What's up, guys? Welcome to the Gamescast special for E3 2019. This is our first one that we're doing this stuff. Everything that we played at E3.
I'm Tim Geddes. This is one of the coolest videos in video games. Greg Miller. I look like I'm your son.
If you're in an audio podcast, person, definitely go over to youtube.com slash kind of funny games because we're playing Game of Perspective. Look at it. Lean in like you just didn't look at it. Look at it.
Well, yeah, it's crazy. We're literally in the hotel room right now and we're using a webcam that is broken being held up by kind of funny receipts. There you go. When I can't expense report, that's why they're underneath the camera.
Yeah, so we're just going to have to deal. It's us hanging out in a hotel room. No, I mean, this is honestly something I know this is going to sound really stupid. One of the things I miss from the old IG game days would be like when it would be, hey, we're doing a podcast beyond after E3 and we would just gather on the floor around a thing.
It's very guerrilla, right? We talked about it, obviously. We're doing E3 different this year. It's a different kind of E3 as totally evident by the show floor, which we'll talk about soon enough.
But, you know, we didn't send everybody down here, so we didn't send, we're not going to bring Kevin down here to make this work. We got the recorder, we got the webcam, we got a computer. Everybody just wants to hear us talk. You know, you're going to hear us talk.
It's how it works. Yeah, and it's going to be a lot of fun. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know this is the kind of fun game cast each and every week. We come to you with all the video games that we've been playing, all the things that we love about video games.
And there's no better week for this than E3 week. We're going to be doing these videos throughout the week. Well, actually, there's this one, we're doing one tomorrow, and then we're going to do another one that will be going out on Monday. We're going to record with Easy Allies on Friday.
Right, so if I have a question, I want you to correct me if I'm wrong. The way it's worked, right, is that there's a weekly game cast because we have a million ones that we're reviewing press conferences. Now we're here doing this one that we play on the first day. It'll post Thursday morning.
Then Thursday night, we're recording the podcast at GameSpot, which then will go Friday morning. Then Friday, we're going to be that one. You know, don't deliver celebrities. You can't.
When I die, that's what you play. And then, yeah, Monday, the Easy Allies one. Yes, it's very fun. And it's funny that we're saying that this is our day one our day one of E3.
No, it's not our day one. We were back at home doing the Nintendo conference, and we flew in. So day two of E3, which really is day 18 of E3. I know it's hard for, if you've never been to an E3 or worked in E3, ladies and gentlemen, to imagine what it's like for the people here.
We're walking in, and people are in triage. I ran into Odell today, you know, kind of funny, Games Daily co-host from back in the day. Odell, he had no voice. He's gone.
People are exhausted. They've been drinking for 15 days straight here. And we're like, I feel pretty good. I'm tired.
And then they hear my travel schedule. EA play the same. Let's go back here. And they're like, you're crazy.
I'm like, you haven't slept in three days. You have it worse than me. It has been absolutely insane. This was our first full day at E3.
Like you said, we're doing a little different. Normally, we've been told team time. This time it was just me and you, because it was a smaller show. There was less students to book appointments for, and all of that.
But we got to do a whole bunch. We got some more stuff to do tomorrow. But I feel like we have games on the hour every hour. I feel like we got all the big ones out.
At least for me. Oh, I just mean the amount of things we're doing. I know there was an order that we did. I want to start with something that a lot of people have been asking about right now.
And that is xCloud and Google Stadia. Sure. You got to do both of them. I'm just about to do xCloud.
Okay. How about you? If you didn't know, ladies and gentlemen, of course, I'm going to tank for both of these. I love the streaming future.
I love the idea of that. I want to believe in this technology. I know it's going to have hurdles to this technology, but I've been stoked for them. What did you think of Project xCloud?
I was extremely impressed with the literally three minutes that I got to play. It was at Xbox's. Actually, Xbox's stage they have at the press conferences where they're letting everyone play their games and stuff. First time I've been back on the Microsoft Theater stage since I want to make it more.
There you go. But it was really cool. There was this table that just had a bunch of controllers on it with different phones attached or tablets attached or, you know, just trying to, the gamut of different options for xCloud. Each playing a different game.
So there was SportsZ, there was Halo 5, there was Halo Wars, there was... That shooter was Halo 5? Yeah. Okay.
I played Halo 5. Okay. It was one of those. I got over there before you got there.
And somebody was on one of mine never got to touch. So yeah, it was Hellblade. I'm sorry. I I played Hellblade.
I played Forza Horizon 4. Then I saw Halo Wars running. And the other one I never saw. And then there was another one.
Well, there was a ton of people playing. So the thing that was crazy is for E3 when you go to play games, they're demos. It's not the full game. You go in and there's usually like a menu, like the devs have to kind of go in and play around with like, okay, now I'm going to have you to control.
You can do what you want. But the xCloud, these were just like, no, it's just, it's the game. It's already out. Like, you can do whatever.
So if anyone, if everyone there wanted to go to the menu and everyone turned on Halo 5, they could have demoed to play right there. Yeah. Like, I stopped two people doing that. Yeah.
Which wasn't fun to jump into my Halo 5 in the middle of a big fight. And I was like, I had no ammo like, well, great. That was the thing that I sent you a sacrifice right there. It was clearly like, they just started the game.
So like, she had no ability, she felt very twirling around. I was like, all right, well, this isn't the best place to tell anyone else. But immediately I was like, oh man, the latency is pretty noticeable. Yeah.
With a shooter, like, you can really tell because of the aim. This will come into play when we talk about Stadia more. Worth pointing out the way we were playing it there, right? Controller with a phone locked to it in Wi-Fi mode.
They were tethered like USB-C, I think, together or whatever. But there was no Ethernet to it. It was running on a Wi-Fi thing they'd set up there. Yeah.
In a convention center. Or not a convention center. A theater. Not known for its best perception to be honest.
So pretty best friends that saw us show off the Switch flip. Yeah. Switch grip That's what it was. Where you have the pro controller and then you can hold the Switch.
Don't you have it right there, too? That's the other one. Oh, wow. You really support the best friends.
It depends on the type of game because that one, it doesn't work. It doesn't function as a, it's this type of game. I love it. It doesn't matter.
But it was just a controller with a phone on it. Sirens are on. What's happening? You might just go do the crazy things.
I'm coming in to Kevin. I'm Kevin. I'm actually Kevin Syves. I hate it.
Jim, can you get the cookies off the top shelf? It was weird, though, seeing Halo 5, which is a very graphic rich game on such a small screen. Sure. And, you know, it's definitely one of those things where a lot of Switch games are made with that kind of UI, kind of just design choices in mind.
Yeah. And playing Halo with a guy is not at all It was difficult to see, but the resolution was great. The frame rate was perfect. It was just the latency of the controller doing what I needed it to do.
But then I went into the settings and I changed the sensitivity of the packages. And immediately I was like, oh, this feels closer. Still had latency, but my mind could kind of adapt to it in a way that wasn't annoying. It was just like, oh, okay, this is how this is going to play.
Like I said, didn't play for too long, but I was very impressed by the tech with the main reason being we were in a giant convention center with a bazillion cell phones, a bazillion people using Wi-Fi and this and that around, and this was working as well. That is a situation where our cell phones have issues with Wi-Fi. So for them to have that and have it work that well, I was very surprised. Yeah.
I played Halo 8 and I played Forza. Hellblade, I felt, again, it's in a non-action oriented part of the game. Not that that game is heavy, heavy action. But wandering around the thing, finally finding an enemy to fight, I thought it was pretty close.
It felt close enough. And again, I'm not the biggest Hellblade fan or anything. But I didn't notice a big differential in terms of lag when I was going. I put up some videos on my Instagram and a couple on Twitter.
But even when I got to where I was swinging the blade, that felt good. It felt like it normally feels. When I took over to Forza, which of course I'm not a recent person at all, that's where I noticed more lag. Where that was, you know, Forza is such a second to second game racing games are.
That it did feel like, okay, cool. Like, there was one point even when I was filming and I was doing it, I'm going to try to hit the e-break and do this or just turn it. It was like, there's enough there turning. Okay, like, this I do feel.
I do think this is a detriment to gameplay. But again, what you're saying, it's all the caviarza. We're not in the ideal environment. I'm not playing at my house, but I'm going to be playing at a hotel on how the internet be there and so on and so forth.
It's the big questions of this. And so we have these programs up and running on our own. We can put them through the paces in our real lives. You'll never know.
And so I was, again, with Project X Lab, happy and stoked to do it. And I'm still down to have these moments and learning curves and figuring it out. I'm excited for all that. I'm excited for the future with that one.
However, then I went to Google State. Before we move on, I want to say one last thing about it. I was very impressed with, because I think you said that. But they're nonchalant.
It's on the table. Like, there's no, like, crazy, like, vertical slice that you're seeing that's, like, showing it off. It's like, no, no, no. These are just the games.
It's there. You can do whatever you want with it. And it's going to work that way. And it works as well as it did.
I was very impressed with that. And I think that says a lot for how they do things, because we know how they normally control how they do things. I'm so into gaming. I'm going to go to the Xbox event.
I would expect you to know. And the excitement people are having over learning about what it was. Shout out to Bill Wright, the company best friend who's in Charge of Project X Lab, who was talking to me about everything. I'm like, these MFers from Microsoft, who already have it?
He was like, yeah, they were saying something about CFDs. If you log in during this time, so he just bust out his phone and logged in. He's like, you suck. You know what I mean?
That's awesome. I would love to just be part of that alpha test. Just to see you go and understand what it's all like. Yeah.
So you got to go to do the Google Stadia stuff. I had to miss out on this one. You had to miss out, because you went to see Avengers and Final Fantasy. So yeah, what a rough life you have.
I wanted to see it, though. I would have enjoyed that mainly because the controller, how did it feel? The controller feels really good. Really?
I picked it up, and my first thought was like, oh shit, does this not have rumble? Because it feels light. It doesn't feel as light as the six axis, but it feels way lighter than the normal controller. Totally has rumble.
I thought they were great. I had no problem with it. It was that thing of, at no point that I had to look down and worry about it. I picked it up.
It felt natural. I was in the game. It was giving the normal prompts that you'd expect or whatever. So yeah, then I jumped in with Google Stadia.
This is a few hours after you were in Project X Cloud. Jumped into Google Stadia and played Doom Eternal. The caveats here are, I'm playing it on a Chromebook that is Ethernet plugged in, and then we're HDMI-ing to the TV. And then I had the controller.
It was flawless. There was no lag. There was nothing. And to give you context, to give you context, to give you context, Forza, hell wait, not my games.
I'm not versed into that. Doom Eternal is the same Doom Eternal demo I've done at Judges Week on a 4K monitor. They had a mouse keyboard. I played the controller.
I played this before. I know what the beats are. I know how it should feel. This felt like that.
I had no weight issues. I had no lag. I had no artifacting. I had no problems like that.
The only thing that I thought was negative about the experience was, and there's a little bit of a caveat to it, the visuals to me looked less than a PlayStation 4 version of what I had back in this game. Again, I played it on PC, so I don't know. But it felt like colors were more muted, which could be the TV. It could be settings and a whole bunch of bells and whistles.
Nobody's done. But then it was also just in general, not fuzz. They said when they sat me down It was 1080p. It was running on, I think, I have my notes over here.
25 megs. Yeah, 25 megs. 1080p. I just didn't think it was just what.
It was running at 25 megs. Well, that's what it was. That's the connection. It just didn't look as sharp as a PlayStation 4 version of it looks, but it is literally what I'm always talking about what we talk about good enough.
Where I was this, and I'm like, this is awesome. This is what I want out of it. And for me, it was the usual thing I always talk about with how dumb I am, that I really hadn't thought through having an even version of these. For me, it always is Wi-Fi.
I'm going to be playing at the hotel. I'm going to be playing at the airport. I'm going to be at home playing Wi-Fi. I was talking to Nate from Xbox.
Or Nate, formerly of Xbox. He was asking me a question about it, because obviously Nate, formerly of my GM, everybody knows Nate. And I was going back and forth, and I was just like, this is going to be a dumb question, but as I talked to you on the final thought of it, and I was like, does the dot, dot, dot, ultra thing I'm getting in the Founders Pack have an Ethernet port? It's like, wow.
So that solves so many issues in terms of how this will work. I love Castle. Yeah, I do. Oh, wow.
Okay, this is my first one. I'm very skeptical about it. Yeah, I, as I said before, and we'll continue to say, I feel that I am an Xbox fanboy in many ways in the way that I'm cheering for them. I want them to kill it.
I think they're doing amazing things with Game Pass, with Project X. So on and so forth, right on the line. I'm more impressed today with Google Stadia than I was with Project X. And granted, maybe it's the setup, right this was like, literally like, all right, cool, here's a good show.
I said, I'll play Doom Eternal on TV. And I said, I'll play Doom Eternal, and it felt like Doom Eternal did on the PC, and it was just ready to go. But I played it, and it was like, and I'm holding it and doing it. I'm like, this is literally the future I'm not talking about.
And then, not that I'm going to get into that game right now, I'll let you drive your own show, because I always stay out of your hair, and I never backseat you drive. Is that I then went and watched the Cyberpunk demo. And like, on the heels of that, it's like, yeah, if Stadia works, I'm not going to play Cyberpunk on my PlayStation 4. What?
If any of these streaming services work, the way they say they will, the way they are in test environments, are you fucking kidding me? I'd be an idiot to play on PlayStation 4, because I can just have my phone, my iPad, my whatever, and have a moment to go screw around, and go farm out shit, and go buy some stuff, and whatever. Like, I'm, that's one of those visual games. Well, I guess I would want to play it on the, and that's, and like, that's the thing.
Like, that's not, like, I'm obviously talking hyperbole. It could very easily be that, yeah, when we get Cyberpunk, and if I was, like, I'm going to play on this. What the fuck is that screen? You know what I mean?
Like, there's a million different things and things, but. I think that that has a lot to do, though, about your experience at Xbox Live or Stadia, though, is, that's why we were playing on these tiny little things. And even a laptop screen, that is more like a TV. Like, playing Doom Eternal.
Oh, sure. I mean, like, when I get my iPad, whatever version I have the giant one. Yeah, I mean, when that is all ready to go, it's just like, are you kidding me? Like, I, I, I know that I want to believe, and I know that it's not going to be like that.
You know, I do, but, like, it's also not going to be like that at launch, and I think down the line. And it's like, I hate the fact that, like, I tweeted about how amazing I thought today was, and they were, like, immediately just trying to dunk on you, like, well, what about the dedicated? And I'm, like, they're going to figure that out. They're going to figure this out.
And I'm not smart enough to tell you how. Maybe they won't. Maybe it'll be fucked up. I guarantee they won't.
We're in such an exciting fucking spot right now. And that's the thing. For an E3, I think we've been, like, oh, conferences, man, all right, they're good. They're good.
They're good. Cool games, whatever. But I was like, oh, what the fuck? I'm leaving this show being, like, this is, I mean, again, I know I want this, but, like, I want this.
And I can't, I can't even imagine the future where it's, like, cool, we're going to Florida for a week. And it's, like, cool, uh, stay the controller and the Chromecast in my bag. Not the PlayStation 4, not the game screen, not whatever. And it's, like, when we're still on the airport, it's the iPad, I switch over from comics, and it is, I'm going to do something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then jump over. I feel like the word today is caveat when I come to say that to these things. Well, I mean, to be fair, it's because we are trying to do due diligence and say, like, we know this isn't the real condition.
You know what it's going to be all the time. You don't want to oversell this, but, again, the fucking potential of this thing. I mean, my thing is, I think that there's room for all these things to coexist. I don't know that this is ever going to replace our main gaming habits, but it reminds me a lot of the Switch of, like, Doom runs on the Switch.
Doom is on the Switch. Also, it's worth pointing out, if I may, I talked about this during the press conferences, so you've seen it in the review, I think, where at Doom Eternal, they were like, oh, man, failing is part of Doom, and, like, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. I played Doom Eternal today, you know, a second time now, and, like, literally, I'm going to download Doom with the Switch when I go. And the thing with Doom is, like, it is a game that's, I feel like, a lot better when the visuals are there and the speed is right in the frame, and it's, like, it works fine enough on Switch, it works, it's fun to play on the go.
And it's, like, that is a different experience than playing it on a 4K TV and all that stuff. But I feel like with TV, and with Xbox, that could be the same thing. It's, like, okay, it's not the ideal way to play it, but it is another option. But I just feel like it's going to be, we're not underselling it, and, again, we're talking hyperbole, and we're talking potential, which is always so rough.
If I'm at home, and it's plugged into my Ethernet, and I'm getting that blazing speed I pay for, and it is great and awesome, when I go on the road, and it is a little bit less, right, it's not going to have a computer view of some kind of big. I don't care about that. In the same way, like, oh, it's pie in the sky, whatever, if one of the things would have been, hey, on the xCloud, you're playing The Division, where it's, like, I can draw, right now, from memory, I can tell you button combinations to get where I need to be. Dropping me in the fourth set, where I'm, like, how about I change perspective, and I'm, like, that's a different thing, where, again, to your point, of what your main time of the game is going to be.
I think even with Cyberpunk right now, where I'm watching the demo and there's so much shit going on, 30 hours into Cyberpunk, I'm not going to be as lost trying to get my phone and nowhere I'm getting to. Yeah, interesting stuff. What do you want to go from here? Do you want to stay in the Xbox realm?
Close that guy out a little bit? Sure. Because, yeah, so we went in, we did XCloud. Did you do something before Microsoft?
Yes. What'd you do? Let's start there, I guess. I have comprehensive notes on it.
Well, yesterday, the first thing I did, of course, was we landed, dropped off our clothes at the thing, and I went and saw a little boy and did Mike Biffle. He was putting on a game called John Wick X. X. The hexagonal gameplay, you know.
Everybody's talking about an X-Con kind of thing. As you know, I haven't watched John Wick movies. Action movies, not that great. Worthless.
They should all be superhero movies a lot. But as you know, audience members, of course, we love Mike Biffle. Mike Biffle, of course, Thomas was alone. Volume, all the circular games.
Supporter of kind of funny from way back in the day when he did Volume. He's one of the first people to support us on a Patreon level to promote Volume and stuff. We loved him before, we loved him after. It's cool to see him have this kind of game, right?
John Wick game. Oh, yeah. Keanu Reeves images in it. I played this one.
I really enjoyed this one. Of course, PC announced consoles of some kind. They're not ready to announce that. Coming, what?
I think it's just coming down the road. That's all they have right now. No release date yet. How much do you know about it?
You saw the trailer, I assume? I didn't. I saw the trailer, and I've heard good things that people say. Sure.
So imagine, you know, in hexagonal stuff, you're moving the character around. What I want to do is they call it a timeline strategy game, which I think is really funny, right? And it's true. At the top, you have these two timelines.
They're the John Wick timeline, and then enemies you run into. And so every action you take has a set up time, and every action they take has a set up time, and then it's the action themselves. So it's kind of like a Fire Emblem strategy RPG mixed with an active time battle thing. Correct.
Right. Because it's turn-based, and you stop it. You stop any point and survey what you want to do. It's not turn-based in terms of, like, it's your turn.
It's the timeline. Yeah. Like, you make your move, and you see that you hover over your things, and you see that if you want to do a takedown, it's going to be faster than, or a takedown takes longer than shooting, or airing, or whatever. So then, just for the audience, please.
I will call you on this. It's not the active time battle. It would be like, if I see 10, it's not a battle. I just wish I knew anything.
Yeah. I'll keep describing it. Anyways, though, you make your choices. You see how many seconds it costs you.
You see all these different things at the top. And at the first, it's overwhelming. Overwhelming. You get the hang of what you understand.
It's all about sight lines. So, like, you can be coming through. Of course, you can spin the camera however you want. Zoom in, zoom out, all that jazz.
You can make the choice to advance, like, all the way forward, as far as you can see. And then, if you're going, and suddenly, somebody gets a sight line on you, it stops. It's not what you want to do. Like, it's not like you're committed.
Like, I feel like in XCOM, you wouldn't be committed. I may be rest at XCOM. You'd be committed to going all the way through with that motion you chose. This one is like, oh, no, John Wick's going to respond to that.
How do you want to respond? And so, you can make moves on people, and then if they see you, you fall back behind cars. You can crouch, you get up, and there's, you know, pluses and minuses to all this shit. And it's this very strategic timeline game, right?
Of balancing out how you want to do it, and what moves you want to do. One of the things I like is that you have the custom pistol. John Wick uses, I guess, in the movie. And so, you can pick up other people's guns, right?
I mean, Wickman is the kind of strategy I like to play when it comes out to a console, of course. But what I really thought was cool, when they're announcing 83, that's cool, as I guess, when they showed the thing, right? And you think about this, strategy game, slow pace, you make choices, which is actually really cool because when you're in the mind of John Wickrod of how he can actually handle these situations, I guess there was blowback. This is already playing with, I'm about to say.
There was blowback, though, from people like, what the hell? Like, that's not how John Wick is. He's fast. He's fluid.
At the end, when you actually complete the mission, there's a watch the replay, and you watch it without any of that. So he's like, you know, the gun food. And I'm like, that's really cool. Like, that was a really cool idea.
Awesome. Yeah, I really like what I saw. I think that's going to be a really good one for it. Yeah, I don't like points on that.
Then I saw X Cloud, because we're at Microsoft now. We're at Microsoft. New play the game called Bleeding Edge, Ninja Theory's new game. It is a 4v4 multiplayer, well, obviously, 4v4.
Is this a 3v3? It was you, me, and Jeff playing. Versus another team 3. Wait, was it?
No, it was 4. Maybe I'm not. I'm sorry. I just want to make sure we're not in trouble.
Keep going. I'll verify it. You know, I think it might be right. It was me and Jeff.
Who else would have been with that? Yeah, I never heard anybody do it. Yeah, so maybe it was me. I might be confused when it was the game I played later.
But anyways, 3v3 or 4v4. Melee-based. We saw it first at the Microsoft press conference. And it's melee-focused, and it is kind of, it reminds me of Overwatch a lot, both in characters and in being able to switch between rounds, what character you are, like, even what character you are, and the kind of King of the Hill style objective-based, do this thing as a team.
Like, you have to focus on, you know, risking it. You're right, 4v4. I have no idea who the hell this was playing with. Anyways, I thought this game was really, really awesome.
Like, with the pedigree of Ninja Theory, like, I knew it was going to feel good, but I feel like this game really kind of has learned from these games in the past, even like things like For Honor. You know, I think that they looked at that and were like, oh, let's take things you like from this, speed it up a little bit, add that Ninja Theory flair. And it's clear that people that are making this game are a fan of Overwatch, and the things that make that special, both characters, and with unique abilities and looks and all that stuff, and keeping it simple. So there's not, like, a million different things to figure out.
It's like Smash Bros. If you know how to play one character, you know how to play all the characters. It's just a matter of finding which one specials that you like more, and recovery moves you like more. And this does not look too much at you.
It's just kind of like, hey. That was my biggest thing, you know, for jumping into a demo, and, like, you know, we ran through a tutorial, then it was screwing up the characters in the dojo, and then I was like, oh, let's go play it on match. Jumping in there, and having it be that pretty much, not just pretty much, everything you can do is on the screen, right? You have your three special moves down here.
You know that X is going to do whatever basic attack you have to build up your specials. Then you have your giant special here. It was like, okay, cool, like you're saying, I get it. You know, I was maybe Al Bastard or whatever his name was with the knives.
It was like a heavy attack guy. But I felt like I could have jumped into the characters. I didn't for the gameplay match we were doing, but you were encouraged to. You know, I did a bunch of different dojos.
The demo that we did started off where we do a tutorial that was really, really quick. It was just kind of giving you the basic ideas of how it controls, and it controls exactly how you think it would. It felt very, very good. Then you get into the dojo, which is kind of like, there's just a couple dummy enemies that you can just face off against, but you can instantly, using the D-pad, switch between the different characters.
So if you hit up or whatever, you pull up the character select screen, and you can go in, no loading, just boom, new characters in, and you can play with different characters. And that is so important, because it's so overwhelming when you see there's 16 different characters, and I don't even know where to begin. The way they organize them is similar to Overwatch again, where it's kind of like by the different classes. Yeah, there's support, there's heavy, there's range.
Yep, and then getting in there, like, immediately, I was like, oh, I love this character. Back to Al God, I was like, oh, I wish this one had a bit more speed or whatever. I was like, oh, this is what I was looking for. And it's so simple, but I feel like the thing this game has going for it is, it's got the design philosophy down.
Like, it knows what it's trying to be, and I think it's doing a really good job of learning from some of the best, so let's put it all together. It felt like it had answers to the problems or questions I was coming up with, where when I was starting it for Al Basardo, right, like, he has this, like, leap attack. And so I did it, and I was like, oh, that's really hard to aim or figure out. And then I was like, oh, right, no, earlier they told me about Lock-On.
I was Lock-On. Lock-On, sure enough, you don't have to do anything. He was going to go to your Lock-On. I was like, okay, great.
I understand it better. I thought it was really cool. I think that it succeeded where Arms didn't in the same type of thing. I ran a lot of Power Stone from back in the day, that level of Chaos, but it definitely has this, like, polish to it, and the cool factor.
I was like, oh, man, this playing it and seeing the gameplay was a lot more impressive than the trailer that we saw. Sure, that's fair. I will say, though, it's like, the match itself, it did get really chaotic, and when all the characters were in one place, which is often, it's hard to understand what you're getting hit by, and you know who's on your team because they're glowing with a different color. Yeah.
But at any point, there could be eight melee characters doing crazy attacks around each other, and it gets, I think, a little bit of a just nuisance. And there's many moments where I thought I was, like, beating someone else, and they were beating me. Yeah, yeah. Or the opposite, and I was like, that's not.
But I can definitely see the potential of one of a team that's together that has their roles. Oh, my God, yeah, yeah, totally. Even Jeff, one of our guys that works at Microsoft. You know, in Zombie Blagnac.
Yes, yes. He was our support, and he was killing it. He was killing us left and right, and it made it feel like way more of an experience than just us jackasses running out of action. Sure, yeah.
Do you play it, like, on your own? On my own, probably not, because, like, you know, I would prefer that in single-player form. Yeah. But I definitely think there could be a cool party mode.
Oh, sure. I think that he's going to get into this, because it seems cool. Yeah. Then after Bleeding Edge, we.
I felt like it was a little generic. Yeah. That was my one thing. The developers are generic.
But again, this is also the thing of, like, this is my type of game, so I'm not, like, really equipped to weigh in on it. I had fun with what we played, but I'm not, like, anxious to go back to it. Yeah. I think my thing is, it is generic in a lot of ways, but I think that it is kind of the greatest hits of a lot of those games that are similar to what you make it generic.
So it's kind of like, oh, shit, you guys are doing this right. Yeah. Yeah, of course, yeah, you know what you're doing. With Xbox as backing, which is great.
But also, like, and I don't mean this as a negative thing, this is a Game Pass game. You look at it, you're just like, oh, this is the type of thing that they want to invest in to get people to want to keep coming back and try different things, where it makes sense that this might not have a super ambitious single-player campaign. That's fine. The point of it is that those two thousand.
Yeah, no. After that, we. Did some Gears Escape, right? I think I did Battletoads first.
That's not true. All right, fine. We did Gears. Remember, we did Battletoads, and we tried to find Jan.
We couldn't find Jan until we left. You're right. Totally looks like what I'd imagine it to be. It was fun.
That was cool. My system crashed at some point. Yeah, very, very, very. I had a great time with it.
It's always that thing, and I know this probably sounds sweet, but everybody who loves Xbox, and I apologize. I forget all the time how good Gears feels. Like, you know what I mean? I remember that on 360, when people, when the first person I ever saw play Gears passing the controller, and I was like, holy shit, like, this feels good.
I mean, it changed the game, man. Like, cover-based stuff is now just kind of, like, so standard. Oh, totally. We do.
I mean, so many do it, and they do it. They still feel the best. Yeah, it really does. Yeah, it was fun to play.
It was cool. I like the way it was set up for us from Jeff, actually, right? Like, in Horde mode, you sit there, and people come at you. This is the opposite of that, right?
Like, the idea is that you guys have infiltrated the hive or whatever. Now you are breaking out. You are the ones running out and attacking. And so it was cool, and it was brain-taking.
There's this fog following you that'll kill you, so you have to be moving. You know, you start with just a pistol, very few rounds. You have to be stealthy and sneaky in the very beginning. Then it's like, it gets notified, and you get the guns.
You start picking up the random stuff and the crazy stuff. And, you know, I had a special, this electric knife, and just, like, say, say, say, there's a guy coming. Yeah. The guy came.
I set it off. I just started stabbing him. There comes a big bat. It was great.
Yeah, very, very cool. Felt a little underwhelming, I would say, in terms of just, like, it felt like just a game mode, not like a revolution. Sure, sure. And sure, it is just a game mode.
But, like, I feel like they're kind of putting a lot of emphasis on this as, like, a big thing for Gears 5. It just feels like, oh, okay, it's something new. It's something. Yeah.
See, that was the one I was playing around with. That's going to be a fun party mode. Yeah, a party mode for sure. Like, I don't see this, like, having lasting legs in a community outside of the people Well, that was the thing about it, right, where, and I'm not fully briefed on it, but Jeff, who's played it before, was like, oh, this is everything.
It's like, cool, if I play this once or twice, do I know where everything is and how it is? Because of him doing that, like, it was really easy. Yeah. We lost to the end.
Well, it was because, yeah, you crashed. I got grabbed by something. I got grabbed by a ghoulie. But for a long time, it was like, oh, this is pretty, pretty easy.
And, yeah, it's just the same maps, the same scenarios. But it was cool. For the characters and enemies and, like, things going on on some of the planes. A lot of the backgrounds are, there's some CD elements going on.
Like, there isn't that weird contrast of, like, it just doesn't mesh. And I keep talking about this, but, like, there was an aesthetic of these games that happened for a while, that everything looked like flash animation online. Yeah. And that was cool for a while.
And then it just turned into so lazy, just like, oh, this is a game. And then just, like, all right, cool. Like, that is what an indie game is when it comes to 2D platformers. You don't have the resources to really invest in, like, art designs.
Yeah. Just, like, these weird, like, push and pull animations. This looks so good, and that backs up the gameplay. When I was watching you play it, I was like, this is awesome.
And when you got into the motorbike stuff, I was like, this looks awesome. Yeah. So, the main game is just, like, Baltoads. It's a 2D-sized stroller.
Go from left to right. You're on the plane where, the 3D plane where you have to move up and down as well. And it has all the same issues that any, one of those 90s arcade games do. Adventure stroller arcades.
Yeah. It's like, it's hard to know what plane I'm on. What plane you're on to line up and fight the bad guys. And that gets really frustrating.
We were playing a three-player co-op, so there was a lot going on on screen at one time. The coloring and sizes and differences between the different Toads was clear and cool. And I liked that. They each have different abilities.
One's faster, one's strong, blah, blah, blah, blah, obviously. That's Amy's comic. I hate you. But this game did something very, very, very cool, which is try to come up with a modern solution to that issue.
Yeah. So, this isn't just a remit. It really is a reimagining battle zones, and it's trying its best to make it modern. They add a lot of fighting game elements.
So, it's not just going left to right and just kind of saying something wrong, but whatever. Each character has its own things you can kind of team up together to combo. There's a combo meter that you're trying to keep filling. And every time you hit another level, it gives you kind of another move that you can do.
So, it really is trying to get you to do different moves. If you just hit Nash the Swear button over and over, or whatever, the X button over and over and over, that your meter will keep going to combo-wise, but it's not going to get to that next level. It's trying to get you to use different moves. It's cool, because I haven't seen that before, where there's a mechanic built in to try to get you to not just do it the fastest way, but to do it with style.
I guess Devil May Cry and stuff does that. I haven't seen it in this side of the game. But on top of that, on the fighting game stuff, there's so many homages to different video games, different 90s cartoons. In every move that they do, there's some animation.
It's like, oh, that's clearly referencing Renny Snippy. That's clearly referencing Star Wars or whatever. One of them is clearly referencing Mortal Kombat with that kid over here. You hold the, I'm just using PlayStation X, I'm sorry.
The L1. The LB. Yeah, the left bumper. All day, I'm playing this with the Pro Controller on Switch, the Xbox controller, the PlayStation controller, and it's like, oh, rest B.
I'm sorry. Damn it, I hate my life. It's honestly, in this is just a dive drive. It's only in Switch that I can't do.
It's like, hit X, and I'm like, I got Switch all day. Honestly, it was Octopath. Maybe it was, it was either Octopath or it was, it must have been Octopath. It could have been Duckery, but I think it was Octopath.
We're finally had to be like, all right, what do I think it should be? A, B. All right, so it's the reverse of that, B, A. So if that's B, A, then that means this is Y, X.
It's just like, this sucks. Stupid. Duck Bouser, fix it. So you have the LB.
We need eye contact, I can talk. Yeah, cool glasses. But the LB, and then you hit the B button, and it kind of uses your tongue to grab an enemy, and it doesn't matter what plane they are, it brings it to your place. Does he say, get toter here?
I couldn't hear the mics. I would not put a passage. But this sounds simple. I've never seen one of these games do it.
And it kept the guesswork out of the, uh, uh, where is he today? Boom, go, go, go. Pull the other guy, pull, go, go, go. It felt a lot more frenetic, and I was in charge of what was going on.
So that stuff was great. I was like, oh, man, this is actually pretty cool. I might really want to give this a shot. The dialogue was funny.
The story seemed like it's even the best way. Then we got to the hoverbike level. Oh, no, Greg. Oh, no.
Now you say, oh, no, I put a video on you. You were into it. You were refusing to be beaten by it. No, here's my thing.
Let me explain it again. Let me address it. So it was me and two other people playing. So three hoverbikes at one.
Unlike the original hover-bike level in Bowser's that is a side-square that is notoriously difficult, this one is like, you're going down, like it's a straightaway. So you're behind it, you see it, and you're going, it's kind of like an infinite runner. It's horrible. It looks good.
It looks pretty. It is horrible. Now, as someone who's watching it and seeing them all fail differently, and I think that there's a good checkpoint system to see. Yes, great checkpoint system.
But it is very much that you're hurtling, like I'm pointing straight in the camera, you're hurtling down that way, and so there'll be obstructions coming at you. You'll left, you'll go right, you have to jump wherever. But if there's an obstruction coming right at you, like my hands come in my face, and you go around it, they'll immediately put another one there. It's not like you have a second to come around and figure it out, you have a nanosecond to come around like, oh, middle.
So here's a couple of issues that really make this fall apart entirely. It's an infinite runner in style. Mobile game, swipe left, swipe right, or middle. There's a track or whatever.
But instead of there being tracks, every post might be in a different way. It's not like lane one, lane two, lane three. Oh, that sucks. It'd be so much easier to click, click, click, click.
Exactly. It's fully open and it could be anywhere, it could be in between, whatever. The bigger problem is, using the bumpers, you do go lane one, lane two, lane three. But that doesn't mean that you're going to make it past the thing, even though it feels like it should, feels very loose and not good for something that needs to be incredibly precision.