:31Colin Moriarty:had a legit like soy face thumbnail and i think it was gene and it was part of the joke of the episode yeah like that oh we're gonna do this i think it's some people some people are a little hypersensitive they're like any kind of expression that you make on a thumbnail is bad it's like no no like you gotta see what the mr beast likes are doing out there and that's that's what i assume he's talking about. But yeah, I don't really get it either. When I see Mr. Beast's face sometimes like making that thumbnail face, I feel like I feel like there's something primal inside like a fight or flight response.

1:00:14Colin Moriarty:I don't know if it's the way they're like photoshopping his face or or something. It's just like

1:00:18Dustin Furman:he disturbs me a little bit. The more I see him, the more I'm disturbed by him. I can't even really explain it. And it's not a personal thing. It's just like, yeah, it's the way he smiles, I think.

1:00:29Colin Moriarty:Yeah, he's got like, it's not a, it's not quite like lights are on, nobody's home kind of smile. It's more like the lights are on, but that building's been abandoned for 45 years. Why are the lights on? Like, that's a little upsetting. He's, I don't know, Mr. Beast weirds me out. Like, I just don't really understand his whole, like, he feels like a psyop to me.

1:00:55Dustin Furman:Yeah, I get that vibe.

1:00:57Colin Moriarty:entire thing it's like what do you mean your thing is that you spend money that you inexplicably have on things like where'd you get all this like and what are you doing are you just in massive and there's the thing he did where he was like well i'm actually broke technically it's like yeah

1:01:09Dustin Furman:okay yeah like i i remember i remember reading that as well that like he basically claims that he basically just dumps all the money into the next thing and then the next thing and the next thing but it's like i hope you're saving something for yourself i think you probably are and that's okay i don't i just don't under i agree with you like i don't understand i don't understand like content like this is a full loop circle of links of like you need the money someone's got to give you the money the money comes for a purpose and needs to be made back and then you have these games and you're publishing them constantly like some chain on that link is broken like i don't i don't understand it either it's just too much money too often like it's it's weird it's he he is an nft to me we're like i just i i just fundamentally don't understand you like i just i don't i don't get it but whatever yeah i mean teach their own yeah i'm not even really sure like i think i watched something of his once not so long ago don't remember what it was i didn't get very far into it the way the videos are edited it's so makes me want to fucking lose it that to me we're breathing shit like this is unwatchable that's what i do remember about that there's no breathing space to the point where like it comes across as like very unnatural and very weird it's like people that it's akin to like you know when people do like talk to the camera style videos but they they do jump cuts and it's like you don't have to jump cut your breath in between the the words you're saying you don't have to like shave people are so fucking crazy where it's like I got to get a half a second out of this I got to like I'm just going to constantly jump cut even though I could just speak at a normal cadence and to me I that bothered when I noticed that in videos I see them and that annoys the fuck out of me and I start really tuning into it where I'm like just god almighty you don't need to jump cut your like the after the period before the next sentence you know what's crazy is that like that bothers me too

1:03:06Colin Moriarty:but I do it when I make stuff but like what the psychological thing that I've taught myself to do in editing that makes it feel like that's not happening is to just change the camera angle. Or not change the camera angle, but change the frame. So it's just like, alright, I'm going to jump cut in the middle. Zoom in so it feels like a separate shot psychologically and it doesn't feel like a cut in the middle of the sentence. And it works. It feels like vamping is like

1:03:30Dustin Furman:a lost art. You know, like, I don't know. Just a little bit. I don't know. Teach their own. Obviously, I mean, obviously people love it. So, yeah. all right guys let's uh get into the news shall we get this over with already i do want to start with a uh a psa this comes from our friends at push square by the way originally before all the this stuff dropped like the big news was gonna be kill zone and i was gonna be like oh this will be a good episode like a fun episode you know we can talk about kill zone and alas that's not we're going to talk about at least not right away but at the beginning here a PSA from Push Square Sony factory they write will still have significant PS5 disc manufacturing capacity after physical media deadline I wanted to bring this up because something was lost in the in translation possibly literally in the way people have been talking about this Austrian blu-ray factory where games are ordered from where I've ordered games from and you guys might recall that it was originally reported as attributable here in Push Square, it says the Sony DADCs, which is the factory's Dietmar Tanzer, nice Austrian name.

1:04:44Dustin Furman:The quote was at that time, quote, PlayStation currently accounts for approximately 50 % of our volume and of that approximately 20 % are new orders. We are talking about roughly 10 % of the volume in 2028. That was the original quote. So people had read that and I think reasonably so as we're going to have about 10 % of the volume that we have now in 2028. This is apparently not what they meant. And the Substack game asked Sony DADC spokesperson, a different person, to clarify the situation. And they said this, quote, to clarify and avoid any misleading information. In that statement, Dietmar anticipated an overall product volume decline by 10%, not a decline down to 10%, end quote.

1:05:27Dustin Furman:So in other words, the Blu-ray situation at the Austrian factory beginning in 2028 will retain 90 % of its capacity even with the lens manufacturer for devices, external devices that Sony is spinning up and will and will begin selling at that time. There's no relevance to this except for the corrected record and to say that I still believe that there's a way for Sony to bail out of this with PS5 because the volume situation shouldn't be a problem. I want to reiterate, though, I'm not saying they're going to. I don't think they're going to. I think it's more and more unlikely as time passes that they're not going to do anything.

1:06:08Dustin Furman:But the means are there if this is true. So I wanted to just throw that out there. A little bit of copium, as they could say, perhaps for you disc people. But copium nonetheless. All right, let's get into the real news. Unless you guys have anything to say about that, I doubt you do. But we have to correct the record. Yeah. okay Fizzint the Hideo Kojima project that was presumably going to be for PlayStation 6 that was announced in January 2024 with a fairly impressive video right you guys remember it was on the Sony Pictures lot our favorite man ever Herman Holst was there with Hideo Kojima and they did this nice little drone shot pulled out you know the shot and they were there and it was cool and it was to announce their their getting together on a more traditional Kojima style stealth espionage game.

1:07:04Dustin Furman:I don't know if it was going to be called Fizzant, but that was at least the name that we were going by for a while. And that was it. We didn't really see much else about it. So this was more than two years ago when it was announced. And I think that Kojima Productions released like facial animations and some details here and there. And I have some details from people that know more about it, one person in particular, and I want to vet this stuff a little bit more because I have what I would consider I don't know if it's extensive but some information about what the game was or is but I want to verify it first before or at least try to verify it before I talk more about that.

1:07:42Dustin Furman:So we just made assumptions about this game. To put this in the context, it was announced before Death Stranding 2, long before Death Stranding 2 ever came out. And obviously OD has been in development that whole time as well. So this was going to be a thing that was far away and i assume it still is in early 2030s probably um so it was announced so there were three posts of relevance here there's a playstation tweet a kojima tweet and then an xbox wire article and i think they're yeah they're like the playstation tweet is dated 10 or timestamp 10 30 kojima's is 10 39 and then there is no date on the xbox one so these were all somewhat aligned.

1:08:26Dustin Furman:But the long and short of it is that PlayStation bailed on Fizzint, and Kojima went to Xbox, and now it's theirs. PlayStation tweets, quote, an update from PlayStation Studios. After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to step away from collaborating with Kojima Productions on its project Fizzint. We continue to have great admiration for Hideo Kojima's vision for the game. Our relationship remains strong after three decades of industry-leading genre-defining creative cooperation, and we look forward to continued close collaboration with Hideo Kojima and his award-winning independent studio in the future.

1:09:00Dustin Furman:Kojima tweets. As confirmed earlier through our official channels, in mid-June of this year, we unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the Fizzin project. Fizzin is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions. Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner. In the course of seeking advice and pursuing negotiations with people across many fields. We found an Xbox, a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future, and we have decided to team up with them once again.

1:09:28Dustin Furman:Please rest assured that development of Fizzin, our genre-defining action espionage title, is ongoing and will continue moving forward. Xbox Wire posts, quote, Hideo Kojima has spent his career challenging conventions and expanding what games can be. Today, Kojima Productions announced the next chapter of its partnership with Xbox. Asha Sharma, in a quote, said, in a quote, said, quote, creators have, say quote one more time, column creators have choices about where and how things uh how they bring their ideas to life we're honored that kojima-san has chosen xbox to work with kojima productions on fizzin his ambition to challenge conventions reflects the kind of creativity we want to support at xbox kojima says quote this expands our relationship with xbox beyond od as we move forward with the development of fizzin we remain committed to redefining the action espionage genre for players around the world end quote and then they write and this is just written in the wire article itself quote in addition to od and phyzent their relationship will also extend beyond games with xbox and kojima productions collaborating across film and television to bring new stories to broader audiences end quote there's much to delve into here let's get into uh the 40 000 foot stuff first though and we'll go to you first chris what are your thoughts a little surprising

1:10:42Colin Moriarty:i mean this is uh i mean we always figured that phyzent was going to be like quite far away um I didn't think that we would see something like this a full on separation from PlayStation from this especially anytime even I didn't expect to hear anything about Fizzin actually for like quite a while let alone an announcement of like a complete shift in partnership but I mean how do I feel about it I think the main thing that I feel about this right now is like man PlayStation cannot catch a break

1:11:19Dustin Furman:lately well they're doing it all by themselves right i mean yeah this is kind of the thing where

1:11:24Colin Moriarty:i think i don't know you look at what playstation's doing what they're investing in what they're keeping alive what versus what they're um not going for and you look at xbox in a similar vein and i can't help but feel like and look maybe this is just this is very insular This is a very specific view into a specific window of time. But at this very moment, it just kind of feels like Xbox is being a little bit more responsible with their money and a little bit more responsible with their investments. It feels like they cut the right fat not that long ago. They're making moves here that are definitely prestige plays that they desperately need.

1:12:15Colin Moriarty:at least as far as like goodwill goes. Obviously the disc to digital thing, the investing in this Kojima thing, which is clearly, by the way, you know, if Death Stranding is anything to go by, like these games aren't really about how much they sell as opposed to just how much prestige it lends to your brand by cooperating with it and kind of being a part of it. And so it's a prestige play, and part of me looks at it as like maybe Sony just can't afford to be doing this. You know, after Concord, they've got all this live service stuff. They've got a Horizon game that's being reworked. They've got fair games still on the horizon.

1:13:03Colin Moriarty:Marathon's kind of limping into a grave. I don't know, man. PlayStation's not playing it well right now. No. kind of how i feel about it the 40 i agree and you were saying like being a victim of circumstances

1:13:19Dustin Furman:it's only notable to me if you're not the creator of the circumstances to which you've been victimized so right it's not like other externalities are happening and then they they're like shit man we uh we're fucked here it's like no you fucked yourself yeah it's not like the price of the

1:13:36Colin Moriarty:machine going up because of the economic situation right right that is that is i don't blame sony for that yeah that's not good in addition to all the other stuff it doesn't help them but that's not their fault this kind of is yeah so yeah but that's my overall okay dustin let's hear from you what are your thoughts my thoughts are playstation does not care about you anymore they don't um we've been saying this for a while now but i feel like this more than ever uh they simply do not care about their core audience anymore they i'm trying to remember there was something on twitter recently that some developer was saying that's like sometimes in the c-suite it's like it's all about what the spreadsheet says and they'll argue that they're right this decision is right because of what the spreadsheet says and uh this feels like that kind of decision that's like oh well we're looking at the spreadsheets for death straining and it looks like we're not going to make very much money on this project so like why would we do this this is what the spreadsheet says of course why would we're trying to make money aren't we and I just wonder how how much more can the core audience take at this point I posted last night that I was like we are I already thought that PlayStation was at rock bottom in terms of goodwill with their core fan base um and then somehow this happens where it's like dude you take one of and again i'm talking about the core not the mass market but you take one of their beloved creators a highly anticipated project being like yeah the numbers aren't shaking up sorry sorry sorry kojima but um we don't need this we don't want this this doesn't pursue the goal of live service or uh the bottom line to the extent other things would um and you know i i think too what a big part of this is like okay it's like well me there's a bunch of like realities like maybe kojima wanted way more money than they were willing to spend we know that when this was announced that it was i believe at least heavily implied that based on the studio lot thing that you mentioned that this was going to utilize beyond just PlayStation and also Sony Pictures and so this probably was going to be a pretty big endeavor but the thing the spreadsheet can't quantify is like what some of these projects mean to people and what they mean to your core fan base and you can't necessarily put a dollar sign on some of these things and I mean to go back to what I was saying a second ago just like how much more how much more can they endure for until people are like you know what fuck this I have there are other options maybe it's not it's it's probably not Xbox sorry Xbox but yeah uh it's probably it's it's becoming more and more like PC where it's people are looking at this like if you're a hardcore PlayStation fan and you look at all the decisions they've made recently, not even just recently, let's say this entire generation, and you're looking at the future and you're like, okay, well, I can just keep doing what I'm doing and stay on PlayStation or I can go to PC.

1:17:13Colin Moriarty:And I'm talking about the affluent right now. I have to keep reminding, I'm talking about the hardcore. So yeah, maybe this amount of pissing off people won't move the needle for them. and that could be possible. But I just, I think it absolutely sucks. And I wonder like what kind of trickle down effect that has to the mass market when you piss off your biggest advocates over and over and over again. And the last thing I'll say too, touching back on the thing of like, when I heard this news, I think my gut reaction was like, okay, well, let's try to explain this. And I thought of like the, okay, maybe it was a budget thing.

1:17:58Colin Moriarty:Maybe it was the, the timeline. Maybe it's the strategy. Then I'm like, you know what? I think it's fair to say, maybe you guys will disagree that I am done giving Sony the benefit of the doubt on fucking anything for any of their decisions at this point. Over and over and over again, we see these stupid decisions. And so it's like, no, I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt anymore or trying to explain like oh maybe this is why they did that it's like i don't care at this point maybe that's bad for me as a commentator but i am just so fucking sick of this company at this point doing stuff like this that it's like i don't even i don't even know what to say and so legitimately thank you xbox for saving this project hopefully i wonder if it's going to be scaled down to some degree I know that in that Xbox wire post, it says that they're going to be working on movie and TV stuff.

1:18:58Colin Moriarty:Certainly they have enough money to make that happen, but it's not quite the same as having your own, you know, motion picture arm of your company. So I'm ha I'm so relieved and happy to see this game go somewhere. Um, what this means for the project. We, I mean, we barely know enough about the project to begin with, but, um, yeah i just it's it's ridiculous and i'm i thought like i was actually quite upset last night i was like i can't fucking believe this uh and i thought i'd be like i'll reason i'll i'll cool off in the morning i'm like no i just i can't anymore i can't i put the gif in our discord of uh i love it from

1:19:40Dustin Furman:the chapelle show of the prince um clip where but like it zooms in on prince's face and he's like his lips like quivering and he's like making like little noises and his like eyes are like watering yeah um i always i just always think of that when i'm when i'm like upset about something yeah there's a there's a lot to say about this i have a lot of notes like just little bullet points i want to touch on because i think i think you guys both touch on a lot of um a lot of germane things that need to be expressed and i will disagree with you in one thing dustin is because i understand what you're saying and i'm not saying you're you're saying this in a bad way is like i will continue to explain why i think sony is doing things sure it doesn't it doesn't mean that and i i think i understand the situation from their perspective it doesn't mean i agree with it or i would do it the same way and i think as things get worse and worse for the brand which seems like it's going to happen in the short term you have to understand that like i'm not advocating for them but i'm going to try to also explain what what their thought processes are because I think that that's like necessary to what we do right and I think you should do that

1:20:50Colin Moriarty:just real quick I think you should do that I think it is worth exploring their side like what could be their side of this yeah like to me it's not even that mysterious you know like it's just it's

1:21:00Dustin Furman:just more about like why they don't see it as more than what they're seeing it as that's the question

1:21:04Colin Moriarty:and we'll get into that right I I think in the past I have tried to justify unpopular decisions and I think I'm not saying that was wrong but I'm I'm tired of doing that when it's just like okay you're making bad decision over and over and over again you think it's right I get why you think this but it's like I can't anymore I think

1:21:28Dustin Furman:so I'll get into some of the things I want to say actually I'll bring this inquiry up from and I mean literally probably 200 or 250 of you wrote in about this topic so I can I only put three questions in here I can only like I appreciate it. I did. I was bussing balls a little bit earlier. I went through your stuff. It's like everyone's saying the same things. So I did the best I could. Connor Gashin wrote in and said, Hey, solid Colin, liquid Chris and solidus Dustin. What are your thoughts regarding PlayStation's pulling its funding from Fizzin? Do you think this is a sign of a change in PlayStation strategy or did Death Stranding 1 and 2 simply underperform by PlayStation standards?

1:21:59Dustin Furman:Either way, it seems like in another long line of PR black eyes for Sony. I know for myself that PlayStation is becoming less and less attractive as a platform and the loss of potentially the only exclusive that really drew my eye and will now be everywhere just solidifies my move to PC for next gen. Additionally, do you think Kojima will return to his vindictive ways when discussing PlayStation a la his initial departure from Konami? To answer the last inquiry first is that no, because I think this is a much different situation. In fact, I think them just kind of tweeting the things that they've been tweeting indicate that it's not the same.

1:22:30Dustin Furman:The Konami situation was very serious and really was, it's still not clear. what really even happened but when you read a lot of the stories and a lot of the scuttlebutt around it it's like this is a company that had their boot on this dude for fucking years you know um and he was over it and remember every metal gear solid game since the second one was going to be the last one he didn't want to do this shit you know some of his best work came out of that era which is funny three four five peace walker but like everyone was like konami holding a gun to his head and the japanese culture and the culture of staying at a specific company and then i think like watching what happened with iga internally at konami which happened even before in a fune at capcom and i think he just kind of got inspired and he i think iga did pretty well for himself outside of konami in a fune didn't do very well outside of capcom but i think obviously kojima could did and is and will do great so no i don't think it's gonna be the same he's in a much different position now and I think he understands that PlayStation was incredibly important to Sony Sony could have asked for the IP and did all those kinds of things to even get in bed with him and stuff so they didn't do any of that so no I don't think so and I also think and this is something that I think is important to say at the top is like I don't think first of all I think the game is so far away that even saying what platforms it's going to be on is premature but I imagine the game will continue to run on Decima and so that's PlayStation's engine and I imagine it'll be a PlayStation game.

1:24:02Dustin Furman:So like people that are worried about it not being on PlayStation I think are kind of silly from that perspective. It's not about that. It's about like what it indicates below the surface about the company. And this is where I really want to get into. As I said earlier, Sony is the victim of their own circumstances that they created. They made a series of bad strategic decisions or good strategic decisions that were poorly executed. And this is the chickens coming home to roost. Because it is probably a spreadsheet decision. But in businesses like this, you're getting dragged down by other bad decisions where you can't make new choices and something has to give.

1:24:45Dustin Furman:This is what we saw with Bluepoint, right? That was such a mismanaged botch situation where they didn't even get a game out as a first party. and in a different circumstance where they weren't where Sony wasn't wasting its money in all these different ways blue point would have survived so all these things are starting to encroach on each other's territory and I imagine and at least in some way the bungee situation and games as a service kind of boondoggle and all the rest is starting to encroach on everything else because there's only so much capital to go around and do these different games and so the the unfortunate situation for them is that they have only themselves to blame for putting themselves in this situation i i think i saw reese elliott make this this is what i was saying earlier about like why i think it's fairly obvious what's going on here in some way is that like death stranding 2 didn't do well and this deal was announced before death stranding 2 i was looking up some sales figures actually and um where is it yeah so death stranding in 2025 had 20 million players and it was on subscription services at that point so that's six years after the game came out but in march 21 was that was the march 2021 was last time we got solid data on death stranding like sales data and that was after 505 had brought the game to pc and at that point it reached 5 million so these are not great numbers remember the ps4 install base by the time death death stranding came out was over 100 million you know so it's not some triviality to only sell a few million copies but i think they wanted to be in bed with kojima i think that's smart and that's what i'm gonna get to is i think you just do these things because they're good for your brand but i think when death straining 2 came out and then there's predictions there's no solid data on it really and but at in march 2026 so the next year after it came out when the game finally came to pc they were like it might have sold about two million copies where i think the math kind of goes haywire well so i should be clear like it's it's it's possible that strain too didn't even make any money if that's true or made very little money and remember the fizzin deal was signed earlier however i think where you're missing where they're missing the point is you were kind of getting to this game.

1:27:15Dustin Furman:You were earning access to something that would have likely been substantially more intriguing to people than Death Stranding was. Now, I don't say that as an insult. I love Death Stranding and I love Death Stranding too. I think they're both awesome. I platinum both games. I've played both of them combined for probably 250 plus hours of my life so i liked them a lot but i also understand that people were when you see the numbers with death stranding one and then you see really the number collapsed to about a 10 to 10 of the people that might have had access to that stranding playing death stranding 2 it just shows that it's not necessarily resonating sony put a period at the end of the sentence there instead of a comma right like everyone wants kojima to make a metal gear game and that's what you were doing now metal gear it's important to note has also never been a huge seller sold four five six seven million copies metal gear solid five was a big seller they obviously did the prelude to it as well and in uh what was called ground zeros yeah but these are not god of war horizon grand turismo uncharted nowhere near that and that's with that's being multi-platform for a lot of those games either immediately or over time i guess i'm just confused why they didn't see it that way that it's like you're getting into the meat now now is when it pays off now is when you get the cross-media transmedia thing you're after that you clearly was at the kojima wants to do this sort of thing you're finally giving him the ability to do it it's perfect sony i remember i was saying at the time like sony's kind of perfect for this because they're really the only brand that can leverage all of it right and kojima wants all of it a lot of people don't want the games or they don't want the movies or tv or whatever but they can do all of it and i thought that that was the entire idea and i thought that they understood that so even if that's draining too underperformed or didn't do well and it's clear that it didn't do very well commercially critically everyone liked it i just don't understand getting to it's like running a race it's like running a multi-leg race and then like just dropping the baton when you're winning and maybe it came at like some expense you're a little injured and hobbled but like you're on you're winning like you're getting to where you're going you're going to cross the finish line with what you wanted the whole time which was metal gear doesn't make sense but like you didn't even just drop the baton you handed the baton to someone else right exactly that's crazy about it too and but i think this is where i think it gets interesting chris is because i think sony's not they're not tactically sound right now they're not they're they are they held out the baton they're like we can't run the race anymore and they expected take two or some other capcom or maybe some external sort and then they look over and it's asha and she just grabs it and runs in the other direction and they're like oh no we didn't even really know they were in the race and so i think they probably are like fuck you know like i i bet you they just didn't consider it you know i and that's just tactically unsound because you're dealing asha was well established, not well established, but in her place by June, which is when this decision was made, right, to drop it.

1:30:47Dustin Furman:And you had to at least strategize and be like, you understand that like they're doing everything they can to fuck us, right? Like they're, it's not about anything other than hurting us. And I'm saying that from Sony's perspective, right? Like gears, taking gears off of PlayStation hurts them. Materially, they're doing it to hurt us. You don't think they're going to come in even if maybe the math is a little shady even if this thing is kind of far in the distance even if it has to use decima even if it's going to come to playstation whatever might be true about it you don't think they're going to come in and fuck you do you have your are you are you fucking blind you're not dealing with phil spencer anymore and i just so i just think that like when asha came running by and grabbed the baton they were like oh no no you know like because i just didn't think they saw it because i think if they did see it and they would let that happen they're stupid stupid yeah do i think oh i'm sorry go ahead chris no i just

1:31:49Colin Moriarty:want to say i'm glad you brought up the that death stranding was leading into this because that's exactly how i felt so like the whole point of all this was to get to this thing that clearly had the most promise like you had your art and we both love death stranding but like that was this was clearly the meat that was going to be a little bit more widely appealing like the stealth action kind of thing that we've been wanting from kojima since since he left metal gear so like it's that is i'm glad he brought it up because i'm just like yo you spent your time making the stuff you spent your time you spent your time building the driveway to a house that now you don't have access to is crazy right and and they've built everything

1:32:32Dustin Furman:on your foundational tech use the thing about like you're saying it's like sony spent money on the game already a lot of it probably i would say probably and i don't i don't i don't want to talk about i asked but like in pre-production getting everything going below tens of millions of dollars probably something like that and obviously there are going to be milestones and agreements and there's a huge budget that they're going to reach all these things and they probably got to some milestone they're like no but i but i don't think that that choice happens in a vacuum i think it's because the money isn't there because they're wasting it and they've already wasted billions of dollars and this would be a triviality to them if they just didn't do that that's why this situation sucks now it's starting to hit the things we care about and i think that's the that's the blue point was that too but we hear about the cancel twisted metal game or the cancel spider-man multiplayer game obviously the last of us online was painful but there are a bunch of things you hear about where it's like who gives a shit about any of this.

1:33:28Dustin Furman:But like, but then you have to understand, like those come at a cost and the cost is something you do care about. And this is why I'll reiterate, you need new decision makers. Now, I will say this. I will say this. This decision indicates to me, boys, and I don't know if you agree that Holst really is out of the driver's seat. It's easy to blame Herman Holst for this and I want to, but at the same time, his face is emblazoned all over that fucking trailer. He's the one who helped shepherd Decima at Gorilla. He's the one who has a friendship, a personal friendship with Kojima. I doubt he made the choice to cancel this.

1:34:04Dustin Furman:And I think that that indicates to me that he just isn't in a position of power anymore. So I don't know. It's hard to know who to blame. And Sony's obfuscation, the curtain they keep over the whole thing is starting to work because you don't to their credit because you just don't know who to blame. So you just blame the whole brand. But really, if they were smart, they'd start throwing some people under the bus because I think that's where that's where you have to begin. Like, in other words, the corporate, you don't want it to seem like the corporation makes all these monolithic decisions. You should have people that make good choices.

1:34:36Dustin Furman:That's why companies put people in positions of power that are smart and capable because it's not a monolithic choice. So if someone's making these calls that led you down this path, whose fault is it? Now is the time. that's the interesting part about it to me is like every component of the of what's happening with them seems like it's misaligned and not within not within the confines of the way they usually structure things it seems now that they're running as opposed to being quiet by virtue they're they're now like we don't know how to explain any of it that's the way it's starting going to come off that's different right like saying nothing is very powerful but only if you look good saying nothing when you're fumbling like a person like i always say in a fucking in an infomercial trying to hold you know dropping all the shit all over the car and

1:35:29Colin Moriarty:yeah it's like if you're gonna be that guy i've never washed dishes in my life right exactly it's like drops the phone in the fucking sink if you're gonna be that guy then you have some explaining to

1:35:40Dustin Furman:do in the words yeah desi arnaz but without the racist accent although it wasn't racist from him because he really was cuban so i don't know man i don't i don't there's a lot more to say about it and i can get into more than things but i'm i just i don't know what they don't get about this and i think they need to really shake things up they need to do something it's not this was a decision made in late in mid June too so there are certain things where it's like maybe Kojima's upset about discs I'm like Kojima doesn't have a fuck about discs Jesus Christ the the weird thing about this decision was that it didn't leak and which is I think a sign of respect on all sides and why I don't think there's probably super bad I mean I'm sure Kojima's not thrilled with Sony I doubt Kojima will ever work with Sony again in a second party capacity I don't know why he would um but i don't think it's i don't think there's bad blood and i don't think it has anything to do with these externalities it's that the externalities are all adding up this won't undo playstation just like this decision is not going to materially really help xbox it's about the choice of a thousand cuts and where and how you position them on the individual body and then what you look down on you're like well any of these five things wouldn't have really mattered together but there's 20 and now we are at the wrong time too right exactly like i don't we don't have access to them no one can ask them these questions the only time they're ever forced to ask answer questions is during fiscal calls and the journalists do the best they can a lot spoken through translation as well I don't know man

1:37:32Colin Moriarty:here's the thing Colin though is it possible because I get the feeling that Sony I'm just speculating but you know there's the argument that they're kind of like well spreadsheet says we're good they might not think that any like they're like oh yeah we've had to cancel a couple projects we've had to shut down a perfectly good studio you know we had to shut down blue point but uh our numbers are great like you know so it's like yeah it's like we were saying a few weeks ago there's i i get the feeling where they're like where else are you gonna go where are you gonna go and at this i think that that was a correct feeling when you're on cut one or two but now that we're on many many cuts later as you were saying it's like people are like okay yeah maybe it will be painful but maybe i will go yeah like the royal eye not it's more cut than it's more cut than skin it feels like at

1:38:35Dustin Furman:this point it's crazy yeah yeah it's it's insane um yeah it's what a wild i don't know if like that I don't know if what their intention is, is to try to consolidate all the bad things they have to do is into as few months or quarters as possible. I mean, like, I guess, and this is where it's like trying to figure, and this is what I was saying earlier, Dustin, it's like, I want to try to figure out what they're thinking. And it's like, maybe they're just trying to eat shit now and think that's like, we should just get the shit off our books and just take the PR hit and just deal with all of this in a couple of quarters.

1:39:11And then, but then you have to rely on things.

1:39:14Dustin Furman:Like I was relying and we'll talk about Wolverine later. I've not played it, but it's like Wolverine seems like it's fairly average, which is not good enough for Insomniac. I don't really blame Insomniac so much. I think that they've been, we'll get into this later. It doesn't really matter right now, but like, I think it's like, they've done the best they can. Like someone else can do a game now, maybe. But you need to, this is what I was saying. It's like, you have to have the goods. and if you don't have the goods, if Tokan comes and everything's fucked up on PC, if Wolverine comes and it scores in the sevens, which is unheard of for Insomniac.

1:39:51Dustin Furman:Not unheard of, but unheard of in the first party for Insomniac, really. When's the last time they had a game that was in the sevens?

1:39:57Colin Moriarty:Fuse, probably, right? Yeah, right, exactly.

1:40:00Dustin Furman:Yeah, Fuse and maybe that Metroidvania they did with GameStop and stuff like that. But like, it's it's just a it's perplexing and unusual and I it's hard to say if it all matters like I think it does I think it's unquantifiable and so it doesn't show up in the spreadsheet but the weight the anchor around the numbers in the spreadsheet will be evident eventually and you'll wonder then when you're in the boardroom what happened and it's like well you kind of nipped and talked to too many times, didn't you? We can afford to lose these guys. We can afford to lose those guys. We can afford to lose them.

1:40:45Dustin Furman:We can afford it. And then like, when, when can't you afford it anymore? They're not stupid. That's what's so perplexing. None of these companies are stupid. They make bad choices and they make stupid choices, but they're not collectively dumb. No one's sitting in these rooms, not asking these questions or not wondering, just letting things go. They are coming to conclusions based on deliberation. That's the puzzling aspect of it. And they need to do something. And in a different world, Wolverine would have been a nine and things would have looked a little rosier. Right. But it's just like, yeah, this isn't working anymore.

1:41:26Dustin Furman:And I'll reiterate what I've said a million times. They are incredibly lucky that their primary competition is inept. And by the way, they don't seem so inept anymore, do they? Whether it's going to change the fortunes of Xbox or whether Microsoft will let them spend enough money to do so, it is clear that they are re-engaging. And you are letting yourself... They're going to... Because Dustin, you're right. They're going to look at the next hardware numbers. They're going to be like, we're outselling them seven to one. Give a fuck. And I think that there's a compelling angle to that, but I'm like, but isn't it, who is this rooted in?

1:42:05Dustin Furman:Are you like a consumer brand, like a toaster? You know, like, are you with just a fucking GE microwave that you go and buy? Or are you a PlayStation with like a fan base? And I remember, I keep saying this about the Wii U moment where it's like, they might find out who is really a PlayStation fan. And I think that they are counting on the mainstream carrying this thing. and I think they might be right but I don't know at what cultural cost it comes at and I don't know why you would cut off your nose to spite your face like this it's let me put it this way

1:42:44Dustin Furman:if Vincent was probably very expensive right you imagine the game was going to be yeah I don't I don't want to let's say 300 million dollars right something like that and they're going to do all this transmedia stuff it's not cheap and it's going to require marketing and PR and all the rest. You're not going to lose all of it if the game doesn't hit. That's not the way it works unless it's like Concord. And even then you don't lose all of it because you can write it down. So at least you can write the taxes off of it. It's like, oh, we spent$300 million on Fizzin. We made$220 million. So we lose$80 million, you know, something like that.

1:43:20Dustin Furman:It's like, okay, so what did we gain out of it? It's like, well, Kojima's with us. Is that worth$80 million? I don't know. is it worth us not finding out for 80 million dollars you know what i mean right yeah that's my whole like they just seem like they're they almost seem it's risk aversion i almost recognize it because i'm risk averse so i almost recognize it like the patterns you know it is but then

1:43:50Colin Moriarty:but then they're but then they're making fair games right you know like what i don't know like i understand what you're saying like it is risk aversion but then like what is where's the risk aversion in in building a thing that uh continuing to build a thing that there's no enthusiasm for that almost seems like certainly doomed for years you know like where's that risk

1:44:16Dustin Furman:conversion why why that it's a fair question and and that's what i was saying these link these are linked yeah they all it's a fungible amount of x money whatever that is with each project adding and subtracting from it nothing is on an island isolated from one another and the chickens have come home to roost and i think that it's unfortunate that they're roosting on this project because you're absolutely right like if i if i was looking at the spreadsheet you would think right and i think you're right if you look at the spreadsheet the spreadsheets you're looking all the numbers you're like we need we need to save y amount of money and you look and you're like well we can cut kojima and save it it's like all right but what else can we do like if that and and if spreadsheet green arrow goes up into the right it's like is part of that because you're just cutting costs and creating and manufacturing you know lower fixed fixed costs on you know in terms of real estate in terms of headcount you can make the numbers say whatever you want really if you do that they're gonna point at wolverine's gonna sell great regardless of its of its uh score i imagine and probably i think they're relying that won't be in this quarter but next quarter of grand theft auto buttressing them we're gonna everything in other words, everything is going to be shrouded in bad data that doesn't tell us what the nature of the actual business is.

1:45:53Dustin Furman:And that might always be true because of how much they are reliant on these games as a service and these few dozen games where they make all of their money that they don't even own. So no matter what choice they make with first and second party, it just might never shine through. And that might be their argument. And

1:46:14Dustin Furman:I developed the thesis right about the customer versus the user and I think I'm right and you said that earlier Dustin it's like they don't what value is a customer that doesn't spend money or doesn't make us money you know like and I think that's their perspective and they're like we released Saros it sells 500 ,000 copies yeah why will why would we even do that and that's a reasonable question i think it's more unreasonable for someone of kojima stature especially in a second party relationship and it you know to be fair to sony i think there's there are a few things that i think are probably it's like they don't own the ip right they don't they don't get to extract any money out of it they don't like in an effective way i can see all those things from their perspective i just don't think they're making the right choices to try to balance the budget as it were uh let's see here mchaggis wrote in and said hello gents with the news that sony dropped kojima and for the project to be saved by xbox i'm starting to think the issue is deeper than herman holst who is running things over there and do they need to wake up to what is starting to look like a resurgent xbox p.s interesting to note that after grand theft auto 6 reveal both consoles saw more or less the same percentage increase in sales that is something that um moore's law and i talked about on sacred plus last week and how he was saying like if he saw that at sony he would have called like an emergency board meeting and i it's like yeah like like they both went up 33 percent and i'm like and i saw that and i was like huh like that's interesting 33 percent of playstation is a lot more than 33 % of Xbox to be fair.

1:47:52Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

1:47:52Dustin Furman:But it, the ratio never changed and it's like Sony's paying for marketing. Sony, it's like, this is captured on a PlayStation five. This is, it's like, it didn't matter by ratio. So who knows, man, but who's running things and what are the research? Again, I think I could be saying this until I'm blue in the face and I could be wrong. I'm wrong about a lot of things, but it's like, I don't believe Xbox is a threat to PlayStation the way people think like this resurgent xbox i don't believe it like i think they're going to be a really dominant publisher of games with a niche hardware hardware ecosystem and i think it's perfectly reasonable to expect that this game will come to playstation so like if you're if you're worrying about it just from that perspective i don't think you're losing the game right like i said this about elder scroll six and people like you know poo-pooed it but and it's fair enough it's just prognostication i'm just speaking based on my gut but it's like when people are like what will elder scroll 6 be exclusive i'm like you might not even have an xbox to release elder scroll 6 on by the time it comes out what are we what are we even talking about fizzin is well beyond that realm of possibility you know so it's like they're a publisher of games first and foremost don't i'm not even when i consider fizzin and losing fizzin it's not from the platform because i don't believe it's going to be only on Xbox.

1:49:08Dustin Furman:I don't believe it. Like, and we'll see what happens. Especially again, if Decima is in play, there's no universe Sony's going to license Decima to be used on an Xbox exclusive. And if they don't license Decima, then they have to start over. So now they can use assets. It's not like starting from scratch, but they have to import everything over to a new engine and they probably have a lot of work done already. So I think some people are like caught up in that aspect of it. And I'm like, I don't even give a fuck about that it's really about like what it says about the business and what it says about

1:49:39Colin Moriarty:its decision makers yeah the wrinkle and go the wrinkle for me is like where xbox if xbox was still positioning itself in the way that it was before in the sense of like we kind of think consoles are a secondary thing like we think uh everything's going to be in this one place at some point uh maybe they'll be on pc on tvs you know it'll be a platform more than it will be a a machine if that was still the perspective i would actually consider this kind of a big deal and i would actually consider xbox somewhat of a a major player but the fact that like they're pivoting back to hardware kind of nips that in the bud because i do think they're just more well positioned to be in that other position where oh we're a third-party publisher we're going to be we have a big lead in other spaces that sony kind of doesn't um and we've built a little bit more proceeds now granted the xbox pc experience is not very good but it's there in a way that sony just kind of hasn't really invested in and in particular they've divested from so that's the that's the one part of this that like is a little bit confusing because i do think it's a like going into going in bed with kojima is is a smart business decision in general like it's a smart thing for the brand but it is also significantly smarter if the idea is to build towards this platform agnostic kind of future i think i don't think it's going to get people to buy an xbox especially because like you said this thing's going to be on everything um because why wouldn't it be but at the same time they i mean gears was 400 million dollars and that was supposed to be on playstation they took that away um would kojima go for that i guess is the bigger thing yeah they probably would respect they would respect kojima probably enough to be like to do whatever he wants and i doubt he would want to exclude anybody most game developers

1:51:31Dustin Furman:don't want to do that in the first place yeah like my problem chris in envisioning like this xbox exclusive like mid to long term um exclusive kind of platform is like it seems like they're just making a pc so like if if anything right and this is what i was saying earlier is like then really xbox games really are if they're just pc games then they just exclude playstation by virtue of that and that's different but the idea it's gonna be like it's gonna be on xbox and pc it's like i don't think there's going to be an xbox the way you're envisioning it in 2030 you know when the game comes out you know um yeah i'm not even sure that really exists it probably does for elder scrolls 6 just in that it could be an xbox series game probably it probably is um if you're smart you'd make it for ps5 level hardware and sell a shit ton of copies that way but yeah again it's all like unfounded prognostication but i said that earlier and because I wanted to underline that is that Asha isn't Phil Spencer.

1:52:27Dustin Furman:And like the directive of Xbox now is not this complacent, dovish, accepting, you know, like Xbox was in a posture of like, we accept reality. And it was going where it was going. And they got someone in there that sold them on a different vision and they're going to try to pursue it. So that's why I just, any way that they can hurt PlayStation, they're going to do it. it's not any more than like saying like our new we're gonna needle you now again like it used to be i kind of dig it i've i've said that i've respected the shit out of ash's aggression because it's like it's just very different people say phil saved a brand and maybe he did in a way but it seems like she's kind of saving the brand from obsolescence with her decision making and you're right chris and i said that earlier too it's like they'll do things that hurt them gears hurts them they're going to make less money it's not going to move xbox consoles it's not gears isn't going to move xbox consoles i'm here to tell you that right now they're doing it because they need they feel like they have to and then they'll kind of reassess the situation but they're also kind of they're reluctant to say anything beyond clockwork because i think they realize that they're kind of on they realize it might not work and they might not be able to really do this reasonably and sustain the business.

1:53:44So a lot of unknowns,

1:53:45Dustin Furman:but again, my major arguments is like, it's a prestige play. You earned this at Sony. As far as I'm concerned with, Kojima has been running largely on your money since 2015. You earned all of this runway. It's like you said, you built the driveway to the house that you didn't just sell.

1:54:06Colin Moriarty:Right now that you've gotten a really good with this technology, you're about to make the thing that we wanted all along. go ahead we'll see we'll see you later it's very weird that all that all comes at a cost and i

1:54:17Dustin Furman:again i understand death stranding 2 was not compelling to a wide consumer audience but i don't think it was the game i'll say over and over again that i just think that things are collapsing where gaming is not gaming is not it's going to crash no it's not it's going to make more and more money it's it's that people are spending their time and money elsewhere and it really doesn't matter how great your game is anymore it just might die and that's just the way it goes when you release thousands of games a month and and everyone's fixated on these i bring it up all the time and we joke about it but it's like there's a money-making problem out there roblox has more monthly active users than both consoles combined and they don't make money there's something amiss you drive gross revenue but not net income and i think that it's tough to make money out there so i think that they're blaming death straining too for probably problems that it's really not his fault and they might look at it and say like physics just going to suffer from the same problem

1:55:12Colin Moriarty:but that's where i think they're mistaken i i yeah it's it's so clearly going to be a more appealing game than that's that's running is such an artsy game the fact that it did as well as it did actually is kind of insane to me like because like five million for the first one two million for the second i mean like that's that's that's not nothing for a game where you are us you are walking like we and i we love these games right like i love death stranding one in particular like i think it's just an immaculate game but that is a walk like a true to life walking simulator in a way that like no other walking simulator even is right there's more to it than that obviously but like i mean this is a very different kind of experience that like it's not my confusion is like it's for somebody to have seen death stranding 2 do softer than the first game or not be this breakout hit for me i'm like how did you not know that that would be the case i was always under the assumption that they they would know that yeah this is not this is not fucking fortnight or something like this is like this is not our big this is not spider-man 2 you know that much should have been clear i i so them blaming uh death stranding 2 and looking at the numbers for Death Stranding 2 and making the decision and be like, oh, well, this didn't do well.

1:56:32Colin Moriarty:We're not going to do Fizzin. Like, it just seems so crazy to me because, like, how did you not know that Death Stranding 2 wasn't going to – how did you not know that Death Stranding 2 wasn't going to hit 15 million sales? You know? Because I knew that. I think we all knew that. Yeah. So where is the disconnect there? and we assumed that it was just kind of to lay the groundwork for Fizzin or to just kind of get in and like you know build a relationship and build a rapport and kind of work towards this thing and now that's not happening anymore I was like well now this was kind of pointless I'm glad we have those games I guess but like what did you get out of it

1:57:16Dustin Furman:I don't know weird stuff I think there's a lot of soul searching to be done about like i i've said it i've said it long before this that like i understand the idea of settling and it's like you need a place to settle and and it's like yeah all things being equal why wouldn't you just go to pc yeah i love console gaming i love playstation i'm not i'm not personally going to go anywhere but i wouldn't i again it's the death by a thousand cuts if you you can you can be like neo in the matrix and dodge all the bullets but eventually you're gonna get grazed by one of them and then you're gonna and then you're gonna question like okay well why am i why am i here it's like yeah they took out this guy and they took out this guy first they came first they came first they came for the auteur and i said nothing yeah

1:58:13Colin Moriarty:Yeah. All right.

1:58:16Dustin Furman:Let's end with this. Andrew Christensen wrote in and said, what's up CDC? Long time listener here. I don't want to catastrophize, but it's getting really hard to feel any other way about PlayStation right now. So my question is simple. What does Sony do to turn this shit around? With the latest news that Fizzin was apparently dropped by PlayStation, according to Kojima himself, I genuinely have to ask, what the fuck is going on over there? Feels like there has been no good news. They pissed people off over physical games, sent an email reminding everyone that we don't actually own our digital games.

1:58:41Dustin Furman:They're focusing more about dynamic pricing, and now they're apparently walking away from a Kojima project that felt like the easiest W imaginable. All of these are unforced, avoidable errors, and if the early word on Wolverine is true, that game is a stinker and is going to add to the bad press. So what are they doing? And is there any realistic chance Sony changes leadership or direction and turns this around? Probably not. Guess I am fishing for Cope, because dramatic as this sounds, it's genuinely kind of depressing. PlayStation is giving me some of my favorite gaming memories of my entire life.

1:59:09Dustin Furman:And lately, it feels like the company is being run by Dr. Evil. Anyway, thanks, guys. I know that sounds dramatic, but at this point, it is what it is. I think they would think Dr. Evil will be an upgrade compared to what's going on here. I love Dr. Evil. All right, so let's end here and we can go around the horn. Dustin, what do you want to see out of Sony? So let's frame it this way. We're in the second fiscal quarter. The fiscal year doesn't end until March 31st next year. they seem to be consolidating all their bad choices within single quarters. Maybe to potentially start announcing bigger things later on.

1:59:44Dustin Furman:I don't know. There's obviously a strategy behind all of this. Like, it's funny to think this was before they announced the disclosure. They canceled this game. Yeah. So what do they do? How do they get back? What do you want to see them do?

2:00:01Colin Moriarty:I mean there are things that I personally want that I just don't see them doing like reversing the physical disc thing I don't think they're going to do that but I think it would make people really happy the better digital rights that you're advocating for Colin is a big thing I think that their plan at least this is what I would hope I hope this is their plan is they're like man we've got something so sick with PlayStation 6 and the games that we have for it that let's as you were saying let's get this bad stuff out of the way because in just a little bit from now we're going to show them PlayStation 6 and it'll it's going to be so good that people are going to be like they're going to forget quickly I've said that a million times gamers do forget very very quickly but i just can't even possibly imagine what what could be so good about playstation 6 at this point or their lineup like it feels like a pipe dream to be like oh the lineup of the games that are going to be coming is is going to make it okay it's like okay well based on uh the PlayStation five generation as a whole from first party is, I can't feel confident to even dream that up or something.

2:01:29So I think that the main thing, you know,

2:01:34Colin Moriarty:instead of going over like what each individual decision is just like, um, new leadership and trying to at least at the very least point the ship in the right direction. but again that's just from my perspective as the hardcore the the core gamer not the the mass market and for for their shareholders they might be cruising right in the direction they want to be uh the question will come as uh at what cost and will that will that pay out for them

2:02:15Dustin Furman:Chris, what do you think should, how would you handle how they should move forward?

2:02:24Colin Moriarty:I don't even know anymore, man. Like, I just think it's such a... There's just something in the air, man. Like, it's not... It's not a good vibe. I'm kind of with Dustin on the sense of just like, I don't know how good this machine could possibly be because anything that I would want out of it is really just kind of... It feels somewhat tertiary. It's like, okay, make it faster, make it... i don't know make it look nice i guess like i don't know what they could really i guess if if the leaks are true and like if what we know about it is true then like i guess there's the handheld component which is going to be kind of probably exciting or it's going to be novel and interesting especially for a place machine and i wonder if maybe they're banking on that um being a bigger deal uh and to be fair like it could be that we're all we're saying all this before we see these machines it's very you know when we see them it's going to be different they're going to be real there's probably going to be more excitement for them i get it at this point though like i don't know what you can really do in the short amount of time that it that it's presumably going to be before we start to finally hear about these things you have to figure like if everything's on track you figure like maybe like february or march we'll hear about this from cerny or something like that if everything goes according to the general timeline of how it's been.

2:03:51Dustin Furman:Yeah, because Tom and I were talking about this, that he was saying that as they understand, they're going to make these machines starting in April. And I'm like, well, that's when they're going to leak. So you need to say something before then. Right. Yeah.

2:04:03Colin Moriarty:That would be my guess anyway, because I feel like that's generally the time frame.

2:04:10Colin Moriarty:I don't know what you can do. I think there needs to be new leadership, which Colin you've kind of indicated that maybe there is um yeah or at least they're like just

2:04:20Dustin Furman:riding these people out as they figure out what they're going to do next and that they're certainly like they're not the people in positions are certainly not making decisions I just kind of make like string that logic together because otherwise Hulse kind of looks in this particular case stupid right like like yeah it can't I don't it's hard for me to square it I would love to blame

2:04:36Colin Moriarty:him it's not the first time though that's you know a PlayStation spokesperson has been out there and said something that's just like not the trip in true you know we believe in generations is like a very popular like it's just a funny thing in retrospect but i i think new leadership more communication and honestly just like dude this cadence is not it man this cadence cannot continue like i understand like it's expensive or whatever and like but like maybe maybe spend more of your money on the things that are important and spend less of it on of the stuff that doesn't need to be need to be spent you know like there's a lot of i play a lot of triple a games now at this point and there's so much where i'm like you could have trimmed this down you could have spent infinitely less time on this entire entire other half of the game and had a stronger video game and maybe that's a philosophy that needs to be a little bit more taken a little bit more serious going forward especially we can't be waiting like five six years between between games especially if like when they land they end up kind of being like all right whatever my I guess a lot you know what sucks about this too is like it there's so much pressure on intergalactic now there already was I want to be clear there already was a lot of pressure on intergalactic but like after all of this bad news that's really the only thing that is on the horizon that could even potentially like maybe correct the vibe a little bit like if if when we see intergalactic next it's just undeniably special and cool and interesting and like exciting but that's a helmet that's that's their hail mary really and that's a lot of pressure so

2:06:25Dustin Furman:yeah and it's the pressure on the wrong outfit in my opinion right now just because i think people want to crush them anyway so like intergalactic can be the most impressive thing in the world and it's not going to get full love because there are people that are always going to try to bash it

2:06:39Colin Moriarty:anyway i think sure so it's it's it's and god of war is like in a bad position for that so

2:06:45Dustin Furman:already so i just i don't know you know so the way i would answer this is i try to i try to envision what is driving them like what is driving their decisions and certainly they have wasted billions of dollars on these false starts these bad acquisitions they have had to write down so much and it could very well be that they simply like you have to purge these things and i think it's i think it's it's like when you're in therapy and and it's like you you know you can't control the past you can't do anything about the past you have to accept what is what is right now there's no going back right and undoing things and they have to they have to look at it through that that lens too of like you can't undo the bad decisions that were made but this is why i think you need new personnel because you need to it's like a i know you guys aren't sports fans but it's like hiring a general manager to hire you know to make it create craft a team and the team just doesn't pan out it's like all right well you got to go and we're gonna have someone else try a different way.

2:08:01Dustin Furman:And it's why I have this fantasy of Shuhei coming back just in an interim basis to set the stage, understanding that he's not going to stick around to ride out the decisions, but that they are probably the right decisions on this project and the studio and this acquisition and all the rest. And then you move forward from a position of strength. What I know for sure is that there are many, many people that can make better decisions and no more. and then the people in positions of power. But I actually think a lot of this, there's another way to play it, which is that you could try to explain everything.

2:08:38Dustin Furman:And I don't think that that's a bad route necessarily, as long as you're very prepared and you're media trained to deal with the questions and being bombarded with certain things. But you could, God forbid, talk to the audience and explain why things are happening. You could do it. and we have to understand that their silence is a choice and they are continuing not to speak by choice and it is not a good look and sending out nishino or to toki to give a random wall street journal you know interview where they say stupid shit sometimes in them too like uh we're you know in so many words like we're just gonna squeeze more out of our audience now which is basically what Nishino I think said or no it was to Toki said in the Wall Street Journal in so many words that like hardware selling hardware is just not even really an option now they just need to get more out of the existing audience I just I just think you have Sony used to have messaging even even at their worst they had good messaging and and interesting messengers and anyone who was around for the ps3 era which is many people out there and us obviously it's it's feeling like that right now it's just a dissonant sort of feeling because the the feeling around ps3 was accurate it wasn't doing well there is a dissonance between ps5's performance and and it's feeling around the core and we've talked ad nauseum about why that might not matter but i think the thing that i would explain if i was internal to sony or if i was you know uh consulting with them whatever i'd You have nothing to lose by solidifying your foundation.

2:10:25Dustin Furman:It doesn't mean you don't have to chase all these other people. The exciting prospect could be for you to turn some of them into your PlayStation people as opposed to them using PlayStation by virtue of its availability and where some of the other games are. So you release something like Saros and maybe no one really cares about it and maybe you even lose a little bit of money on it. Maybe it's not itself the best investment, but it's like, well, what did you really lose? it's another first party game that people like and it adds to a catalog and a provenance of this like of where this thing comes from and the prestige around the brand and that you invest in it and you and you make weird things and i think i've if i've excused sony for one thing it's it's them getting away from smaller games and i don't blame them for that but now they're getting away from bigger games right like yeah don't make rain okay i can appreciate don't make counter spy we don't need to make doki doki universe or whatever you know like all these random it's like okay i get it i understand that you should make fizzin

2:11:28Colin Moriarty:yeah that's different

2:11:31Dustin Furman:in fact if you because you have such transmedia aspirations because the future is ip based staying in bed with kojima and making him happy might be the move so that you could acquire his studio one day. Then you don't have to worry about any of these things. You do the slow dance that you used to do with studios. And I know the slow dance takes longer than ever. And I know it's not trivial to not see the numbers and be like, well, you don't understand the full financial breadth of it. It's entirely possible the project sucks too, but I doubt it. It's entirely possible that the project could have been in a better shape or in more intriguing and they would have stuck with it.

2:12:11Dustin Furman:But clearly other partners saw different. I will admit that that's the one thing that's hard to gauge is, is Xbox doing this because they believe in it? Or is Xbox doing this because it's an opportunity and very similar to Sony? They can get out of it later. Right, like so it's hard. You can't even gauge it based on that because I'm like, I don't know. All things being equal, if I take two dropped Fizzin, would Xbox have picked it up? I don't think so. You know, so you can't really judge it based on that. So I want to throw out the possibility that it's not good, but being a longtime Kojima fan, I love Metal Gear.

2:12:52Dustin Furman:I love other things like we talk about Bakhti and fucking Zone of the Enders and certainly things that I've not even played that people love, like Snatcher and like he's got a hit rate, dude, of nearly 100%.

2:13:10Dustin Furman:Is there anything else they really say about this? I don't know.

2:13:13Colin Moriarty:I don't know. No, no, no.

2:13:17Dustin Furman:It's a, it's a, it's a, it's an unfortunate situation. I am.

2:13:25Dustin Furman:I am hoping and praying that Sony makes major changes at first party and second party. And. They've got to do something and they've got to make the good decisions immediately. setting in motion the good outcomes. The longer you wait, the longer you put off the pain. Maybe this is the argument they make about some of the decisions they're making, frankly. But the more you put off the pain, the worse it's going to get. And the longer it's going to be for there to be a solution on the other side. So make the good decisions ASAP. It's like why you don't put off a health procedure. Just do it. You know, and then you get into healing quicker.

2:14:08Dustin Furman:You get into getting back to your old self quicker. You get back to positive outcomes quicker as opposed to putting off the inevitable.

2:14:17Colin Moriarty:Yeah. All right.

2:14:20Dustin Furman:We'll leave that there for now. This was supposed to be this next one was supposed to be like, oh, is it good news this week? Wow. MP first reports of a new Killzone in production. Now, this story is a little confusing in that I think there's some unclear parameters of what specifically this game is, but nonetheless, this all lines up to me and makes a lot of sense. They write on mpfirst.com, which we've been citing more lately, that a new Killzone project is in very early stages of production. And they write, quote, old school PlayStation gamers should have fond memories of Guerrilla Games' Killzone series.

2:14:58Dustin Furman:What was once Sony PlayStation's premier first-person shooter franchise that was even dubbed the Halo Killer in the now infamous E3 trailer has since been sidelined in favor of the Horizon franchise. Well, it seems Sony has plans to revive the series as MP1st has learned that a new Killzone project is in the very early stages of production. While we aren't expecting an official announcement anytime soon, based on what we've heard, Killzone is indeed back on Gorilla's plate. So this is where things get a little strange to me. They write, quote, according to people familiar with the situation, Guerrilla Games is working with an external read, not PlayStation first party studio on a Killzone remaster and remake.

2:15:32Dustin Furman:So far, it has been specified which game in the franchise is being updated. But common sense points to the first 2004 entry as the most sensible choice. You guys will remember that Killzone one came to PlayStation two in 2004. It took a while, though, for the sequel to come out. It wasn't until 2009 that Killzone two came to PS3 and then Killzone three followed closely after in 2011. we last saw kill zone in 2013 with both mercenary on vita arguably the greatest kill zone game in my opinion and shadowfall the launch game on ps4 so ever since then and of course did you guys ever play liberation which was like the isometric shooter on psp no no gorilla made that in between kill zone 1 and 2 and that exists as well i actually think they released liberation on ps4 as a premium game.

2:16:18Dustin Furman:So Killzone has been dormant for 13 years. And if you read on into this story, a hypothesis that I had made a long time ago seems like it was true. You guys might remember that back in 2025, in the spring of 2025, People Can Fly, the Eastern European studio, signed a deal with Sony to work on an existing IP, that they were calling Project Delta. And it seems based on the MP1st reporting that People Can Fly is the studio that's working with Gorilla on this Killzone game. So I was right. That just felt like what it was. I don't know why. What I'm a little more concerned about and interested in is this, it's kind of twofold.

2:17:04Dustin Furman:One is, what is Gorilla's involvement in this? Because I know they want to probably shepherd things, but I think they have bigger fish to fry right now. with horizon the second thing is is uh yeah what kill zone game is it it must be kill zone one and this was something that i was cautioning right dustin on the stream on monday was on sacred streaming was kill zone one's not very good and i i don't know if you want to like studs up remake it as much as you might want to reimagine it and oh yeah and i i wonder i so i wonder what the nature of the project is i will stand by though what i've said a million times kill zone feels prescient right now like there's something about the story about these human bands that hate each other that fight like these interplanetary wars with each other over like resources and one is kind of like the hell gas are like the underclass they're sent do you guys know the story of kill zone you probably don't even give a shit it's like i what i think happens is humans leave earth and they find like multiple planets and one of them i think is vecta and vecta is like the human home world or whatever that's like a nice earth-like planet and they find another place called helgas or the hell yeah helgas or helgen or whatever and it's like this place where they send all like the underclass humans and that's why they like have to wear gas masks and like they become all fucked up um and so it's about the haves and have nots there's something cool about it and how like the helicast like want to attack and like take vecta and go to earth and all the rest and there's a bunch of shit that happens that's a kill zone one really this happens all in the kill zone games and it feels like it's feels very modern so i actually am excited about it coming back like i think it's really cool it sounds pretty early but uh does well chris let's go to you first what do you think people can fly so bullet storm gears yeah etc capable studio working on a Killzone revival.

2:19:08Dustin Furman:Are you excited?

2:19:10Colin Moriarty:I mean, I'm not going to pretend like I've been a Killzone guy. I've never played the first one. I played a little bit of two on a friend's machine, but I don't have a lot of experience with it. It never spoke to me. Killzone came out at a time that was just very unfortunate for it. You know what I mean? As is the case for a lot of guerrilla games, ironically enough. they just always they have this awkward timing right like because i think kill zone one came out like something like a week or two before or after halo 2 i can't remember it was like something like that like some hysterically close time and then the same thing happened obviously with um what is it horizon horizon and zelda's i think yeah both of them yeah that's true if i recall correctly but yeah so like i've never been into it i like the hell gas design like whenever i saw it i thought it was cool um as for what this is going to be like let me put it this way if they're going to do kill zone one i don't think anybody's going to sweat if they completely reimagine it you know what i mean i don't think it's like a sacred cow kind of thing where it's just like no don't don't alter kill zone one in any way it's just too special right you know i don't think it's one of those things so i mean if they if they have you've got good iconography with the with that class of uh enemy yeah kind of a cool name i would say i think there's really no harm in in kind of going back and reimagining it turning it into something that maybe is a little bit more um deserving of the pedigree of the studio i think that'd be cool or like the pedigree of the original studio is what i mean gorilla so it'd be cool to see like a reimagining of something like that um done with a little bit more fidelity uh it would be nice to see so many it would be nice to see a shooter again yes um i've been parrying so fucking much i'm so i know you're tired of it i'm so and i like good like and i like these games just fine but like holy shit dude if i see another thing where it's just like you've got a parry parry him i'm like all right all right buddy yeah like seeing a shooter from them would be seeing a shooter from that would be very nice and it would be a nice change of pace in order to be excited about it though i would have to see it you know and i would have to have something to glean onto or glom onto but it's cool that's happening it's a better use of their time than uh gorillas that's for sure yeah yeah i wouldn't want well yeah gorilla making remaking killzone one seems like too

2:21:45Dustin Furman:small of a project for them at this point. It would seem like a waste of resources. Maybe if you got to Shadowfall or something, but Shadowfall doesn't need to be remade. Yeah, exactly. Shadowfall is awesome. I love Shadowfall. So, Dustin, let's go to you on this and let's add a little bit to this because I'm wondering, too, if we interpret this as when the reporting out of Guerrilla came out about Hunters Gathering and how they're kind of remaking, or not remaking it, but they're reworking a lot of the game, they said there's a second project that's also going to be I guess, assessed at the end of the calendar year.

2:22:18Dustin Furman:I assume that's this, right?

2:22:20Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

2:22:21Dustin Furman:Which means Horizon 3 is nowhere to be seen. But also, I don't know. The way that reporting sounded, it's like there's no guarantee this game's even going to happen. So I'm loathe to get too excited about it because you can imagine, right, a trailer, you know, PlayStation logo, black screen, eyes, boom, eyes boom you know like they all start appearing and then they just all go away and then just the killzone logo you know that would be kind of cool yeah be an exciting little teaser

2:22:55Colin Moriarty:yeah i'm like chris where i play i never played the original killzone i played some of two played some of shadowfall so it's not something near and dear to me but um it would be interesting for them to do this just to kind of test the waters where it's like okay we can have an external team do this and see uh if people actually still do care about kill zone because i feel like this is one of the series from you know hardcore playstation fans that they want to see come back for years and years and years now and so it's like okay well um we'll see we'll see if people are actually interested in it maybe it's something that gorilla would really want to come back to i think that doing a full reimagining reboot of the first game is probably the best move at this point to uh you know bring new people back in because it really would be if this happens it would really would be my like my first main kill zone experience that I would really dedicate time to.

2:24:04I liked, I'm just trying to think,

2:24:06Colin Moriarty:I liked Shadowfall, but I don't think I ever finished it. I don't really remember that game all that well. But it's, I wonder with the review, this is what scares me, man. It's like, you were saying earlier, Colin, it's like, well, now they're not starting to do the big stuff, you know? Could they look at this and be like, well, this is a possibility that we'll only make 5 % return on this. let's just not release it or let's not do this let's not continue put a battle pass in it

2:24:38Dustin Furman:yeah killzone 1 specific what I really like for them to do is just get the games out like 1, 2, and 3 like Retribution or not Retribution Liberation itself is like that's interesting but they ported it easily they seem to be able to get PSP games off of UMD pretty easily so they did that but it's like let's get killzone now people can play Killzone 1 fairly easily obviously you can play it on PS2 but there is a PS3 version of it and I think it's available digitally so you could go and that's I think I own it already but that would be actually we should play that on stream it's actually not a bad idea I'm pretty sure Killzone 1 is like click to aim and stuff like shit I hate I hate oh like I didn't like Killzone 1 at all so kill zone 2 is really good and but people really like i like two and three like i i think they're at the time i've softened on them a lot over time i was so into resistance that it felt like you really were with one or the other but really i liked them both in hindsight um people really like the online modes with kill zone which is something i never really got into so i can't speak too much to that but that that was the bread and butter of those games starting with two where like the online modes people loved it and they got kill zone three out really quick which was interesting too so anyway we'll see what happens here people can fly very capable team they're working with a lot of different publishers right now kind of a studio for hire so we'll see i think i think a return to kill zone would be very welcome and i think it was one of the great mistakes that Sony made walking away from FPS just based on where everything went it's like obviously you made a huge mistake so it's time to get back into it we'll see what happens all right did you guys see this story about steam achievements leaking now in our discord I posted because I saw it happen right when it when it occurred I saw people reporting on persona six's achievements popping up and I was like oh that's interesting but then it ended up being an extensive list of games who had their steam achievements leaked there's over a hundred i think but here's some interesting ones and some of these are unannounced so two unannounced warhammer games for loop was one of them uh let's see clutch that's the game from the um forza horizon guys the old forza horizon guys crazy taxi world tour tangan rampa two by two or two cross two i don't know exactly how to say that but that's the dangan rampa 2 remake or re-release dragon quest monsters the withered world final fantasy residents gears of war e-day if you're playing over there judas kingdom hearts 4 lords of the fallen 2 megaman dual override persona 4 revival and persona 6 the new professor layton game rhapsody and scarlet which is one of those konami games that we were talking about that we're looking forward to rayman origins stranger than heaven and then yeah so here's some unannounced avengers game unannounced brawl stars game unannounced candy crush game unannounced nickelodeon life sim animal crossing esque game unannounced ride and fighters collection unannounced shrek 2 remaster unannounced slime related game not slime rancher unannounced solaris expansion unannounced twin peaks game unannounced walking dead collection so quite a few things in here i think what people are most nervous about is not necessarily the existence of the games, but that the trophies could spoil the games, especially because games often have hidden achievements and trophies, but those are exposed by sites like Exophase.

2:28:22Dustin Furman:And that's where that's what scraped all these. Now, as far as I understand, something in the connected API of achievements on Steam expose these games. And what I was confused about with that, and so it got they got scraped. What I was confused about with that, though, is that usually you publish the trophy so this is a big problem um that happened with steam i'll be curious to know more about it but uh dustin let's stick with you first because i was curious about persona with you um yeah did you see any of this are you interested in any of this did you look at any

2:28:53Colin Moriarty:of the achievement lists that leaked i am avoiding it at all costs particularly the kingdom hearts 4 one i to my understanding has the uh the unannounced worlds in it and i've kind of concluded that i mean both persona 6 and persona uh persona 6 and kingdom hearts 4 are far enough away that i will not be able to dodge this forever at some point they will come for me and they will spoil some of these achievements for me it's uh pretty crazy this has shades of Nvidia leak some of you may remember not quite the same but uh it's really interesting first of all Colin you totally skipped over penis bird oh is there a game in there oh yeah there's just a game called penis bird in there fair enough so look forward to that so obviously some of these are a bigger deal than others um but I think the biggest question is why why is there already a complete persona 6 achievement list in on steam already yeah i

2:30:05Dustin Furman:don't understand it either but that's actually something that craven more come wrote in nice subtle oh nice says hey gents with the massive steam leak happening i am a bit surprised by how early some developers are uploading these achievement lists to the back end i assume most developers would not prioritize that until near the end of development but this whole situation may cause them to rethink when they do it. Also, the funniest leak I saw was a test achievement that some developer put on the back end, which said, I'm a chud, I'm a chud, I'm a big fat chud. They really are just like you and me.

2:30:33Dustin Furman:This surprised me too. I've made achievement lists and I know how they are dealt with from a back end perspective. And I actually can't really explain it because I don't get it. When I first saw them, I'm like, are these real? like like what why did but i guess

2:30:59Dustin Furman:if it's anything like my experience with the games i've worked on it's like steam is used as a way to share games that are being worked on and you can earn achievements that way and so on and so forth i think what it indicates in my opinion dustin it gives you a little bit of insight into how games are structured especially big triple a games that these games are not done but they're constructed if that makes any sense and that's interesting because you wouldn't strap achievements to a game that was that you were going to move things around with and that the collectibles weren't all in place and it it's kind of weird just from what i understand about my own experiences in game development but just also what i how i understand people work at these bigger studios i can't explain that i can't i don't i don't i don't get it yeah like in the last game i worked on we were adding trophies like a month before the game came in the game was done i think something like that maybe two months or something so yeah i don't know i i so i was surprised when so i think that it just indicates these games are not imminent but all 2027 games that are constructed and probably being shared internally on steam and that's how it's going to go I guess the interesting thing I haven't looked at any I've looked at some of the lists there are certain lists I'm like I'm not looking at the Judas list for instance no way

2:32:25Colin Moriarty:right but there are games that I

2:32:28Dustin Furman:have looked at that I don't give a shit about that I'm like oh interesting did you look at the Kingdom Hearts worlds no do you want me to no I didn't even think to do that to be honest

2:32:43Dustin Furman:that's what sucks about these level of spoilers though is that it's going to be very easily to spoil very easy to spoil things like you said doesn't um what do you think about this though chris um did you get did

2:32:55Colin Moriarty:you look at any of the lists um yeah i looked at i looked at some of them most of the most of the stuff i don't care about really to be honest like there's judas obviously that's that's one that i care about um but ultimately even some of the unannounced stuff it's just like all right shrek to like i mean that that wouldn't have had me excited any either way so like i feel like not a lot that i would have liked to be surprised by got spoiled by this to be honest um but it's i mean it's it's fascinating that this because i was kind of under the assumption that yeah like this is like the last like month or two that they that these things get sorted but i guess not um or Or maybe these things are done and maybe GTA 6 has kind of put them in an awkward position.

2:33:40Colin Moriarty:We're like, well, this would have been two months before we got everything in place. Now we're just polishing a lot. Yeah, that's a good point. And waiting. It's an interesting point. But yeah, I don't know. I saw the headlines about this and I thought it was going to be a lot more interesting than it ended up being to me, honestly. I just checked the Kingdom Hearts Worlds. And it turns out there's going to be a world based on Darren Aronofsky's The Whale, which I didn't even realize they had the rights to, which is fascinating. Right. That and Final Boss Kill Walt Disney. Right. Somebody's going to be furious that I spoiled the whale's inclusion in Kingdom Hearts 4.

2:34:26Colin Moriarty:You got to feed that fat bastard a cookie or something. But yeah, I don't know, man. I looked at some of the lists. like they're kind of like some of them are spoiler heavy and then some of them aren't like some of them are just kind of like really baseline like I don't know what the fuck this could possibly mean but it does suck for a lot of these games particularly because I know some of these are pretty big and people care about so like I mean I don't imagine you're going to be able to stay away from these for long you've kind of got a really disconnect especially for some of these games that are way further out like I don't know man that's a rough situation

2:35:02Dustin Furman:yeah it sucks that really sucks and i wonder i really wonder what happened exophase isn't at fault this is what i've said though is that i'm so surprised remember i've said this before that i'm surprised that i'm surprised that the companies let their shit be scraped like this there is some level of it's not collusion but there's some level of acceptance i think you could make it so that you couldn't necessarily externally scrape trophy lists and achievement lists they just choose not to do any of that so this is the risk and this is why when you get a lot of games early you're asked to like sign off of psn and hide your trophies and whatnot although that doesn't really matter because i don't think a lot of people realize that like the trophies aren't leaked by the individual they're leaked by exo face every time and that's why i follow them on on social media you know you know they would you're on there and they pop up and it's like oh shit and so that's what the persona 6 stuff i was like whoa that's interesting but then yeah it was part of this it was part of this larger situation booger supreme wrote in and said hello gentlefish with the humongous steam leak is this the biggest leak in the history of gaming with there being achievement details for kingdom hearts 4 judas persona 6 and basically every game releasing in the next year and a half on pc what are the repercussions of a leak this large rockstar and naughty dog have got to be thanking their lucky stars that they avoided this firestorm are there any games you are more interested in due to the details being out there or any games that you feel a little less likely to jump into based on the leaks you've seen either on purpose or by accident and to what extent have you guys looked at this stuff if at all i'm kind of bummed out about some of the big game reveals that could have been massive surprises that are now spoiled from the nvidia like list well i won't focus on anything here other than like is it the biggest leak in gaming history of gaming probably one of them by virtue of the volume but i don't think there's substance wise yeah like it's a lot of it's like weird and like it references things like i look at like something like what happened to insomniac or even the nvidia thing which had actual full titles of games that didn't no one knew existed yet like we know judas exists we know kingdom hearts 4 exists there are a lot of unannounced games but i wouldn't think that any of the unannounced games are like that crazy no so i i think it's it's by volume it's pretty big but i don't think it's like bigger than those other ones the biggest thing for me that i'm really

2:37:17Colin Moriarty:disappointed by it's like i would have loved to have i would have loved to be surprised by penis bird whatever penis yeah right like uh that would have been the wind completely stolen out of their sails with that one because it's like oh finally penis bird we're finally seeing thank god i wonder if that i wonder if that's a code name because you can't surely right yeah although i guess it's steam so i guess yeah you probably could do it there yeah yeah yeah i was i was thinking i guess in a console. There's no shot you're going to see on the PlayStation Store penis bird. But...

2:37:53Dustin Furman:Yeah, doubtful. Yeah. Oh, you never know. It seems like no one's really minding the shop, so you never know. Yeah, who gives a shit, I guess. All right. A few more pieces of news. I saw this on Push Square. I thought this was interesting. They write, you can now play your physical PS3 games on PC straight from the disc. Our friend Sammy writes, quote, when it rains, it pours, and Sony's probably going to need a new umbrella at this point. In an embarrassing strike against the platform holder, hobbyist PS3 emulator RPCS3 has added physical Blu-ray support, meaning you'll be able to play the vast majority of your last-gen games on the PC directly from the disc.

2:38:26Dustin Furman:You'll need to own a compatible disc drive, and you can find a list of supported models that they supply. There are quite a lot of options, so you should be able to source something that works. Previously, the emulator required you to dump the game files from your legally-owned collection, but now you can just play them straight from the Blu-ray, like God intended. So I did a little bit of research here about, and I don't endorse anyone doing this sort of thing. I think people know where I stand on this, but RPCS3. Have you ever used this, either of you? That's how I played Metal Gear Solid 4.

2:38:55Dustin Furman:So it's first version was released in 2011. I did research on this. This is one of those facts in quotes where I feel like I'm getting got. It stands for Russian Personal Computer Station 3. Does that sound right to you? This is on this Wikipedia page and then I followed a link. Yeah. that they cite that leads to the official website for the emulator where they have this blog and in there they talk about the name and i'm like what it just feels like i was like having a fever dream because like it's kind of like an onion yeah right like an onion thing it felt like i was like like their wikipedia was hacked but that's what it says and apparently 70 percent of the ps3's library works on it so pretty good and i guess you have to kind of individually get games to work so i think the games that matter work and i think people are probably working on the things that no one really cares about so i thought this was a cool little thing for people that are interested in playing their so basically you can just and i guess my honest take on this even trying to be more virtuous colin or whatever is like who cares how you play the games if you have the discs it's like then download the emulator and play them i i to me i personally have no problem with that level of of it's the roms that i really have more of a problem with than the than the emulation and obviously the emulation is not illegal in fact the rpcs3 emulator has a patreon account so right yeah i think this is awesome i haven't tried it for

2:40:27Colin Moriarty:myself my experience using rp rpcs3 was mixed with metal gear uh certainly playable and i was playing at a higher frame rate in resolution the playstation 3 but it it certainly wasn't seamless at the time it's been years though and development on popular emulators goes crazy and sometimes in a short amount of time so uh it's probably worth checking out again at some point but uh ps3 discs get them now because they are already going up all playstation stuff is going up so you want something, go to your local game store and buy it.

2:41:07Dustin Furman:By the way, I just asked Gemini about it. It says RPCS3 stands for Russian Personal Computer Station 3, which is a playful inside joke and the expanded acronym for the popular open source PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger. The base core name combines PC and S3 to form PCS3. The R originally project co-founder DH stated the R stood for real in 2011 to distinguish it from fake malware emulators. Later on, after lead developer Neko Takina, who is from Russia, joined and became a primary architect of the software. The community embraced the joke, meaning Russian personal computer station 3. That's interesting.

2:41:43Dustin Furman:There's the story behind that. Get in on it if you want. It's a pretty cool feature. Keep your discs alive. This next story just broke this morning from when we were recording. I'm throwing it in here. I don't know if we have too much to say about it, but I think it's fairly interesting. It comes from Bloomberg. They write, Saudi's way merging EA with Savvy to create global gaming giant. and people might remember that Savvy Games Group is a large Riyadh-based games publisher that's been using public investment fund Saudi money to buy publishers and developers and expand their reach into the games industry, and EA obviously is a major parallel to that.

2:42:21Dustin Furman:So Bloomberg writes, quote, Saudi Arabia's wealth fund is considering combining Electronic Arts Inc. with Savvy Games, people familiar with the matter said, and a deal that would bring blockbuster titles like Madden NFL and Pokemon Go under one roof. Executives at the Public Investment Fund are weighing plans to create one of the world's biggest gaming firms and to ensure better coordination between its assets, the people said, declining to be identified as the information is confidential. No final decisions have been made, and a deal is unlikely to happen until Savvy completes its$6 billion acquisition of Chinese mobile gaming business, Muntun, the people said.

2:42:53Dustin Furman:Such a combination would represent a major shift in the structure of Saudi Sovereign's Wealth Fund's gaming strategy, potentially giving it a single vehicle through which to make acquisitions, develop games, and exploit intellectual property across different parts of the$214 billion industry. Any deal would have to cross regulatory hurdles. Large mergers in the video game industry, such as Microsoft's$69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard, are often subject to antitrust inquiries. Spokespeople for PIF and EA did decline to comment. A spokesperson for Savvy didn't respond to a request for comment.

2:43:23So this is interesting.

2:43:25Dustin Furman:I was looking up some stuff about Savvy that I think might be interesting for folks. They have multiple subsidiaries, including Scopely, which is a big California-based company behind Monopoly Go and Pokemon Go and so on. They own 8.3 % of Embracer. They own 5.94 % of Take-Two Interactive. and the Chinese mega company Hero Esports, they own 30 % of that as well, in addition to having subsidiaries like ESL and so on. What's interesting here, and they go into it a little bit in the Bloomberg piece, is that this is maybe more inclined towards mobile development, and I wonder what that means for EA.

2:44:10Dustin Furman:Because it might be that EA has kind of... And EA obviously is a dominant sports presence, especially on console. I wonder if there's unexplored territory in mobile for them as well. Either way, the Saudis own a major piece of the gaming industry here. Two of them that they want to combine into one. We'll see what happens. And I find, I don't know if you guys remember a while ago, there was a video that Savvy put out from their office in Riyadh. And it was like what you would expect out of developers, developers, you know, like purple haired androgynous people and like, you know, whatever. And I'm like, this is so, I'm so bothered by this because it is so it is so detached from the reality on the ground in Saudi Arabia of the way people are treated and how you're allowed to express yourself and so on and so forth, especially as a female, that it comes off so, so much as selling out that I can't get over it.

2:45:12Dustin Furman:Like what a, how can you, it's hard for me to imagine being a gay person and working for EA right now. I mean, that's what you have to do. There's probably plenty of gay people that work for EA, but how do you square it? And how are you at Savvy Games Group in Riyadh? Like at home base and your, and then everyone's like, well, like things are kind of softening and they're liberalizing. I'm like, they're doing it for money. They don't believe it or care about it. it makes it worse remember chris chris you and i've said this many times it's like everyone's like oh they're gonna like put fucking burkas on the characters and you know and fifa whatever and i'm like no they're not and that makes it worse because they don't even believe it they just want the money yeah you know like they just want to they just want to wash they just want to launder money through the you know it's not really a lot of money laundry but they want to they want to manufacture income in the shit that they would otherwise not domestically endorse and it comes off as bullshit to me.

2:46:12Dustin Furman:Yeah. And I hate it. And I think people that collaborate with these kinds of companies are sellouts. I don't feel that way so much about EA right now because I think things just settled and these people are victimized by that. But ultimately, I think choices have to be made. Easier said than done. All right. We'll leave that for now. I'm sure we'll hear more about that though.

2:46:36Colin Moriarty:Chris, I put this next one in here. Speaking of the Saudis. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm saying speaking of the Saudis

2:46:39Dustin Furman:indeed I put this in here for you SNK announced the Metal Gear I'm sorry the Metal Gear the Metal Slug Ultimate Collection rolling out in 2027 it will obviously come to PlayStation 5 no PS4 release for these which is a little surprising but not really it includes Metal Gear Metal Gear Slugged fuck me Metal Slug 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Metal Slug X and Metal Slug Advance so most but not all the Metal Slug games are you going to retain your stance against SNK

2:47:20Colin Moriarty:yeah I think so like it's fine I love I really love Metal Slug like that I have like really fond memories of Metal Slug I used to play there was this pizza place down the street from my Catholic school that I would go to all the time they had a Metal Slug machine and I was obsessed with it just the animation like i remember being like a kid and thinking like they were the the pow's were hobos

2:47:41Colin Moriarty:like why are these homeless people in the middle of this fucking battlefield but i i yeah i just i can't um i i just can't do it it's a bummer because it looks cool but yeah it does look cool metal slug tactics i thought metal slug tactics i was like way more excited about because i just like I had just recently gotten into tactics games and I love metal slug. And so to see that combination and have it look so good was like really enticing to me. So that was a lot harder than this. These are games I've played already before, like endless amounts of times. I'm sure there's some of these that I've missed.

2:48:14Colin Moriarty:Like maybe I didn't play like metal slug seven or something like that, but it's okay. It's fine. There's, there's, I'm not wanting for stuff to play right now. I'll tell you that there's too much.

2:48:27Dustin Furman:So yeah, that's true. I, yeah, Yeah, no, no, nobody should be hungry for anything. I did do a little research. I didn't realize that they didn't release. So obviously the early Metal Slugs came to Neo Geo, but they released Metal Slug. I got to stop. Metal Slug 5. Everything through Metal Slug 5 in 2003 came to Neo Geo natively. It's like, damn. That's pretty cool. So that's pretty cool. All of those are going to be everything through Metal Slug 5, including Metal Slug X. And Metal Slug X is, isn't that a, yeah, Yeah, Metal Slug X is a Metal Slug 2 remake. So it'll be all the Neo Geo native versions, which is cool.

2:49:07Dustin Furman:And then Metal Slug Advance is a GBA game from 2004. And then the Metal Slug 6 will be the PS2 version. Metal Slug 7 was a DS game. And that was the last mainline game from 2008. So Metal Slug's been kind of dormant for a while, except for, like you said, Tactics came out a while ago. And then I did look this up. There are games that are missing. Metal Slug XX is a remake of Metal Slug 7 for PSP. That's not going to be in there. And then there are these two interesting Neo Geo pocket color games from 1999 and 2000 called Metal Slug First Mission and Metal Slug Second Mission. There's also and I didn't know this.

2:49:39Dustin Furman:There's a 3D third person shooter Metal Slug game called Metal Slug that was released only in Japan in 2006 on PlayStation 2. And I looked this up is that some of these games were made by a studio called Yuki Yote or Yuki Yote. They don't exist anymore and i was like why does that name sound familiar and they made the and i don't know if you know this one dustin specifically the 1994 snes it's kind of a side-scrolling action platformer called skyblazer i don't know if you know that one that sony ironically published and they also made and this is what i wanted to really get into because this is like a nerdy thing do you guys remember the ps1 game punky skunk what is that that sounds it was like this really underwhelming 2D platformer game, but it had this really notable, it came out like a couple of years.

2:50:31Dustin Furman:It came out in 98, I think on PS1 in the West, but it came out in 96 in Japan, but it had this like really interesting ad campaign, like magazine campaign. And when I was reading about the studio, I was like, punky skunk. I haven't thought of that stupid game. And I went and looked it up and I was like, yes, I remember there were like kind of these like ads in PSM and other magazines for this game. And so I just thought it was interesting. They made that game.

2:50:51Colin Moriarty:I've seen this before. I don't remember it well. I don't think I don't think I ever saw the game in action, but I think I remember seeing this box at some point.

2:50:58Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's like it's very notable, like orange pink kind of thing going on, I think. Right. Metal.

2:51:04Colin Moriarty:Yeah, this looks like the type of game that I would randomly pick up because the covers weird like swag, man.

2:51:11Dustin Furman:Right. That I would be in that. What is what is Punky Skunk's price right now? Doesn't it? I bet you they didn't print many copies of that game.

2:51:18Colin Moriarty:Forty nine. Ninety. That's it.

2:51:20Dustin Furman:Complete. That's what it costs. Probably when it came out.

2:51:23Colin Moriarty:that's the price charting average probably not very well

2:51:26Dustin Furman:sale per week well not very well liked probably because I don't think it did very well like with the critics

2:51:33Colin Moriarty:this is like the era that I was playing like weird shit like Flintstones bedrock bowling or something like that like very weird probably better off yeah I feel like I remember liking it there's no shot it's good if I went back to it and played it

2:51:48Dustin Furman:alright PS plus game catalog additions for September is our next story. We're almost done here. These games will generally be available beginning September 15th, and they're part of your subscription if you have PlayStation Plus Extra or Premium. So remember, of course, you get access to the Perpetual Game Catalog, hundreds of games there, Game Pass-like selections, except for very few new releases. However, one of the games does launch into PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium, and that's RuneScape Dragon Wilds, which was at State of Play, or maybe the Gamescom show. I don't know, something like that recently.

2:52:22Dustin Furman:so that's launching on september 15th and that will be available in ps plus extra and premium uh wwe 2k 26 which came out earlier this year will be included the excellent ball pit which came out last year will be included i highly recommend ball pit ball pit is available not on the 15th but on the 22nd by the way date everything is available now so not on the 15th but right now from when you're listening to this available as of september 9th which is yesterday from when we're recording date everything is I remember seeing that game it's an interesting kind of sim guys September 22nd Slitterhead on PS5 and PS4 I still have not played it it's on the list me neither I'm so brain broken that I was I'm playing Dawn Walker and there's a place called like the something silt and I kept reading and I'm like oh it says slit like Like I was like, oh, it's like Jesus Christ.

2:53:21Colin Moriarty:Maybe that's a stream, Colin.

2:53:23Dustin Furman:What the stream? Yeah, the itty bitty slitty committee. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, we should do that. That's a good idea. Ninja Gaiden Ragebound is also in there for PS4 and PS5. That's on the 29th. Highly recommended. Highly recommended as well. That's exciting to me. Dungeons of Hinterberg, which I don't know is available on the 29th. it's like an exploration dungeon crawling kind of game and then sniper elite resistance which i feel like we just talked about for some reason i don't know why that's going to be available on the 29th and then premium games megaman x command mission which is very exciting um the ps2 game i think it was on gamecube as well but this will obviously be the uh the ps2 version that we knew that from the last state of play and then metro redux which is so when metro 2033 came to xbox 360 and p It never came to PlayStation 3.

2:54:16Dustin Furman:It wasn't until Metro Redux that we on PlayStation, on PS4, that we got the original Metro game. So that's that. Very good game. Highly recommend. All right. There's that. And then, guys, I just wanted to acknowledge some sales stuff before we get into what we're playing. PlayStation released their PlayStation Store top downloads. This one's for August. Madden NFL 27 was the best-selling game of the month. Not a huge surprise there. Bigger surprise to me, actually, is Tokon coming in at number two. it's not a huge month for games necessarily so i wouldn't read too much into number two there but it's very respectable placement call of duty black ops 2 still cruising along the remake or the re-release of the 2012 game number four is a game i've never heard of no more room in hell 2

2:55:01Colin Moriarty:are either of you familiar with jimmy jimmy was saying he was really into this game so that's that's number four i think it's like left for dead eight player cooperative zombies survival game.

2:55:15Dustin Furman:And then others, Hell Let Loose Vietnam's on here, College Football's on here, Minecraft's on here, Campaign Evolved holding on the Halo game, Pal Worlds full releases on here, Spider-Man 2 popping back up because of the movie, War in the North, the Surprise Lord of the Rings re-release is on the list as well, and Mafia Definitive Edition wrapping things up at 20. PS4's best-selling game for the month was Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands followed by Red Dead Redemption 2 and Gang Beasts. PSVR 2 games Synapse was number one. I Am Cat number two and Bootstrap Island number three. Free to play games, nothing new here except for one notable thing.

2:55:52Dustin Furman:Fortnite and Roblox are number one and two, but the game Once Human came in at number three, followed by Marvel Rivals and Rainbow Six Siege. Are you guys familiar with this game?

2:56:04Colin Moriarty:Once Human. I think I saw something about this recently.

2:56:07Dustin Furman:It says Once Human is a strange world survival game set in a strange post-apocalyptic future. Unite with friends to fight monstrous enemies, uncover secret plots, compete for resources, and build your own territory. Once you were merely human, now you have the power to remake the world. It has 90 ,000 English language reviews on Steam with very positive consensus. So, not so bad.

2:56:32Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

2:56:36Okay.

2:56:37Dustin Furman:What else did I have here for this? Oh, Dave the Diver 10 million copies sold wow oh wow that's a sleeper hit I feel like I never hear about it and yeah Mike really liked that game a lot and then um I had two oh yeah Onimusha sold a million copies in a day Dawn Walker sold a million copies in a day so those are the other two that I wanted to bring up as well that's all we have for the news all right my boys let's get into what we're playing I'll go first and get out of the way then you guys can talk about I guess onimusha and then we'll get into wolverine last we'll stamp all that so people can avoid things

2:57:14Colin Moriarty:yeah not that there's going to be spoilers but yeah we won't spoil it but just so people if they want to hear nothing they have the option uh let's see let's see let's see let's see let's

2:57:28Dustin Furman:see all right so alan wake 2 i platinumed it platinum number 216 platinum to right after we recorded last week so nothing really to say about that i hadn't already said i did all the expansion stuff as well and 100 % of those. I will say this, Chris. I don't know how much you mess with Alan Wake 2's expansion specifically, but they connect to Control 2. Oh, yeah. I finished all of them. I didn't know that. Overtly referencing Control. Now, of course, Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2 especially do reference Control often. I love seeing in the game, I said this when we talked about it last, but what's his name?

2:58:03Dustin Furman:Robert Darling or whatever, like the doctor. And he's like in like various pictures and stuff like it's so cool it's so creepy but yeah they get in they get directly into control resonance stuff in the expansion so if people are like looking for the full breadth of that experience when resident comes out later this month you and you you might want to be familiar with those as well i will say i don't know how i'm going to kind of line this all up i kind of let go of playing silent hill immediately that's definitely gonna be the low-hanging fruit that i'll have to get to later i still haven't played control one replayed it again and I definitely want to do that before I play control resonance so it's good I'm not going to get to it right away because I really want to I love I loved I loved control so much and I really loved Alan Wake too and I'm like I just want to be in the right place to really get the most out of control resonant as opposed to being like previously on

2:58:53Colin Moriarty:like that entire the expansions do some really fun stuff I really I was and they're like really bite size which is nice like I feel really respectful of your time and they they mess with the gameplay in a lot of ways that i didn't expect and it's like it's a good i only two is great like i i i've i've said it so many times at this point it's i'm sure it's annoying but like it really is like if you haven't played it like i really think you're missing out on something

2:59:16Dustin Furman:really cool yeah it's really an exceptional game i totally agree and it's disappointing because people might remember like i was so excited about allen way too when it came out in 2023 i pre-ordered it when you know right before it came out to get the uh you know i don't i got the expansion season pass and and then i had the ps5 pro issues i guess ps5 pro came out that fall right so it was like one of the first games i think i played on ps5 pro isn't that right it was like that and silent hill later on the next year i guess were both these these games that just had shimmering problems for me yeah the problems were still there in fact i got to the point in the game where i was like holy shit it's where this is what turned me off from playing it the first time and It's just the same.

2:59:54Dustin Furman:So I just, I went through it. It was fine. It really is a special game. It is intriguing and strange. So I use this term a lot recently with this game, but it's so avant-garde.

3:00:09Dustin Furman:And it's too bad that people don't get it more. I was lamenting that it only has sold like 3 million copies. If you look at the trophies, fewer than a million people have even beaten it. It's like, what a shame. Like, really, what a shame. and I feel bad for you if you don't get it like because I to me I'm like this kind of stuff is that good to me and that's special and that different and you're right about the expansions the night spring stuff is really cool night springs is the is the Alan Wake universe or the remedy verse version of twilight zone and so one of the expansions is like three episodes of that although one of them plays into control I won't spoil it any more than that and then the other one the lake house is about and a compound like a department of control or whatever compound near the lake the allen wake lake that's relevant to the story so and you play as like a he plays like a an agent like that you've never seen before that's in that's in allen wake too so yeah yeah really really neat and then i got into blood of dawn walker and i i gotta say man this game's awesome it really is it's like really great and i'm really impressed by it there is a

3:01:34Dustin Furman:real depth to the structure of the game wherein i can't believe like i had an experience in the game that I don't even want to I don't want to talk about it because I was like I it's not even this like amazing thing it's just that something happened where I'm like I can't believe I just was allowed to do that in the structure of the story and I was like that's fucking dope like it almost felt like a mistake but it wasn't and it goes to show you that this this open world role-playing game it looks a little bit like a PlayStation 4 game to me I don't think it's visually impressive by almost any stretch of the imagination.

3:02:11Dustin Furman:It doesn't mean that it looks bad or that it's not atmospheric or anything. It just doesn't look like that great. And I'm playing it on the bootleg performance mode that they probably strapped into it two weeks before it came out. But I did put it up to like the 30 and 40 frames modes and it doesn't look that different. I can't believe people play on those modes. I wanted to throw up playing on 30 frames. Shit. Like it moves like so stuttered and fucked up. So I'll take it. It is what it is. But so it's not like this aesthetically amazing game. I don't even think the combat is the combat's cool.

3:02:45Dustin Furman:It's like it is like parry heaven. But it's not like the greatest thing in the world. It works. I enjoy it. The cool thing is, is that you play partially as a human, partially as a vampire, the same character, depending on day or night. So there's these two different ways to fight. I feel you fight with your claws when you're the vampire and like it's more kinetic. It's almost like you're practicing to play Wolverine, wherein you use a sword and so on and fight more standard when you're the human during the daytime. Where the game to me really shines is just in its complexity. And you can tell that a lot of, I like Western role playing games.

3:03:24Dustin Furman:I don't think I've played nearly all of them. I wouldn't consider myself a huge expert in them, but I've played a lot of the big ones and I understand typically how they're structured and work. this game feels so much more thoughtful from a decision point of view where it's not tracking your karma or like your decision from any perspective other than that you do things in these one-off ways but there seems to be so much depth in how things can come out and how things work and it's one of those rare games like this where i multiple times i have paused went back to a previous save and i'm like i don't like the way that went because everything has so much gravity and you work so hard in parts of the game to get to certain places and then like this outcome happens and I'm like, I can't accept that outcome.

3:04:05Dustin Furman:I got to do something different. I will also say that the 30-day limit thing is, I'm actually going to get rid of these inquiries because we don't really need them. I already talked about this stuff. The 30-day limit thing was really constraining to me at first and I was really worried about it. But I will say... I have plenty of time left and I'm like where I'm like better than where I need to be where I don't feel stressed about it at all. And you simply can't do everything in the game. You have to kind of teach yourself to just not waste time. Everything you do in the game has a cost. Even upgrading your character, which I'm not crazy about, comes at a time cost.

3:04:46Dustin Furman:So like if you earn a skill point from leveling up your character. to spend that skill point you have to spend a part of the day and so it you can like stack up these skill points you might be a little uncertain if you want to use them and then maybe you just use one whole day and just upgrade your character that day i'm not crazy about that decision but the more persona like structure of like you got to do this you got to do that you got to do that it doesn't quite work like that either because it's not calendric it's literally just on 30 days and you just have 30 days to save your family that's kind of like what it is because I understand the game goes on.

3:05:19Dustin Furman:Even if you go past the 30 days, you just lose. But you can continue to play. You just can't beat the main game, I guess. So it has not been as constraining for me. And I have not consulted or looked at anything for the game the entire time I played it. I've just gone raw, as it were. You know? And I don't know, man. I'm kind of blown away by it. And I know Micah is like really, I mean, she is. She's really into it, too. and what's fun is talking to her about it and the different outcomes and the different the different ways you can do things and the surprise of like you did what or that i wish i could just explain you guys i i'll explain i'll tell you what i don't think it's really a spoiler there are these different bosses it's very it's structured a lot like far cry like a far cry game like far cry 5 where it's like here are the lieutenants the the brent sis is the main vampire enemy and here her is like they're all the characters in the in the trailer remember the introductory trailer yeah right the female one and like the mongol one and the one that's like really handsome like that's all of his lieutenants and you have to kind of like bait them out by doing things in their territories and fight like fighting them and figuring things out there's all these clues whatever but i went to one of their territories and i accidentally just went right to the boss and fought fought the boss and killed them without ever encountering anything about the boss and the conversation that we were having was like oh here you are like it was like it was it was a possibility it wasn't a glitch it wasn't like i tricked something it's like you can do this you don't know that you can do it but you can and then i unlocked this thing about halfway like i'm on day you really count backwards you have 30 days so i have 18 days left and i unlock this thing where i'm like i can go beat the game right now if i want i'm not strong enough i don't think I can probably figure it out, but I can do it.

3:07:06Dustin Furman:Like there's the route that I can just, I already figured out like one way to beat the game. It's very intriguing. I highly recommend this game. I really do. And the vampire stuff in the Eastern European stuff, that's just layers of good stuff on the cake for me. Where it's because I love vampires. I love the Eastern European setting. It's all very pleasing and interesting. I think the voice acting is pretty good. I like the characters. There's a lot of depth to the system. this is a great game guys i'm telling you i'm i was always excited about it i was always really interested in it i think i like it more than i even thought i was going to like it and this is a highly recommended game for me and i was really pleased like rebel wolves already announced you know it sold a million copies and that they're already hiring people for the next game so they're moving and it's good i saw someone write something like you know it took about four years to do this game it's pretty good and the one thing i'm excited about is them getting a little more money and making it a little more aesthetic and seeing where it goes from here because it's a really really cool story and it's a really heartfelt story and an interesting story and i really really like it so that's my experience with the blood of dawn walker all right let's go move on to you guys you're both playing onimusha and you're both playing wolverine and chris you're also playing play tale so i guess you would go first with play tale and then maybe we go into honimusha then maybe we go into wolverine that probably makes sure yeah yeah yeah that sounds

3:08:35Colin Moriarty:all right yeah so uh this is the most recent game that i'm that i've been playing like i've only got a i've got a couple hours into it uh this is obviously a continuation of uh play tale requiem and a play tale innocence i believe yeah uh now i really liked the first two play tale games namely because um i just the setting is awesome i think it they look great um but also they're stealth heavy games in an industry in an environment where that's just not really common like i feel like they're just not really they're not the thing to do anymore um and so you can kind of take them where you get it and i think personally like i think a play tale both previous play tale games are quite good um i think they do stealth well i think they do tension well i think the art design and the level design like kind of complemented like it just looks really pretty and there's like a sense of weight i like the characters a lot this is very different i don't know if i really like this so far and it's not to say that it's bad really like it's actually pretty well done the combat is kind of it's a little janky but it is visceral like there's different it's it takes a little bit of getting used to because it's like a whole you have to you have to break stamina and once the stamina is broken you can go in with like a specific attack and you can kind of get a lot of damage in and there's like a grapple hook that you can use to pull people into you and like it you can kick which is nice i feel like i don't see kicks a lot in games like this weirdly enough i don't know why but so like the combat's pretty good and i i'm intrigued by the world that it's setting up but i'm not as gripped by it as i as i was in the first two games i'm not as sold on the premise which at this point is like it really feels like they kind of drop you into the middle of something and i kind of just don't know what the fuck is going on i i assume that more light will be shed on these things as time goes on but um i don't know i'm a little iffy on it and to be fair like i i've just got done playing quite a number of these melee action games so like it just could be like i'm hitting a ceiling with this um i think i but like this but even as i was thinking of it's like this isn't hitting for me maybe i'll go to blood of dawn walker but it's like that's i mean it's a very different game obviously so there's probably more to it to sink my teeth into than just the melee action stuff but like i mean damn it's another one so i'm tentative about this so far i think i would have preferred another stealth oriented plague tale where you're kind of hiding and using shadow and there really just isn't a lot of that in this so far it's very action focused very set piece focused but i like the character that you're playing as Sophia I like her enough to be like you know what I'll I'll give it another go but it's not hitting what I want out of Plague Tale right now that's to say with about four hours in I think maybe three closer to three probably so it's still pretty early but yeah so that's my time with Plague Tale I'll keep going uh Uh, Animusha, Way of the Sword is the next one that I've been playing.

3:12:08Colin Moriarty:I beat it. Uh, it took me about, I think, probably check my time. It's over 20 hours. This is a really, really great video game that is stretched out into a game that I think is not as great. And what I say about that is like, I think the combat is fantastic. I really like the characters a lot. Like, I like the space that you're fighting in. I like the personality. Like, all the villains so far that I've faced so far, like, the personality is wonderful. I love the way Musashi is written. I love the way the villains are written. I love the way they're performed. Even in the English dub, which is, like, kind of goofy, like, it's still, like, very, it's quite charming.

3:12:56Colin Moriarty:They're all British, and it's, like, very weird. But I like it. I like it a lot. But it's just, it feels... So they've done this kind of open structure approach to the game in the sense that it's a little bit like a... It's like a sliver of a Ubisoft game. And I don't say that necessarily in a way that is as detrimental because part of what makes those games kind of unapproachable is how big they are. This is a lot more contained. so it is like kind of an open town and there is like stuff on the map and things to do but it never feels like overwhelming or anything like i was able to kind of decide pretty early on like what side content i was going to involve myself with and what side content i was going to ignore and i was able to breeze through it without necessarily um needing to do all of that extra stuff so i don't want to make it seem like it's so overbearing but i do think it there's a lot of boss reuse there's a lot of like doing the same things over and over again and it's to the point where like when the game is linear i love it like i love the combat i love getting a perfect ishan attack i i love i love how it feels to do all of these things i love running through these linear puzzle spaces where like you've got to get a key and you got to cut this and there's like a little mask puzzle with light and shadow and you do that and you get a key to a new place and you fight a big thing it's cool it's just like going from open world mission point to to other open world mission point and just kind of like walking to and from and like farming it's just kind of like i wish it was a little bit more linear i wish i wish they borrowed more from resident evil in the way that the old ani musha games did or at least the one that i played the first on emusha which is more linear it's very linear yeah it is yeah it's like a mini game kind of yeah and small yeah so i think it's like this is a great like 10 to 12 hour game arguably like very very very good um but it's just got all these other things that kind of like you're muddying the you're muddying the water with this you could have not you could have not done all this extra stuff and had a stronger game in my opinion but it feels really good to play and I think the standout really is the characters I really, I like the world and I like the story it's compelling every character so far that I've met is fun to watch and you're kind of delighted to see them which is more than I can say for a lot of games so like, I really like Animusha, Way of the Sword I do recommend it, ultimately even with some of its flaws but that's kind of how I feel about it and then we'll move on to Wolverine once yeah Dustin what do you

3:15:48Dustin Furman:want to add anything to Onimusha?

3:15:50Colin Moriarty:yeah I pretty much am in total alignment with Chris in that the linear sections of this game are hitting so well for me I really love the art direction of this game in particular some of the creatures monsters whatever you want to say that you run into are absolutely disgusting in the best way it reminds some of the parts remind me of like junji ito stuff that i absolutely love yeah the combat is really good too it took me a little bit to get used to because it is a sword-based parry game uh that's focuses a lot on parrying but it does not feel like sekiro i mean i guess the parry itself maybe does but it is a much slower paced which uh so you have a lot more like i don't feel more methodical in a way maybe a lot a lot more forgiving than a game like sekiro i know people were concerned after the demo that the game would be too easy uh i have found that it's not it's it's not sekiro level difficult but there are some definitely some hard bosses like ones that it's like it has that you have to play it a few different times learn the the flow of the boss learn the parry timings and stuff like that uh and i like that a lot yeah the worst part is to me and i think other people love this so i think this is a matter of taste is the the open world stuff where it seems like between you can like i wish you could just choose not to engage with it but between these linear missions it forces you to do it's like oh we're going to introduce this this activity and we're going to make you do this for a little bit uh and it's like uh cool i'm i'm good though like i i really don't want to do that but you're forcing me to teach me like oh this is this type of mission or this type of thing um the i mean the open world itself is cool and i do like that it is more contained I think it's supposed to be Eastern Kyoto, which is neat.

3:18:08Colin Moriarty:But I don't find that very compelling. Personally, it feels like something that maybe after I finish the game that I would maybe go back to and kind of clean things up. But I really just want to play the linear sections more than anything.

3:18:23Dustin Furman:Does it please your Japanese sensibilities?

3:18:25Colin Moriarty:Dude, the one, the main, what temple is it? The Kimizu Yara Temple. I can't remember what it's called. That sounds right. The first temple, the first like main mission of the game is at one of the main, like big temples at Kyoto that Holly and I have been to. And a pretty accurate. I found a spot where I took a photo, which was cool. And I'm curious. There's another temple. That's like pretty iconic in Kyoto that I'm very curious of is in the game, but I haven't looked it up yet. So pretty cool, pretty cool game. I'm probably I think my PlayStation like that little percentage said I was over halfway, but my time has been split.

3:19:09Colin Moriarty:So I will be returning to it very soon. But I've been playing a different game that we can, I guess, get into now. I guess overall with Onimusha, I really, really like it. If you like sword combat games, this is a very good one. and if you like you know weird fucked up little guys there's gonna be a lot of nice little fucked up guys for you to kill in this game so okay let me time stamp this for the wolverine discussion so i time stamped it because i know some people don't want to hear anything at all we respect that so you can skip ahead i guess uh we did receive this game from sony full disclosure we Chris when did we get it last week because we a lot of reviewers had a lot more time than us which isn't Sony's fault I think it might be Colin's fault but it is my fault but I didn't answer I just ignored the email for like a week so I didn't mean to though I just was I'm I'm dealing with that much you're all good I also for a full disclosure I am so close to beating this game guys i really tried between last night and even getting up earlier this morning to try to finish it so i it's not going to change my opinion the last literally i think it says 93 percent and i think i am on like the pretty much the very end so i am i'm almost there so take that for what you will chris you've completed it yeah though right because oh yeah yeah we were talking because I was trying to ask you, I'm like, how far am I?

3:20:50Colin Moriarty:Am I going to be able to make it for tomorrow? And you're like, eh. But I almost made it. Almost made it. So Wolverine, it is good, kind of. I feel really conflicted about this game because when I first sat down to play it, I was like, man, this combat is really, you know, I think, uh, insomniac always talks about their combat being like fast and fluid. I'm like, yeah, this is super fast. It's really satisfying. Uh, when you're jumping around, like doing the Wolverine leap from enemy to enemy. And then the second mission comes around and you're like, okay, I'm kind of, I'm, I'm just doing this some more.

3:21:34Colin Moriarty:I'm pressing square a lot, square, square triangle for kind of the heavy attack at the end. And then I'm doing that some more and some more. And it really burns itself out where when I was playing this morning and to be fair, I was trying to just get to the end. I was like, man, there's just more and more and more of this combat that just simply is too repetitive. I feel like you do unlock new abilities, of course, throughout the game, like new types of moves that Wolverine can do. I have all of them unlocked before the end of the game. And those do add some variety to it, but it is primarily a big push and square type game.

3:22:27Colin Moriarty:The other thing too, is this may be, I'm curious what you think about this, Chris, we can kind of go back and forth here. This might be Sony's most play tested friendly game. And we've talked about like with horizon forbidden West, where she constantly won't shut up about like oh i gotta do this gotta do that this isn't necessarily in in what they're saying though i did have this moment where wolverine was like ah i gotta get up i gotta get up high to get over there i bet you that tower over there and i'm like i fucking there's a giant fucking tower you don't need to fucking tell me but the uh the yellow yellow paint or in case in this case the white paint it is actually egregious in this game literally any path that it's trying to put you on there are like clear white markers on everything you do and in addition oftentimes wolverine is following something based on ascent so it literally gives you like a gps route on what you're supposed to do i've seen a lot of people today since the reviews came out today talking about this technically you can turn that off but i was just playing as the presented intended experience the default experience yeah this is going in going on what it says the intended difficulty is and hitting go it's the same thing as like when we made fun of the halo uh campaign evolved how they have that scene with like the stealth the invisible elites and they're like there's invisible elites but then they have like the the markers over their heads yeah you could turn that off but like the game doesn't The game has it on by default.

3:24:09Colin Moriarty:Like this is the intended experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's just certain points where I'm like, man, I, I, I get it. I talked a lot, Chris, let's, let's, we can do this a little back and forth. What are you thinking overall? Yeah, man. So I beat this a couple of days ago at this point. I, dude, I, I thoroughly did not like this. Wow. i i'm i was kind of shocked to be honest because i was like playing it i was like and i was just like i was thinking to myself i was like is this is this is this bad like this can't be bad right like it's it's and i don't know i don't know if it necessarily is bad so much as it is just like this feels a bit like a very very polished first draft of a wolverine game i don't think the combat is engaging enough on its own to stand the the runtime of like what the game demands i don't think the traversal is dynamic enough to like there are these traversal challenges in the game but it's like what there's no traversal mechanics really like i i'm not even exaggerating i did not have to try at all to get like the highest rank on these on these traversal challenges like every single time i got it at the highest rating on my first go through well they mark up they mark paint on every single point that you need to go to well it's not even just that it's just like as long as you press forward and press the buttons at the obvious times like you're going to get the top time like it's it's not like spider-man where there's a lot of options for you right or like it's kind of hard to hit like you know what i mean like it's it's not you're running around and jumping and climbing kind of slowly like you're you're you're an enhanced superhuman or whatever but like you're there's no traversal in this game really as at least as like a focal mechanic like you're just a guy with claws running around and climbing shit like it's like it's fine i don't know why there's traversal challenges and i don't know man i was just kind of playing and like towards once i got to the midpoint of the game i was like man this this needs to end soon because like this just it doesn't have the depth that it needs to be as long as as it's trying to be and to be fair i want to be clear like it looks really great and it oh yeah and it runs really well and like the performances are quite good like i thought the guy who did who is wolverine in this game is doing a really good job um i don't care much about the x-men i do have to be honest like that is kind of like maybe like a blind spot for me like I don't really know these characters I don't I don't care that much about these characters or that world but I do think it's worth noting that like I didn't give a shit about 007 at all I don't care about James Bond even slightly but I loved First Light I thought it was fantastic and I got like I became I became a fan I kind of became a fan of 007 because of that game this did not do that for Wolverine for me and I don't I I just there's so much to talk about with this game that like obviously we'll once we do like a proper spoiler cast I think like because there's there's criticisms that I have of it that like go into I don't want to say narrative but like gameplay stuff that's that's a little bit bewildering but it's it's a fairly competent action game that's a little bit repetitive too repetitive for me but like I could see some people like kind of blazing through this and having a good time and you know I don't think it's without merit or without fun but i'm also looking at this from the context of like

3:27:56this took a long time to make and i don't think the juice is worth the squeeze for the amount of

3:28:02Colin Moriarty:time like if this game had if this exact game had come out maybe two years ago when the game was originally supposed to come out like what was the original uh you know what i mean like

3:28:11Dustin Furman:when it was originally slated yeah it must have been probably for 2024 because it was announced what in 22 and then spider-man came in 23 they were announced at the same time so i think i think it was supposed to be the one after that 24 then venom was probably supposed to be 25 yeah like

3:28:26Colin Moriarty:if the context was this game came out that soon i think i would feel differently about it honestly because it's just like yeah it's it's not it's not the most amazing game but it's like you know insomniac's hidden you know like they're doing these well polished um really well made games really quickly but i don't i don't know like it's it's very handholdy in ways that are bewildering because it's so linear that like i don't know what like there's that there's that trail of scent that like i initially thought because this was in the leaks a long time ago that scent trail um which i remembered from the leaks and i remember thinking like oh that was something that you would maybe trigger right like you would like press a button and it would it would appear because you were trying to track something that's there just by default it's just constantly shoving you down these like narrow corridors and then there are these like side collectibles that are there but they're impossible to miss to the point where like i was going i wasn't even trying to get all of them and i remember like looking at my mission percentage completion i was like i got 100 on so many of these missions without even trying and at a certain point it just kind of becomes very mindless which you know some people are into that like i i would argue there's this probably like entire genres kind of built it like musou's like dynasty wars where you're just kind of hitting you're just kind of hitting a bunch of people with a stick and it's like fun and the the sheer volume of what you're doing and it is the fun of it not necessarily the complexity but yeah i just this didn't this just did not hit for me man um it not that i was necessarily looking forward to it to it like i wasn't like hyped you know like i was curious about it i was like okay it's insomniac they're a great studio but this is worst game seems harsh because it's not like shit or like bad necessarily but it's it's definitely like certainly the least i've liked an insomniac game

3:30:32Colin Moriarty:i've never played fuse so right but i feel like i said good earlier but maybe a better word is fine yeah i mean i it is fine but like i think i don't know insomniac i feel like you you you expect a little more than fine oh you know that's kind of the way that i feel about it um yeah yeah i uh i was thinking about it in the context of like spider-man also um because it's been a while since i've played spider-man but like the combat maybe isn't i don't want to say it's it's similar to spider-man but it has that beat-em-up feel with abilities but i guess in spider-man you're it's broken up by the traversal yeah there's traversal there's it there's more it's more dynamic yeah you have more options available to you like i was kind of blown away that like and maybe i got through maybe i went through the whole game without even without noticing this somehow like i don't know how i would have but like even something simple like jumping and if you jump and attack you would assume that there would be like a down slash or something like even that's not there and it's just like and it's just like that's such a little thing this is what i mean when i say it's like it feels a bit like a first draft it's like this is like a solid foundation that you build out from and then they just didn't build out from it and it's kind of wild

3:32:01Colin Moriarty:that in spider-man you have so in spider-man you have one of the most arguably one of the most satisfying type of video game characters to take control of uh you have a lot of options available to you both in combat and traversal and they they make a game like that and then they break up the flow of it by making you play as mary jane or whatever and you're like why are we doing this busted ass mary jay busted ass tim minchin looking as mary jane

3:32:33Colin Moriarty:but then you have a game like this where the character is less dynamic less interesting to play as and you're and you're playing as him the entire time in a world where you're surrounded by other characters with powers that look cool you know that blows my mind a little bit that they were like Wolverine could carry a whole game by himself but Spider-Man needs to be broken up a little bit I don't know I kind of just I don't know I'm a little bit flummoxed by a lot of these decisions again I think it's like competent it's well made but like i think insomniac is just they're above this i think um and have been so a few other points about the combat i think what makes it worse in terms of it being repetitive is that um the the times i find the combat like not just repetitive but annoying is when you're fighting a lot of enemies at once uh this game has a parry mechanic in it where that you need to use like you need to be slashing and parrying enemies attack so you'll have like there's moments where i'm fighting a bunch of guys and it's like bing bing bing like i'm parrying everybody there's a guy over in the corner that's trying to shoot me at the same time and i'm like i i the best course of action for me is to run out unless i have like a power up that or a special ability that lets me circle slash my best move is to try to just run out of this exciting confrontation to go and fight that sniper guy and then try to pick these off guys off one by one or else i'm just going to be parrying over and over and over again so it's yeah there's i don't know there's quick time events too that like have no there's no there's you you can press any button and it does it yeah i was i was laughing so hard because like there's a scene where like you're you're you're clawing into this robot and it says r2 l2 r2 and then out of curiosity i just pressed x and he did it anyway and so then like at those points i just like mashed the buttons and i just it's i don't know man it's just odd it's an odd it's an odd looking duck the the interesting thing too and i'm glad you touched on this earlier chris is that i don't think this game if you're not an x-men guy this game is not going to be that satisfying from a gameplay perspective i don't think it's going to make you more interested well it might make you more interested in the x-men but it wasn't as you were saying like first light where i was like wow this is really something good crazy the story i think has actually been pretty decent and yeah particularly i think it builds up like by the end the stuff that i was playing this morning i was like man this is actually pretty intriguing but this is something that i'm curious from chris and i are not the right people for this but my impression is that people that are x-men fans are not really into particularly the character designs and the direction for the story like the x-men it's a very different take on x-men i can't remember what we should or shouldn't say but it's i think i've seen that this is already out a lot of this is already out there but it's not standard it's a very different take on x-men or wolverine because so i'm curious it's like okay well if it if the gameplay isn't satisfying enough for someone to just play for that then it's for x-men fans but i'm getting the impression that they're not really that into it either so that's a bit of an issue i will say one really nice thing that you touched on chris is that uh i think this game from a visual perspective like a performance perspective looks incredible oh yeah if you have a ps yeah yeah if you have a ps5 pro uh you can go and you play on the performance mode, you can turn on ray tracing and unlock the frame rate if you have a 4K TV.

3:36:39Colin Moriarty:It doesn't run in a locked 120, though there are modes for like a smooth VRR that I haven't messed with too much, but it performs so well. And there's moments where you're in, I know this was confirmed, that there's a lot of sections that are in Tokyo. And when it's at nighttime and the ray tracing's on, it looks crazy good like they were absolutely cooking in terms of the the technical fidelity of this game and it's a shame that the rest of it doesn't necessarily meet that

3:37:14Dustin Furman:so i'm uh i'll play it next week like we got three codes i gave it the other one to brad so he he i don't know what he's talked about yet uh well the embargo is what yet today so he wouldn't but I'll talk about it. So yeah, we'll do a spoiler cast and review discussion on this. Maybe the three of you will just do it. I don't know. But I'm going to pick it up day one and play it. And it doesn't seem like it's very long. So I should be able to get through it fairly quickly. But I beat it in about 14 hours. 14 hours. Okay. Yeah, it sounds it's funny. Like the collectible thing, I was seeing a little bit about that.

3:37:48Dustin Furman:And it sounds a little bit like the order 1886 in that regard. In fact, the game seems a little bit like the order 1886 generally. where it's like just kind of has you on corridors with this with the idea of scope and never really giving it to you there are two things i'll say just from an outsider's perspective right now number one i'm really surprised like i thought i thought that they would have something that was more securely in the mid to late eights um so my gut on that was all wrong i never played it so i have no i can't say i'd be a little more embarrassed if i played it that would be like what happened with me with knack back in the day where i played it a bunch of times and i'm like this is gonna be great fucking retard and then the uh and then the the second thing that i'm more interested in and i i um i just had a meeting with sony about some other stuff this week so um wolverine came up a little bit at just about future plans and i think we're gonna be able to get marcus smith the director on the show so we'll be able to talk to him more directly but um and he's an old friend of mine so i i feel comfortable asking him deeper questions this sounds to me like a game that they just needed to finish and get out and it seems like something was lost in translation he wasn't the original director obviously and as we've laughed about in the past i'm pretty sure that the original director of wolverine left to go direct perfect dark um just leaving the kind of the game in limbo and i wonder if um as chris noted early in his in his chat this was a game with a different timeline attached to it originally and something happened so i just wonder if it even Insomniac couldn't kind of thread the needle with this.

3:39:24Dustin Furman:It is one of its lowest scoring games. Metacritic. And I am surprised by it, but I also and I think everyone would agree with this, although maybe not, depending on how people look at PlayStation these days is I'm going to give Insomniac a pass. They've they're really one of the only teams that has shown up at all. and I know not everything is on the individual teams but on the decisions made as a whole for the company but they've released a lot of games comparable to their to everyone else and it's like okay so you released a seven that's fine let's let's like clean it up for the next one but the next two are probably going to be Venom and Spider-Man 3 and I will also remind you that this I think was supposed to be the beginning of the X-Men stuff so I wonder if this doesn't hit if this only sells a few million copies as opposed to seven or eight or whatever they wanted to do and I don't know what they wanted to do I'm just saying you know Spider-Man 2 was recently said to have passed 18 million copies I don't think Wolverine was ever going to hit that number but I think it could have reasonably if it was great gotten a half that number ultimately after a few years yeah I think you have to rethink your entire strategy with X-Men if people aren't feeling this but it might be too late and that's that's what's so funny and it's it's it's kind of a blessing and a curse the insomniac leak showed us insight in into the company that we were not supposed to have about where they were going and that they were tied to marvel through the 2030s right yeah there's another reality though where sony's getting out of all this i don't think that's going to be the case though i gotta be honest with you like i think they look at this is like okay it's a 7.5 it's not going to sell great we'll probably make some money on it this is a safe place to be and it kind of helps subsidize our company but i'll remind people too you have to sell more copies above and beyond even if it's first party because you're licensing it it's not the traditional first party product where sony's like we own the ip we get everything we own the studio the whole apparatus is like no you got to cut a nice fat check that kind of makes it not first party actually and so you have to kind of look at your resources and manage them and wonder if insomniac's core team would be better used and better leveraged doing something else for the first time in a long time um but we'll get i don't want to speak about the game itself because i've not played it so yeah all right my friends let's leave it there and we'll get into questions comments concerns thoughts and ideas as we wrap this episode up as we always do six inquiries from the audience over on Patreon, patreon.com slash last day media.

3:42:06Dustin Furman:The thread for this show goes live in the newsfeed Wednesday afternoons, Eastern time, and then it's deleted Thursday around noon when we begin to record our show. So get your inquiries in there. You've heard some of them throughout the show. You wrote on a lot this week, but a lot, a lot about the same topic. One thing I wanted to say, um, got to tighten things up a little bit. And I'm not saying from a mechanical point of view, I make fun of you guys for that all the time, right? You're literacy huh that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is it's getting too verbose i see things people are writing sometimes and i'm like i appreciate you writing this but like in what universe are we reading this on the show you know like i i'm not i i can't i can't do it multiple multiple paragraphs it's like the thing where you have to expand the field and you have to like expand the field again or you're like it's like oh my like come on let's tighten it up pithy pithy running jester wrote him said good day cdc podcast factory i keep thinking about games as a service and i can't understand why everyone keeps going to the pvp as an option rather than focus on pve first i know there are exceptions but those exceptions rock hell divers 2 destiny the division even the current friend slop games are just an excuse to play with others without having to feel like you need to live in a game to not feel like shit about yourself i know the investment is higher but there seems to be a big gap for the big pve game people can play together I mean, Housemarque making Dead Nation 2 is a third-person game with minor RPG mechanics just makes sense.

3:43:29Dustin Furman:I wish that made sense. That sounds awesome. I know this might anger you, but I feel like this appeals to the mass market more. Am I missing something, or is it the kids who are wrong? Chris, you've touched on this in the past a lot, and I think you have too, Dustin. Let's get further into it. Is PvE the salvation for these multiplayer games, these games as a service? Is that what solidifies a game and gives it a little bit of room to maneuver because it's not so urgent to be present and rely on others and stay skilled and have others occupy your games and is it the reason that games like the division have lasted so long

3:44:06Colin Moriarty:i mean certainly i think if it's not obviously there's exceptions like fortnite i believe had a pve component initially and it just didn't hit the multiplayer is what really took off but I think it's important to have a way to play the game that is not so um demanding you know like I think you want you want to build a game that's like approachable and that people want to spend time in and if like 100 of their time spent in the game is is like entirely hostile like that works um for some games but I don't think there's necessarily even a rhyme or reason to that I think it really is just luck of the draw and like timing that makes that work and so So I think it's better to have some kind of foundation where it's just like, all right, you know what?

3:44:52Colin Moriarty:It's a Sunday. It's like a Monday after work. I want to play the game, but I'm not really in the mood to sweat right now. Let me spend time in the world in a way that's somewhat more comfortable or maybe a little bit more casual. I think there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. And I think it's why Destiny is so huge. Destiny always had a pretty vibrant PvP component. it not necessarily that it was like balanced or particularly like well regarded but like people did participate in in you know trials of osiris and iron banner and these like competitive playlists but most of destiny is raiding and strikes and you know doing pve like that's what really set that game apart um and so i just think you need to have a robust offering for people you know one of the biggest issues with marathon actually is like i like i and i love it a lot is that like it's so hostile like every time to play every time you play it you have to be in this like really hyper competitive mindset and i i can maybe inhabit that for a little bit maybe even for a while but like not permanently you know um which sucks because i would want to spend more time in that in that universe if if there was like a way to not sweat so yeah pve PVE, I think, is a wise North Star.

3:46:18Colin Moriarty:If not as a focus, at least as something. A way to engage with your game is pivotal. What do you think, Nelson? I would imagine that the reason why PVE isn't the first thought is just probably because it requires a lot more long-term investment into it. I mean, this was the case with Destiny 1. the lesson they had to learn is just like people played the game they were so into it they played through all the content and they're like okay well now what when are you gonna feed me again and then three months go by and they had a little you know the first dlc thing people ate that up in a week like okay now what now what uh so i would imagine that that's when you have a multiplayer game you also need to feed and update them as well but it's a little different when you're playing against other players and kind of have that dynamic aspect of the gameplay uh i in a lot of cases so i i would imagine that's the case like a game like destiny was so incredibly expensive and consistently so incredibly expensive helldivers too i mean that's kind of a weird anomaly because that was purely pb pbe but then i feel like i fell off because there was like okay well i kind of run through this i'm kind of good now uh so i i i would imagine that's why uh i personally think that chris is right that's like having a mix of both is is the ideal but that's about it

3:48:04Dustin Furman:I like that he brought up Dead Nation 2 just because I have such a soft spot for Dead Nation I really love that game and it would be so I wish we lived in a world where that was realistic it's not we got Dead Nation 2 anyway it was Alien Nation but I there was something really really special about Dead Nation I really loved the vibe of that game and I thought that game was so fun that'll be a fun one to play on stream sometime because that's a fun co-op game you don't have to play co-op but at the higher difficulty levels it's like impossible without a partner okay um running jester thank you for writing in Sekron wrote in and said hey cdc does Capcom hate Mega Man Legends with another trailer for Mega Man Duel override from the direct I remember that Humble had a bundle for the Blue Bomber as I went over the list i can't help but notice that they never went back to the legends games what capcom ever finished volnut story do they have plans to make remakes did they lose their master copies to port it over does anyone there even want to make a new entry in the series or is capcom still giving the middle finger to innafune i feel capcom is letting an opportunity go to waste but what do you guys think i'll hang up and listen this was asked recently in a different way and i i brought it back up because i when it came back up i'm like you know what i'm just going to go look into this for this and so we can talk about it on the show like what's going on with this and what i kind of came up with is it feels like it is kind of a personalized around in a fune from my perspective in a fune always talked about kg in a fune of course was the producer of megaman and producer of many things at capcom and was a big player with megaman for the entire time it existed really until he left capcom about 15 years ago but he always said and you might remember this Dustin specifically because I know you like legends is he it was his favorite like he loved Mega Man Legends and I feel like the only reason Mega Man Legends got a third game at all was well a fourth game if you count Trombon is um because of him and I feel like that connection certainly hurt the game and I don't know like what's funny is when you go look at the personnel that was working on Legends 3, which was supposed, for people that don't remember, was supposed to be a 3DS game.

3:50:24Dustin Furman:And I think it's not, Inafune is not the producer of that game. He was kind of more of an overarching like brand producer at that point. So he wasn't really involved on the ground with it. And it's kind of crazy to delete or to get rid of something like that. But they, you have to remember what happened around the time that he left is that that Legends 3 was not the only Mega Man game that was canceled. Like they straight up just pulled that Mega Man universe game that was finished and never released it. So there's more to the story than meets the eye, I think. Of course, the original Mega Man Legends from 98, I have very fond memories of that.

3:50:59Dustin Furman:Dagan bought me that for my birthday in 1998 when I was in ninth grade. And I remember playing it, I remember very well playing it. And then of course the sequel came out like right before the PS2 launched. And I don't think anyone really, I mean, it did well. And I like it, it was fairly well regarded, but I don't think anyone really gave a shit. And then, of course, I think Tron Bond, correct me if I'm wrong, but Tron Bond came out in between Legends one and two, I want to say. Yeah, because it came with a demo disc for Legends two. Right. So they had something going with 3D Mega Man. Listen, my own thing about this is that like this is my least favorite Mega Man, probably outside of Star Force.

3:51:38Dustin Furman:And Star Force and Battle Network, I can feel like they're kind of the same. I mean, they're different properties, but they're the same game. it's the same kind of card based very early 2000s mid 2000s kind of gameplay i just don't really give a shit about megaman legend so like i think but it is the last unturned rock pardon the pun uh in the uh in the franchise like it is weird that they've avoided them because between legends 1 2 and trombon that's a collection you don't need to really do anything else and that would and then and then you basically have everything outside like with command mission coming out and there's a few other like battle network transmission and stuff like that like there's there's not much left so there's something about it but in researching it and just kind of reading a little bit about it at the time it's like yeah it seems like this really was like an innafune passion project and they kind of just jettisoned everything that had to do with them at that point but i don't think you can let those hard like listen konami has not let its hard feelings with kojima interfere with its releasing of new metal gear stuff they put his name on it and they they thank him and they put him in the credits and you can do that at capcom too so yeah

3:52:49Colin Moriarty:i don't know my only hope colin is that we have seen capcom release other like we talked about that megaman x game that's uh coming to the classics catalog what dino crisis was released as a ps1 classic the fact that they haven't done legends for because that's kind of like the easiest thing they could do right is just put it on the classics catalog charge people 10 bucks for it throw some uh trophies on there the fact they haven't done that tells me that they are at least holding it because they think there might be something to do with it or hopefully they want to do some kind of greater collection of some kind but I don't know man I feel like I've been waiting forever and it's never happened

3:53:43Dustin Furman:yeah they don't I haven't played Mega Man Legends in forever and there's Mega Man 64 as well which is the Legends port right that came out like really late I think that came out like 2001 but I don't know how they hold up I really can't in my mind's eye like really say like in other words i don't know if it would be as easy as just porting them they might feel like they want to do more if they're going to do it and really remaking legends would be kind of dope but they're never going to do that i i don't i don't that would be cool yeah but i don't know

3:54:19Colin Moriarty:i don't know people would care i played them in the last five years or so i played through all three and there's definitely dated aspects of it and I don't know if it's my personal bias because I love those games as a kid so it's like oh yeah this is plays like how I remember kind of but also it has some weird stuff where like you turn left and right with the L1 and R1

3:54:43Dustin Furman:that's what I was going to say they're free it's pre sticks and stuff like yeah I don't I don't remember with Legends 2 I barely remember at all like I think that might be a dual analog stick game but I don't

3:54:54Colin Moriarty:Yes.

3:54:54Dustin Furman:I don't remember. You would know a bit more than me. All right, Sekron, thank you for writing in. Arkintos wrote in and said, or Tos says, yo, I get there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the PS6 right now, especially in regards to pricing and how it will affect sales. Well, I think it's fair to assume a price near or above the$1 ,000 mark is going to really affect sales in the mid to long term. Is it possible that we're not accounting for the fact that it's now very advantageous to be an early adopter of new tech and holding out just means you'll be paying more money down the road as the hardware prices keep rising.

3:55:24Dustin Furman:Personally, I don't see this paradigm changing anytime soon, and I think people are overstating how poorly the PS6 is going to perform. The PS5 is still selling well enough despite its costing more than it did at launch six years ago. The all-digital PS5 Pro is seemingly sold out everywhere. At least where I live, it seems to be out of stock online. I get that's an after-effect of GTA 6, but if all it took was one game to get people on board with it despite the increased price and horrible press surrounding PlayStation lately, then I think PS6 will be fine assuming they can get people excited about some fancy new tech feature and a good lineup of games.

3:55:54Dustin Furman:this is interesting we've talked a lot about the price tolerance or intolerance thing I don't want to focus too much on that again I agree that I think people are it's not it's not a form of pocket watching really but it's just assumptions based people make based on their own ability or inability to afford something and they project that on other people I don't feel like the price sensitivity in the short term for PS6 is going to be very high as long as it's an appealing and compelling product, which I suspect it will be. But why suspect anything at this point? The thing I wanted to focus on more was this idea.

3:56:29Dustin Furman:And I wonder where you are on this, Chris. Like, we're not experts, obviously, but I don't know that this situation is going to last forever with components. It can't. And I know some people think that 27 is when the bottom will begin to fall out and 28 is when things will return, begin to return to normal. However, I think prices can still go up based on inflation, which is a whole different situation that we have to deal with what do you think about what do you think about this the ps what do you think about this whole situation with ps6 um i don't

3:56:59Colin Moriarty:think it's going to last forever but i do think um to the degree that we can predict how far into the future this will go it doesn't necessarily matter because it will be all the relevant time uh that is you know like the people the reason things are the way they are like there's no real natural way to shift that until like there's very specific there's specific policies that will expire there's specific deals that will expire there's specific um you know politicians and parties that will either exit or re-enter or whatever and that affects all these things as well but you know ultimately you know we've got a couple more years of this at minimum and if the ps6 is um If you're not imminent, then that's really all that matters, really.

3:57:51Colin Moriarty:It's going to matter on day one of the PS6. And again, the PS6 is going to do well. It's going to sell millions upon millions of machines. People are always going to like the new expensive thing. There will never not be that. but i mean you do mention that ps5s are still selling and it's like yeah because like the ps5 is you know gta 6 is going to be on it but then also like you have to consider like when the ps6 is available and the ps5 is also available is the ps6 going to be cheaper than the ps5 what's good like what like people if if people want to get in on playstation well it's like they're just going to go for the ps5 probably you know because it's going to be a cheaper more affordable thing that does still the majority of what they want it to do there's also the reality where it's conventional wisdom that like when a machine comes out you need software on it to sell that machine that has been true forever like specifically like exclusive content that is becoming a little bit more i don't know i don't know if i want to say antiquated necessarily because that's i don't think that's necessarily the right term but like is there going to be a standout multi hundred million dollar game for the ps6 that you can only play there in an environment where budgets are skyrocketing inflation is exploding and the the money that's needed to recoup the cost of development is so much higher than it used to be when there's an entire install base of people on the previous machine i have a real question about this we're like i don't know if it makes a lot of sense to build like a really high octane ps6 exclusive for a launch or even close to it because you have an install base of a lot of people on ps5 that has to be supported to supplant the cost of building of building that game like we're out of the we're out of the realm of like building a game for a couple a few tens of millions of dollars you know they can sell like two million two million copies and that's a raving success that's a long time ago now so i don't know i i think i think the ps6 will do well i just wonder it's not necessarily about price sensitivity it's more about like price sensitivity and like whether or not people are drawn to the machine whether or not people need the machine and whether or not a case can be made for the machine over the machine that is available now of which case sony will still make money you know they're they're gonna have people into ps5 and they're gonna get like the the the ps plus and like the ecosystem that that matters um but i don't know as it stands right now like i i i the the ps6's appeal is is dubious it's not failure dubious it's not like you know crater the company dubious but it's it's certainly at in my estimation based on how i'm looking at it it's like it's it's certainly not ps5 level success on off the ground and maybe that'll change the the portability is a massive factor yeah maybe that's maybe that maybe that is like way more appealing than i'm anticipating it being and maybe once once we see it it'll be like oh cool i can i can envision that and i'm excited about it now but i don't know i have i have major suspicions yeah we're uh things are going to start

4:01:09Dustin Furman:ratcheting it up soon in terms of just our our guessing and speculation we can't help it speculate about this thing and yet we don't have all the answers so we just don't know um it's it's certainly going to launch into a great unknown dustin do you have anything you

4:01:22Colin Moriarty:want to add i'm unsure about the ram situation it seems like it's always if i recall like a month or two ago it was like one of the ram manufacturers like hey uh you know this isn't gonna get any better so why don't you go ahead and you know just spend it spend at current prices you know like hey don't bother waiting it's like okay well yeah you would want me to buy now uh and the other question too about playstation 5 is like let's say they do launch at a well you know a higher price because of the ram and then it goes down um i think it'll probably still sell quite a bit and sony's going to be like oh well people are buying it at this price you know we can i mean i know that eventually they'll realistically want to lower the price uh for you know as like they wanted to do on the playstation 5 and for previous consoles but i i think that consoles could be a higher price and people would still buy them i'm not advocating for that i want to be clear but i just think that when i look around and see what people are spending money on and like i don't it's not really a full comparison but it's like people are all over like yeah i'm in for the two thousand dollar iphone that i will then promptly throw away in two years and get another one it's like this is a playstation that's going to last you potentially six years six years six seven years with oh i didn't mean to say that it's tragic oh boy it's tragic it's tragic how often that those numbers come up naturally yeah people always point it out in the comments when someone naturally says it no one brings it up something about the way that came out though i couldn't i couldn't ignore it um the one last thing i'll say about this is because he says i don't see this paradigm changing anytime soon i think people are overstating how poorly the ps6 is going to perform i think that there's a little there's a a gamer reality distortion field that happens i think we witnessed this very clearly with the switch too it's like oh everyone's you go to the nintendo stream everyone's complaining about the price everyone's complaining about mario kart world being 80 dollars it was none of that was a problem it didn't matter i agree and so yeah as much as we shit talked playstation earlier uh about you know kojima and the path they're on i have i don't have any doubt that the the playstation 6 is going to do just fine at launch yeah most people don't pay attention to this shit you know yeah yeah i can't wait to test this

4:04:12Dustin Furman:on the market itself. Like we're going to find, we're going to find out. It's going to be exciting and interesting. It's like we've talked about it so much. It's like, let's just see.

4:04:22Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

4:04:22Dustin Furman:Let's just see. Vince 2077 wrote in and said, Hey dudes, I wanted to get a discussion about video game innovation started. I know Colin has already sort of hit on it in the past. I think on some inside, but here lately, I've noticed something strange about how people think about video game innovation nowadays. I know my writing may sound simplistic, but hear me out. I'm going to use Dawn Walker's time mechanic as an example. I feel like that's a clear innovation. I mean, yeah, it's been done before. He says in Fallout 1. I mean, it's been done in many other games. But it's not something that gets...

4:04:49Dustin Furman:Fallout 1's an interesting example. I've never played Fallout 1. But it's not something that gets implemented in a lot of games. I don't think people actually understand what innovation in video games is sometimes. It can take the form of old ideas, tropes, you may call them, and maybe the devs put a cool new spin on them. This medium is full of inspiration. I mean, pop culture as a whole is symbiotic, whether it's movies, books, games, etc. but people cry and bitch about innovation and yet a badass game like Dawnwalker gets crucified for it. Anyway, I'm going to go sink my teeth into Anka's neck.

4:05:16Dustin Furman:Happy hunting dudes. I know that Dawnwalker, the biggest thing that people complain about with Dawnwalker, as far as I can tell, is the time mechanic, but I will say, as someone who is extremely sensitive to that and feels like I'm missing things, it just works in the game. And I do think that that in and of itself is a little bit of an innovation. I'll remind everyone, because I agree with Vince here, you're not going to reinvent the wheel any more than you're going to get a novel like house of leaves or something every time you read a book and i'm not saying house of leaves is like an amazing book it is it's a great book but something that's truly different yeah usually a novel is a novel and what's special about it is maybe the little bit of the language used and the story and the compelling characters and i just i don't what i don't like i like criticism but i don't like complaining for complaining's sake.

4:06:03Dustin Furman:There are things I just really like in video games. And I think it's permutations of those things that make the game special. If you're going to have thousands of games coming out every fucking month, then there, and none of them do anything new from in the eyes of some, then maybe that's a sign that it's very difficult to do new things. And even if like we were talking about Alan Wake 2, which is a really extraordinary game, a game on unlike any other game I've ever played before in some regards, but it's a third person shooter it's an explorative horror game it is very familiar in at first glance it's what it does and the experience of playing it and the story and the characters that make it special you might not even realize it after playing it for an hour you have to get deeper into it than that yeah like books and less like movies because they're usually over after a couple hours but certainly like books and even tv shows like you got to give it a chance to to find what's new and interesting about it and um i think people are just too focused on i agree with him like innovation i don't think is even really important it's quality that's important i'm not always looking for innovation i don't want you to reinvent the wheel yeah it's it's it's like one of those like

4:07:16Colin Moriarty:innovation is one of the is a neutral kind of concept i think like it can be good and and sometimes it can be bad like sometimes things are kind of innovative in ways that are just like yeah this doesn't work man um and other times they work really well but it's not necessary for a great game like there's plenty of great games that are arguably like very derivative um and that's fine indeed well said yeah i think too that a lot of times when people think about innovation they're thinking about a new mechanic or a new way of doing a mechanic but if i think about the most innovative game that i've played in the last in i don't know 10 years or something i think about a game like breath of the wild breath of the wild to me is like one of the most innovative games in recent memory because of what it decided not to do the way that it was able to make an open world game without clear direction and it's not confusing and it's not boring they created a world that's like just go explore that feeling is the innovation to me not necessarily i mean i guess it is mechanics it's just like invisible mechanics behind it so yeah i agree that you're not going to see a lot of like you're not going to see a lot of new things done you're going to see new small things like uh pragmata this year yeah very very interesting and innovative in that you have to solve a small puzzle before you fight every monster or every robot guy right but it's not necessarily it's still a third person shooter that you are progressing through levels yeah grander innovation is like i don't know man that's risky it's risky shit especially when there's a lot of money now like and people are so hostile to anything new and and if something's like a little bit off it's like it's crucified immediately so like yeah you gotta be you gotta pick and choose with what you do it's not it's not like the old days where um you could have you can spend like a menial amount of money on something and like maybe have maybe have like a surprise smash hit with like a fraction of the audience you know mr mosquito yeah we're never gonna get another mr mosquito we're never gonna get another buck bumble buck bumble yeah hell yeah we're never gonna get another buck bumble i um i think too much innovation it's it too much

4:09:35Dustin Furman:innovation creates products that are different so as long as the end of like um there are just there are games that get that get too far i feel this way about zelda where i'm like whatever zelda is now is not zelda i appreciate that it's bigger than ever and people love the news of the switch zelda games but it's not zelda and that to me is it's innovating into a new product as opposed to keeping the spirit and by the way i'm not talking about the fucking creepy asshole green of time i'm talking about specifically that the switch ones like that's a more traditional zelda

4:10:06Colin Moriarty:i like that he looks creepy that's my hot take yeah i don't really have an opinion i like that I like that that whole game looks like uncanny and weird.

4:10:14Dustin Furman:That was my whole thing. I saw something really compelling on my old friend, Fran Marabella. He used to help run IGN Nintendo back in the day. Very Nintendo expert purist. He made a good point where he was like. We the GameCube. I don't know if you guys were young, but you might look back when they showed like Ocarina of Time on GameCube or at least like Zelda or Link in like GameCube. And we were like looking for the hyper realistic one. That's why when Wind Waker was released, everyone was fucking freaking out. that was a big part of it.

4:10:43Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

4:10:47Dustin Furman:And he was like, yet we would have died for this back in the day. And there is a sort of jadedness to it. My thing with Ocarina of Time is I don't know what I would have done with it. So I don't, I'm not, I don't really give a shit. I'm not that invested in it. It's also not like Majora's Mask is my, is my baby, not Ocarina of Time. so they'll probably get the Majora's Mask and then I'll have much more to say. But I was looking at specifically like, what is it called? Castletown or whatever? Yeah. And I was like, it's so dense. It looks cool. It does look good. And even the other characters all look right.

4:11:28Dustin Furman:It's like, there's just something about Link where I'm like, I don't know about this.

4:11:32Colin Moriarty:It's young Link and young Zelda. They look really weird. Yeah, but anyway. It's so moist too. like he's so so fucking oily what'd you say dustin i'm sorry i it just has way way way too like link himself his i think that's my main issue with i don't like the way link looks and it's not necessarily his face or anything it's that there's like they've upped the detail as much as possible where it's like oh his clothing is made out of some kind of shit they find in the forest and so it's like woven together and his sword has all these intricate you know designs on and stuff like that I'm like ah and it's so he looks so jarring that the part you mentioned where he's talking to like the people dancing in the town I'm like he looks like hyper detailed and then they look just like normal regular video like like they fit in that world so it reminds me a little bit about like you know how when you watch old cartoons and you can you can see like on the animation cell like what part of the background is going to move because it's clearly like painted on a cell it's like clearly like this part of the background that's like a completely different shade of whatever the color is yeah like a cabinet like a cabinet yeah like a cabinet yeah it's like you see that a lot in like scooby-doo and even later uh cartoons where it's just like they would paint the backgrounds and they would have like a a drawing of a door and it's like well that's a drawing it's clearly gonna it's clearly gonna open link is so separated from like the other characters and in that same way where it's just like oh he's clearly the protagonist um it looks cool i have a lot of love for ocarina of time i

4:13:09Dustin Furman:mean it's a very nostalgic game that that that fall of 1998 like my memories of that game are dom it's dominated by that that you know it's actually around the same time legends came out ironically i think megaman legends came out a couple months before i've never actually played it oh so i'll just wrap this up by saying about the zelda it's like that's just an example of something where it's like innovation and like they made something that a lot of people like a lot more but it loses what it was too and so i don't think it's always a positive thing um like what i never played the second one but breath of the wild i played fairly extensively and i was like i'm just i don't know what this is but it's not it's something it's something

4:13:48Colin Moriarty:and it's cool it's a vibe i like it i like it a lot i like it a lot and i think it's i think it is reasonably zelda but it's it is like the framework is completely different at that beginning part of breath of the wild when you're on the great plateau i think it's like perfect

4:14:03Dustin Furman:it is it is beautiful it's it's a it's I think it's a beautiful game and it's a it's a I love the thing I love about Nintendo and I'll always love about them and I've loved about them since I was a huge Nintendo fanboy is just like the the level of detail in everything you can do like and Breath of the Wild felt like a culmination of that style of like if you think it you can do it and yeah i think that's kind of cool and and qaing a game like that and i'm just like fascinated by the mechanics of like how you don't make a world where you put like invisible barriers around everything and you just let anyone do whatever they want to break the fuck out of it if they

4:14:46Colin Moriarty:want to but it's i want to play that i want to play that game again but i just can't you

4:14:50Dustin Furman:conscience play a switch again i don't blame you i can't do it i think stanks sam ward wrote in and said, hey, CDC, do you think we'll ever see Sony go further with their first party sports games again, like in the 90s? Nowadays, they only have MLB the show, but it was interesting to find out that in the early days of the PS1, they also had first party NBA, NFL and NHL games as well as this is football series in Europe, which was soccer. I'll hang up and listen. Yeah, they had more than that. I mean, they also had F1 for a while. The things that lasted the longest were NBA. The NBA series lasted NBA inside, I think it was called, was lasted into the PS3 era.

4:15:29Dustin Furman:And the show has existed since the PS2 era. I do think there is an opening here because what I'm learning, I don't think, I don't know how realistic it is because it would require major investment and San Diego Studios specifically wouldn't be able to do it, I don't think, because they're all in on the show. You would need to really build another team. The games you're describing are from like the 989 branding days, but those were all made by different teams. So there's an open, like everyone is really, like there's a lot of discontent with the sports games right now from what I can tell. People are really upset with Madden this year, but that's the NFL is locked to EA for a simulation game.

4:16:04Dustin Furman:So that's not going to be an option. There is an opening. I don't know if it's a very lucrative opening because it'll probably be the it'd probably be the fifth biggest sports game. But people are really mad about the NHL series. And I'm like that it would be kind of interesting. That's certainly not an exclusive license. I'm sure the NHL as the smallest of the four major sports in the United States would be willing to work with Sony on something I was looking at some of the footage people have been comparing NHL 27 so I was an NHL EA NHL consumer from NHL PA 93 all the way to probably NHL 12 or any no actually more like NHL 14 NHL 15 I reviewed them at IGN for years as well and I would play them every year I loved them and I much like Madden later but I fell off people have been comparing and contrasting like footage of those games to the footage of the games today and like and I'm like these games look like shit they run like shit the simulation's weird the voice acting's weird like the commentary's weird the tool sets are weird in a world where it would make sense it would be cool for another it might be someone else like take two get back in with remember nhl 2k was a series for a long time um as well so is there an option is there a possibility i suppose so but i just don't think it's going to happen and i really wonder if sony would have even invested so much in the mlb series and getting it off the ground with the show if they thought they were going to lose it.

4:17:29Dustin Furman:It's a good thing to have. It's a huge seller, especially in the States. It also seems like a habit. That's what we do. We make this game.

4:17:37Colin Moriarty:Right.

4:17:38Dustin Furman:As opposed to like, does it make sense? Do we want to do it? I do think, as I said a few weeks ago, though, with the MLB almost certain with Major League Baseball almost certainly going into a lockout next year that will probably last all season, you would assume. I think the show is going to be huge next year because it literally will be the only way. It'll be like the only simulation of the season that never happened with rosters that only exist for that season and so on. I think it'll be pretty interesting. So we'll see what happens, but I do think there is an opening there. The discontent with a lot of the sports fandoms, the dissidence here is that everyone's upset all the time and then you look at the charts and these games just sell like crazy anyway.

4:18:14Colin Moriarty:So stop buying them.

4:18:17Dustin Furman:Just update the rosters of the old games. If you find like one of the, people still update tech mobile and nhl 94 online with like modern rosters and shit so if people are still doing that you can stick around with nhl whatever and get your money's worth final inquiry comes from micah ramey who says hey y 'all is the era of remasters over i can't go anywhere on youtube without seeing my favorite classic games transform into instagram instagram filtered uncanny valley slop with the majority of the reception i'm seeing being positive and my assumption that this would be pretty much cheaper way for developers to bring their games forward is this really the future is this part of the reason that blue point was terminated as someone who loves how older games can be modernized while keeping the integrity of their core art design this deeply worries me what do you guys think appreciate everything you all do may god bless you dustin will will ai ultimately just remaster and remake our games for us and so you'll just always have this like uh more and more upscaled and modernized version of old games that even if they don't exist officially you can just have your ai engine

4:19:20Colin Moriarty:make for you on the fly i mean probably um i honestly don't really know because it some of the ai stuff like the remastered stuff like to my understanding they're using ai to make decompilation projects now which just eliminates a lot of the hard work of like taking extracting the iso files from a disc into making a bootable pc version and i haven't really thought that much about it but to me that seems cool and good but are there examples of like ai remastered games because i know what he's talking about where someone's like wouldn't wouldn't zelda look so cool if it was like this and then it's some shitty ai video or or you know whatever do you

4:20:13Dustin Furman:Remember the one that like it was like it was the Zelda game, but it was just him running down like a hill. Yeah.

4:20:18Colin Moriarty:Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's exactly what I was thinking.

4:20:20Dustin Furman:Yeah.

4:20:21Colin Moriarty:Is that what these are? Or is he talking about the DLSS five stuff where it's just like that, that weird filter over everything? Yeah. Because I've been seeing a lot of that in my YouTube feed and like thumbnails and stuff.

4:20:34Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's hard for me to say if you could be right that that's what he's talking about. The thing is, he's saying the majority of the reception of that is positive, but is it? That's why I thought he was talking about more of the AI.

4:20:47Colin Moriarty:It seems shocking to me that the reception to that would be positive as well, I guess. But yeah, I see what you're saying. It's, I don't know, man, AI is a, it's coming to a head, man. It's going to be so weird. Do you see that guy from Anthropic talking about how like he retired from Anthropic because he thinks everybody working on it thinks it's going to kill us and nobody cares. Yeah, I saw that. It's great. It's fucking really cool. So you know what? You know what? PS6 is going to sell really well because everybody's going to put on their credit card and assume everything's going to die in the next five years anyway, so who gives a shit?

4:21:26Colin Moriarty:Everything will be fine.

4:21:28Dustin Furman:Yeah.

4:21:29Colin Moriarty:Buy your PS6. Take out a loan.

4:21:32Dustin Furman:Yeah, it's... I don't know man I don't know

4:21:37Colin Moriarty:I think you'll probably see some AI stuff I don't imagine it's going to I mean fully AI generated video games though that's a way

4:21:47Dustin Furman:it's easy to make something that looks reasonable enough but yeah I don't know will it play will it operate and I also just think we have to we have to just come to terms with the fact that at least I've long come to terms with this. I don't give a fuck about game output from people that don't have the talent to make them. So, save it. I agree. Alright, my boys. Let's get the hell out of here. It's time to go. It's a good episode. Fun episode. Really uplifting. Chris, goodbye to you. Be well. Anything to share before you go?

4:22:25Colin Moriarty:I don't know. It's like 100 degrees here right now. So, I'm not thrilled. but I have to go grocery shopping. I've got to step out into this sweltering hellscape. But that's really all the rest of my days. I'm probably going to continue Plague Tale. Cool. But I don't know. Something tells me, I'm like, I don't know, man. I'm just not... Something about it is not hitting. I am curious about Dawnwalker as well. That's been growing more appealing as I hear more about it.

4:22:56Dustin Furman:It's really good. It's surprisingly good. Really, really into it. what did I what would I just I just heard something this board is that me oh oh it was the xbox no it's okay I'm like what is that no what is that alien noise Dustin goodbye to you my friend be well have a good rest of your day

4:23:17Colin Moriarty:goodbye uh I was just remembering I'm seeing Iron Maiden next week oh in Hershey at Hershey park stadium oh cool so i'm excited about that it's you're gonna go on great bear what you're

4:23:32Dustin Furman:gonna go on great bear while you go to hershey great bear that was that's their big roller coaster

4:23:36Colin Moriarty:it was oh at hershey park yeah oh i might have ridden that uh a few years ago but um but yeah i'm excited about that it was one of those shows that we bought the tickets i think literally over a year ago oh wow it's like oh now it's here and so me and my parents will be going out to that actually no just me my dad and um brandon that'll be cool little threesome little threesome oh don't not oh my dad call man i didn't mean it like that i mean it's just but that's when someone says threesome that's what that i mean you immediately go to you're right when you're right you're right you know yeah other than that though tonight i will finish wolverine go back to Onimusha and then this weekend no plans

4:24:25Dustin Furman:cool man for now

4:24:31Dustin Furman:very well I appreciate you guys being here yeah for me I'm going to football on tonight just going to go back and watch football and hang out got some more work to do tonight looking forward to the weekend pool still open trying to extract 93 degrees today so I'm trying to extract some more time out of it and then before you know it the days are getting shorter you know I go I go into the pool like late in the day and like the sun's like starting to go down like shit and then it's not so comfortable like once the sun's down it's like oh it's kind of cold in here now so oh boy the problems i experience it's good to be here with all you guys be well patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access and last day media dot store for merch we'll see you next time until then goodbye see ya take care guys sacred symbols a playstation podcast is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA.

4:25:21Dustin Furman:The show was conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. 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. Aaron Betke, Aaron Temple, Adam Refriended, Albion, Alex Cabrera, Alex Gates, Alex Lapierre, Alex Monez, Alan Tiniak, Alan Tremblay, Alan Einer, Anthony Akure, Anthony Vazquez, Anton K., Antonio C., Asak Paredes, Austin Riley, Betty Ann Moriarty, Bjorn Campbell, Blackjack, Boots, Brad Cooley, Brad Lohman, Brandon Runniger, Brian Williamson, Cannonball Jones, Captain Verde, Carlos Algaret, Chad Lewis, Chris Galvin, Chris Morton, Chris Ritchie, Christopher Devayo, Christopher Moore, Christopher Morgan, Cody Benin, Conrad Pennyfarthing, Corey Beacom, Dan Nolan, Dan Root, Daniel D 'Amour, Daryl E.

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