Giant Bombcast 474: "Fun!" (Premium)

no one noticed when it started to go wrong the 1990s were loud familiar and dangerously comfortable while the world watched headlines scroll across tv screens other crimes slipped through the cracks cases never meant to be remembered stories that faded before the truth could surface this podcast brings them back i'm simone taylor and this is 90s crime time hey it's tuesday the 28th of march 2017 you're listening to the giant podcast my brother jeff here's here hello jason is here hey how's it going matt rory is here hi i don't think that wave plays on the microphone too well i don't like wave really furiously in front of my phone and great gustavon of supergiant games hey welcome yeah coming back to second street yeah for probably the first time in a while it is it is indeed yeah i don't think you've even been in this only since we moved to this floor yeah i don't think i have it was it was definitely a change yes yes i was pretty into it yeah there's something about getting off of that floor after all those years of that floor being that floor that's like oh cool just baking the walls up there yeah there's something and being down the more basement you feel is just yeah yeah that's that's us yeah there is a lower level for there was a while there was like man what if we could get all the way down to the proper basement like that's that's where i would rather be this might sound really sad but not having to deal with elevators anymore it's pretty nice yeah i'm just kind of walking in the building here there yeah i feel like i've forgotten how to use those things yeah it's such an ingrained thing yeah when we're on the third floor now it's just like when i still when i do have to get into that elevator or if i'm on another floor coming back here i always still hit let's try hit three now it doesn't like that because apple's there it's just like so i can't even get to that floor it's just yeah it's done it's done also they go to that floor i don't know if you know yeah like to make yeah they tear down everything up there and remake it also jst is working on that floor that's right you run into it uh no i don't get out much yeah yeah but no he's here but he is he is now working on the third floor he's a different people don't know he's a former game spot engineer that like built a whole cms ahead of engineering yeah yeah yeah he built a lot of the tools that we're using in the way back one to make stuff work in the ancient days the history of the internet yeah uh how's it going going all right how are things over in games yeah uh busy busy these days yeah yeah yeah yeah just been cranking away um but uh but going you know going well it's just in that nice uh twilight time when there's there's a uh just a ton of stuff to do every day so it's you know in the in the blue sky period like during pre-production when you're first working on a game it's like things can at least for my case can move a little bit too slow sometimes it's just like ah you're just trying to figure out what you're even going to do and then this is like the opposite of that like well you could do infinity and you have this much you know time in a day or for however long you think you can work and stuff like that so you're just trying to get to everything and also your kind of fluency with working on the game is that you're just kind of closest to the works you could do it the fastest uh that you've been able to but it's it's kind of like yeah it's a more more comfortable phase i think for us as a team when we're in a full production but it's also like a really yeah really busy period too that's it let's probably say the name of your game is pyre yeah yes uh not to put you on the spot too much but you had to put a name on the phase that you're in yeah it's in i mean it's in it's you know it's the production phase but we are um we are past a point of what we what we consider content lock essentially so the game's been the game's been playable start to finish uh for quite a while now since like fall of last year um but due to how the game is structured there's kind of a there's still a lot that we can kind of add along the way as far as different outcomes can happen along the way and so on so we've just been fleshing out a lot of a lot of content polishing a lot of stuff uh just you know now that you can play it all start to finish it's that process of like repeatedly playing it seeing what it needs adding to it subtracting in some cases when it's not working the way that you want um so it's a um we're moving into essentially the polish uh what we consider the polish phase and we try to give ourselves a healthy amount of time for that um because it's really important in games like ours you know where the atmosphere is important where where the kind of just your ability to believe that you're there in that world is really important so um we want to spend a lot of time just getting all the little bells and whistles to be there um so yeah we're kind of we're kind of right there these days still no release date announced or anything like that but it'll be you know we should be on track for sometime later this year this is your third game as a team yeah do you guys just feel like seasoned old game on the hands at this point or is there like still a bunch of nerves attached to this thing coming together like oh is everybody like this or is that no no no no i doubt if i i i am very convinced that that uncertainty never goes away or at least at least i know that it will not uh for me um so it's like the question you asked it's like really a mix of it's a mix of both at the same time it's actually really like sort of a whiplash inducing because sometimes you just feel like a total scrub like i or just describing myself i don't uh you know you get into situations where it can be very frustrating that like it's a problem that you've solved many times in the past like why is it so hard again um and i think my realization is that it's just always anything you know anything worthwhile is just always going to be difficult um if you're if you're trying to make something that's worth a damn so that's kind of how i make peace with it um so yeah on the other hand it has been it's like this exact team we have we do have like a lot of experience working together now like for myself and two of the other guys uh amir and gavin i mean i met those guys 10 years ago when i first when i first left game so i left game spot a week later as electronic arts working with amir and gavin who are you know they were founded supergiant so we've been working a good long time together yeah like at this point it's great i actually i'm just realizing it now is like i worked with them now right back in the day um so yeah you certainly get to get to know what makes people pick and all that that's really that's really valuable um similar tools across the like from game to game does that help at all like processes and tools and stuff like that absolutely i mean i think if we like switch to like unreal or something we'd be like a really different place but we um we're like i think it's pretty rare these days for studios of our size to like sort of roll their own tech as it were and it just mostly speaks to us being relatively old as a smaller studio you know back from it's not we're not i haven't been around that long but since since uh 2009 is when supergiant first came about these days any smaller studio is like probably gonna work with unity or something like that um yeah i feel like we're in a pretty similar spot in a lot of ways where like you see a lot of people coming along now starting content businesses and like a lot of the there are a lot of third-party solutions for things like subscription stuff to patreon or whatever there's a lot of stuff like that out there that people just like pull into their you know like orbit and go okay use this we use this what kind of crazy person would host their own video oh i mean at this point like what kind of crazy person would host their own website right maybe like the larger question and it has both like strengths and weaknesses right because because the moment you want to do anything custom you can't like if you're just relying on other people i mean within reason because stuff like unity you know lets you create your own it has its own like little ecosystem within it but in our case um uh you know although it's based on tech that we've built um it's a lot of new tools and the nature of the game just being very different from the kind of games we made in the past um like the way the way i make content for this game is like couldn't be more different than the stuff i was doing on on transistor and bastion um uh which keeps it interesting for sure but that's you know i think that's part of the stuff i was getting out of like well it's just always difficult because we set out to make games that are like surprising interesting to us and that means uh not like sometimes just setting aside perfectly good ideas that have worked really well for us in the past and like we won't do them again just because we already did them um and we want to find something with its own identity um that has its own solutions and has its own feel so even if these things you know work out great we it does kind of make it more difficult because we're like well we it just introduces new problems to solve in the first place um and we can always go back to solving them in similar ways but then if we have if we're solving exactly the same problems and the game is probably too similar right that's what we were trying to make before so stuff like that yeah that makes sense how do you feel at this point not to just interview you um like third game in all three of the games you guys have made have certain commonalities in terms of like i'm sure that comes from tech running on but they've got very similar style of art assets and perspective and stuff like that after this game like just setting aside the business realities of what it would take to get new tech online or like just the terrifying commitment of like i'm gonna work on this for three years now like are there any types of games that are like just crazy different from the stuff you guys have done now that you would love to do um like yeah no i'm sure the answer is yes like we don't it's weirdly taboo for us to like we don't we don't even think about what our next game is going to be before we're done like it's like super like inappropriate for people to even talk like there's no rule it's just the moment anyone like makes a peep about anything like oh we should make it's like dude sorry yeah yeah we all get like super grossed out by it really because we're just so because it's like it doesn't because nothing matters beyond uh right now and and everything that we've done um while our games haven't been like we definitely don't approach our new games from like a uh we don't go like what were all the problems with bastion now let's solve them and now presenting transistor it's more just like okay we did that now setting that aside and and whatever we it's more like how do we feel now that having done that what we want to make now in light of the experience that we just had working on this other game so it's coming more from that place and so we can't we can't um predict that uh in advance of like being done uh and to a certain extent also you know um i'm sure the response matters as well um we've been fortunate to you know our previous games that people have enjoyed them so it's invalidating in that regard but i think like we we want to we have a audience that we care about um and we certainly think about who our players are uh when we set up when we set up to make stuff but yeah i mean i think i think we we don't have any expectations or guesses or anything as to what we would do next i really like it i i people think i'm joking when i say but it's i tell people like dude your guess is good yeah you're the opposite about a lot of like a lot bigger studios you see like oh they were starting pre-production on the sequel before the first thing but maybe that's the reality of having to ship games on publisher deadline or have to keep like that number of people employed that have to that's right it's really it's really that that's the biggest uh factor i think it's they just have a really big team and and um we uh you know i ran into some of this in my in my later days of da uh but yeah it's like a really it's really counterproductive to the pre-production process when you have a big team that's just like dude give me something to do if you have a team of 30 artists and you're like i don't know man just draw some stuff like nobody's happy about that at least not for very long like people working on a game team want um wants there to be some sort of vision or just want to go in a direction where they feel like they're being productive um but in the early days someone or some group of people that probably is not 100 people need to figure out what it is they're going to do before you know a larger team can get its marching orders and stuff like that so it's really important i think on bigger teams for them to have this kind of rolling uh production schedule yeah i think i think even a smaller team honestly for me personally if it was just me there's certain we'd be doing a fighting game no yeah basically that but i mean for me i have like no shortage of you know if i was lucas pope who made papers please and i could just do everything by myself here's all the games i would make but like i can't i can't do that and i work on a team so it's we have to figure it out together and find a common ground you guys have a full-time concept artist i mean we have gen z our director who is our but who does much more much more than that well i was just saying like for when i used to work on games we had a concept artist who went from like super super busy to kind of as busy but he could do other stuff as well but like concept art is always one of those things that really has to rotate and you can do key art later on i guess but then it's such a compelling part or compelling such a crucial part of like the early part of the game that getting them at the end of the end of a production is kind of a little yeah there's a million people do stuff like that where they don't always have the same kind of tools to work at the beginning of the project yeah yeah or um you know we have a team of three artists uh jen and josh and camilo and yeah they all you know they're all involved in the early production when we're setting out to do something but then they're also you know at their at their busiest uh some of their busiest at the end as well so yeah we don't again like we're just not even configured to like here's our we're doing pre-production rnx games we're rapid like like the same thing they're like give me a robot just start working on some good robot stuff we're thinking robots we're so actually it needs an axe i don't know yeah yeah we're so in deep right now with the thing that we're working on that we can't even be bothered to like think about much of anything else anyway even if someone was like spoon-feeding you know here's the best robot ever is like sweet uh go away you're not at the point that where you think about having a pitch though like you're worried about the next game yeah just in terms of like well are you worried about like coming up with a cool concept and having it i mean you guys go through a publisher correct no we still publish yeah we don't know we've never um we like come up with our like pitch quote unquote like a week before we show our game at tax for the first time we're like holy crap like someone's gonna say what is this game and we need to be able to answer that question that's a really fun week uh no it's cool it's actually really it's a really honest process actually at that point because we don't like back solve from a pitch we just develop the pitch based on what we what we have um but at a point when we've already like tested it on people and heard heard from people played it like what do you see in this like how would you describe this and it's like we just kind of feed that back it's not like oh it's and then we can avoid like using superlatives and all this kind of stuff to describe it it's a mesmerizing you know whatever it's just like we could just kind of try to describe what it is i mean i saw a tv commercial for the power rangers movie and one of the quotes was just fun all right the huge old yeah great that's like fun take it from twitter my new favorite thing about movie commercials is taking quotes from twitter you see the big yeah yeah of course a great adventure in the 21st century filmmaking from butt guy 29 yeah butt guy 29 knows fun okay how are we my alts on this podcast come on that's it's not cool yeah it's not cool uh greg i know you said you've been pretty busy of late so i put you on the spot but have you been enjoying any other people's games recently i uh other than other than my my poison um which is heartstone i really have not it's pretty disgusting actually i'm one of those people who's like this is probably the longest i've gone uh forever like not i'm just in that it's a combination of things so yeah i haven't played anything this year i'm just i'm just like building a list of all the stuff i will play and it's a and it's like a it's not even april yet and the list is like 20 it's like 20 games yeah well games i didn't expect to be on like zelda sure yeah horizon probably but then like people are raving to be about near in a way that i never would have expected yeah now i have to play that yeah near is right at the top of my list but that game is my jam just about every major release has hit this year yeah but yeah i'm in that place where it's like not only am i just kind of swamped but but it's also i'm so i'm so just just heads down with my own crap that at a certain point playing other people's stuff it actually just kind of is distracting to me right at this moment like i don't even want to they're all these great games and i'm sure they're great in all sorts of ways where i'm be like man that's a really good idea and i don't even want their ideas right now like i'm past that that's really valuable for almost constantly and actually i feel horrible even vocalizing this this is disgusting i'm not i'm not that yeah no i'm totally turning into the guy like i hated but it's like when i first got into game development i found that there were it was like unconscionable to me that there were people in game development who like didn't really play i don't know what you're telling me about that i had a similar reaction of just like this is something turning like you fucking sellouts like yeah and it was you know and as always there's kind of more to it than that but yeah there was more of that there was more of that than i expected um so the vocations that require more like designers have to know what's going on yeah yeah you're a concept of your design probably the last thing you want is like another influx of a bunch of other people shit right i mean i mean i don't i i don't ingest a lot of other video game coverage right uh these days and it's not because i don't care about video games or how they're covered but like there are specific moments where i'm like what else is going on out there and i go out there and i lift stuff and i go okay good to know yeah and it's like that or I assume it is like that with games and developing them sometimes yeah I mean for me I just enjoy the stuff and haven't like my sad little anecdote was like I had the Switch and Zelda like on pre-order and I basically cancelled it like two days before it arrived because I'm like I'm just not like I know that's gonna take like three hours just to like turn on for the first time and download patches or whatever you know the console experience in 2017 and like I just don't see myself doing that and my kids like like one of them will play Zelda but they just play Horizon or something like that and like they're not gonna care like that much so I'd rather just get around to it later when I'm not gonna feel like I need to because I had a number of games like in December I started playing like Final Fantasy 15 and stuff like that and it just fell off for me not because I wanted to stop not because I wanted to stop playing but because that's when I was getting particularly busy with stuff so I'm like I'm just gonna form my pile of shame and look forward to coming back to it later this year or whatever Hearthstone more of a like bus game for you I was gonna ask you generally like what your Hearthstone life is that kind of time to take so like what scenarios you play them yeah yeah so Hearthstone for sure the key to it so I almost never play it on my PC for sure the key to it is that it's on my phone I almost exclusively play it on my phone at this point if I finish work like late I hate just like going straight to bed and then waking up and going straight to work I need to just do something else and video games are probably not the right thing that I should do considering I spent the whole day on them but it's like you know what screw it I'm just gonna I'm gonna jump on Hearthstone for at least see what my you know post midnight quest is I think I still do that to some extent where it'll be like if I'm reviewing something it'll be like I'll go home and work on the game reviewing but before I go to bed it'll be like I gotta play and it ends up yeah it ends up just being like some other game maybe I'll review this next that's the worst thing that's what I'm not even doing so this is just kind of brings me back so that's why yeah but yeah this year's been ridiculous so I still like keep up with all the coverage so I feel very aware of one of the games that like everyone is freaking out over and that list is like it's shaping up to be a hell of a year you know unless things like totally fall flat in the fall for some reason because usually a bunch of good stuff comes down in the fall so it's like pretty ridiculous so far it seems like yeah yeah it's definitely like the front part of the year has been really crazy really crazy yes for the most part well I'd say even the bad games have still been really crazy in their madness I guess but I would offer that you could probably skip Mass Effect at this point are we going to talk about this let's talk about the games we've been playing yes all right you played much more of it I played a lot more of it hearing you talk about it inspired me to continue playing Mass Effect I was not ready to fall off and then we talked about it last week and I was like well I should probably get a little bit deeper into this just to you know know one way or the other where you're coming from on this stuff and so where I'm at with it I've cleared another planet and done all this other stuff and I continue to be completely unattached to that game I think it is a problem of the writing and the setting and a lot of that stuff like I've not had a ton of technical problems or at least not like game breaking ones the ship is landing and every texture on the side of this mountain is just shimmering in and out of detail or the snow can't sit on the mountain right so the technical problems of that game I would characterize as Death 5,000 cuts there have been like three things that I had to literally close and restart the game for but other than that there have been like dozens of tiny little annoyances that aren't a big deal on there I'm looking at this video you're sitting on you're going to post to the site at some point of this sequence of maybe the most broken sequence of events the most broken cut scene I've ever seen it is just NBA elite in space for large chunks of that thing lots of T-poses yeah T-poses is like walking around like gliding across oh man so I feel like I have this my current thoughts on that game are that I also don't like Mass Effect but for different reasons than everyone else which is how I thought about Mass Effect 3 like everyone was freaking out about the ending I was like actually everything along the way was pretty mediocre as well so by the time I got the ending I'd written like who cares I think this game is way more mediocre than 3 I would rather play 3 for me it's been just kind of like well this game exists it's not evoking a feeling from me one way or the other other than just this kind of ambivalence of just like the writing is pretty lame the characters are really boring it continues to reinforce that feeling of like the direct to video follow up to the Mass Effect trilogy it's starting I'm like pretty close in the game but I've been doing way more of the stuff to do in that game than I should probably what's the draw there I don't know I hate myself for it I inadvertently have 100%ed every plan in that game I didn't even mean to do it but honestly if you think about what Mass Effect has been over the last time I totally understand because you're looking for the parts of Mass Effect that were great I've done a ton of side stuff I'm like well maybe there's some side quests off the side that's going to be this really quiet well written moment but every single thing I've got plans up like 94% and stuff like that I've been doing a lot of side stuff but all of that has been like just right in line with the main quest I was like well that happened I guess so I can think of one minor side quest I found that barely kind of felt a little like Mass Effect in a good way for about half of that side quest and that's it you get mixed up with this cabal of anti-AI hackers and I found one data pad in there that starts talking about what it would be to be an artificial intelligence imagine that you are two or three times smarter than you are now now you're at genius level for your species now imagine you're 20 times smarter than that what would that do to your morality you're still not as smart as an AI it's like this interesting kind of exploration of what it would be to be this superhuman intelligence and then they totally dropped it that's what I'm looking for out of Mass Effect and there's none of that anywhere so every quest that I do just sort of ends it feels like I definitely feel like I really profound conclusions to every arc that you go through it's just like well that happened and nothing of any import is said or done things just sort of end and then you get to the end and move on that has definitely been how the game has felt and then there's that feeling of well even the stuff where it just kind of ends I don't know if you kind of call the quest line it's like one of the sort of dangling mysteries that they leave in and out of the storyline and they solved it they initiated the last step of the quest by a character calling me and saying like hey they broadcast the map like data into my head let's go there wow like this guy has a like you he has a computer implant there are people in this game that have like the means to receive numbers in their head but still that was literally the extent of the exposition that got you to the last step of this fairly major mystery in the game was he calls you up and says hey I know where to go now let's go there and then you go there and it's like a 10 minute like super boring sequence and it's over yeah I got a couple quests now that just say on hold because you don't have the you know you're waiting for someone to get back in touch and say hey this thing is back on and external block in engineering terms yeah waiting for somebody else to get back exactly there's a point there's a point in the story where you finish a story quest and you get back to your ship like probably six to eight of those pop all at the same time oh yeah no it's like they couldn't figure out where else in the story to like make sure and then it's income available so they all just happen at once it's so contrived and I think that's maybe part of the problem of this being the fourth game in the series is that you've had three games to see this franchise do what it does and it's very easy to see it all now it's very easy and I think that impacts the writing as well as just the design in a lot of cases because every single one of those morality things is now like well here are two bad decisions what are you going to do are you going to take the short term benefit or do this thing that might be morally right and the answer at this point is I don't care because none of these characters matter and this world doesn't matter so it's like in the Mass Effect trilogy I felt inspired to play a certain way based on how I felt about the universe because the writing would draw you in and that's part of why in Mass Effect 3 I think was such a bummer because it didn't make good on the years of decision making but I still felt even in Mass Effect 3 like I care enough about this to where I want to play it a very specific way and in this the characters don't care or it is so kind of thrown together that when they get to these kind of moral decisions about like well what are you going to do are you going to let them keep experimenting on this stuff or are you going to stop this research that might help you I don't care keep killing these I don't care kill whoever and you know the payoff with a 10% increase in shields like fine even the dramatic payoff you get for making that decision is almost non-existent like you are guaranteed to get maybe two lines of dialogue and maybe somebody will change their pose or maybe they won't but they will continue standing exactly where they have been standing for the entire game and like nothing there are no evident consequences of any of the decisions that you make you pick one and you get the XP for the quest and then that's it but at the end of the game after the credits you might get some set of your tone like flashbacks who may show us to keep researching shields I mean hopefully yeah because right now there's been zero hooks to kind of hang out there's just nothing going on how do you guys feel about the power I'm assuming you're getting up into levels yeah I'm super level up the combat is like I can't believe I'm saying this about Mass Effect and the combat is the best thing in game or definitely the most successfully executed thing in the game my problem with Mass Effect is always you walk up into a room it's really huge you see a bunch of like half high gear barriers but it seems like a more performance around moving around and attacking the facility stuff makes it gives a different feel because you're jump jetting up and then dashing over stuff and you feel like you're a steamrolling at the end of the game I'm getting pretty powerful yeah I mean I think any scale to use some stuff yeah like a game never feels particularly difficult I'd say I definitely died but that's more a factor of like there are parts of that game where they don't allow you to manually save and they don't checkpoint you because there's this huge long conflict of like well I'm taking over this base and even though there's a ton of downtime in this sequence they don't checkpoint you anyway and they will not let you manually save either in those things so like that stuff like I died a couple of points late on that like well that's 20 minutes of like shooting I have to do again I'm actually kind of over the combat because I think the player movement is very it's a little too inertia driven I feel like that game of like okay this is like maybe the best that Mass Effect's combat has ever been but you're still not going to confuse it for a pure action game it is not a world class action I mean I feel like the guns out and guns away are two different conversations because when your guns are up and you're just walking around RPG style it feels terrible like it always has but I feel like once you've got your guns out it's like right up there with gears or something I don't know I feel like your cover system is a little too ambiguous there are definitely barriers where I walk up to and he just stands there and he's getting shot and it's like why aren't you hiding behind this thing that's like over to me that's no good yeah I don't think combat is on par with gears I actually I like it better at this point because I've got so many powers I think that the power stuff is a different dimension that a game like yours is not going to have but I mean just in terms of raw like character movement get behind a thing pop-ups use your powers like that stuff is sluggish and not snappy in a way that I feel like it could be and whatever that's not what they're going for but in a game where the rest of the stuff is not necessarily worth seeing that could have saved it like the kind of middling combat was fine in messback games where combat is not a high point but because of those games you could not wait to start talking to people you have to leave yeah I think that some of the dogpiling people have done I also don't think that this game is some dramatic dumpster fire it's the bugs on one hand but again like I said it's the having played out a bunch of the major plot threads to the conclusions and seeing how like insultingly underwhelming those conclusions are having seen all that together makes me very negative on this game oh yeah whereas I am having trouble feeling any type of way about it because it can't bother it has nothing to say so far like I almost wish that I would experience a bunch of bugs because then it would at least be doing something just make me feel right exactly I don't know man it's disappointing to be sure but yeah it didn't mean whatever I have no idea why does this have to happen in this effect all games because of all franchises because they closed it off at the end of 3 and then said let's make another one of these with a bunch of different people and like crack open like pride this back open just go like there's money here you're not wrong I mean like every fourth game coming out of the trilogy has been a little questionable I feel like we talked about this in regard to Mass Effect but like what are they like Gears of War I didn't start it I didn't start it Halo it's got to be another one I would say that though Gears of War 4 does not end particularly well that it finds good justifications for opening the book again but even then even on Charter 4 I mean on Charter 4 is pretty proudly the standout is like for me this lines up most directly with Halo 4 where you've got like the same type of situation where we're going somewhere else okay great like the oh there's tremendous opportunity like possibilities that's why I say this game didn't have to be this bad they could have the premise is sound but just like Halo 5 does they pull it back into very familiar territory I think there's actually an argument to be made that the premise is incredibly spineless that they made a bunch of very controversial there were a bunch of very controversial developments at the end of Mass Effect 3 that had like incredible implications for that universe and then in making a fourth game they just ran away from all of it I mean they didn't want to address any of it I mean judging by the response on that thing of course they did like you know there is the challenge of can we make good on this that would be a very noble thing to do yeah like you could potentially have tried to redeem the things that you did at the end of 3 by saying okay here are all the consequences of that crazy stuff like here's an interesting exploration of and they've been out there in the past saying like oh we don't want to pick a canon in Mass Effect 3 so I guess that would make a difference or you know it's the Mortal Kombat 2 problem are you who won Mortal Kombat 1 and then what does that do to the story so okay Liu Kang became the Reapers basically they're all two new alien races in this game they're both bipedal dudes with assault rifles with basically the same level of technology and the same problems that you have but they might as well just be I was actually like weirdly excited for a brief moment playing the game last night because I finally did a quest where the enemies were like a different fashion than the one you've been fighting for you know that I've been fighting for 20 hours I was like oh these are just humans I'm coming down now neat and then it was right back to the same shit they were wearing armor instead of having shields so you change your game you take the spec in a different direction there you go I need you to get this game done I want to hear your final thoughts on this I'm trying so you haven't even necessarily unlocked all the loyalty I'm like 65 hours in and I've only gotten two of the four or two to six loyalty missions done I've got one more available that I'm about to go do the other three have not popped yet I need to just mainline the rest of the story and stop looking for stuff to redeem it when they were talking about Dragon Age Inquisition as a blueprint for this game because those games just fucking go or that game in particular and to be clear when I say I have 100% of each of every planet that doesn't mean you're having done every quest on every planet it's basically like a habitability percentage that you hit by doing missions and I've hit 100 inadvertently on all those but they're still like I've got planets that are 100% that probably have each or ten more quests major quests in there at some point like with Dragon Age I was Inquisition I know I can go beat the end of the game I don't need to do all this shit same thing with Zelda I beat Zelda last night and I was like 50 shrines or something like that well Zelda is a game where all that side content is incredibly engaging I don't find the shrines to be compelling I feel like the shrines are a lot of really interesting design in there Shrines for me have been one of the best things about that game. And they're short. They're such a nice, bite-sized little distillation of stuff. I want to find the Shrines.

I walk in, and if it's a major test of strength, I walk around. You're right. The combat ones are the only weak parts. Yeah, I got 15.

I unlocked every part of the map, and I went all the way around. But at some point, I was like, I beat Ganon with way fewer problems. I'd never be the Lionel in that game. Those things are fucking tough, but I beat the end of that game.

I hear those are the best thing about the combat in this game. Those are the big Synthar dudes. Yeah, I fought one once. I can't do that right now.

That's right. I love that. You don't need 900 of them. And then the thing you get for it is apparently...

That's all what you get for Ganon. It was compelling as shit. I love it. But no, I mean, what I wanted out of the game for the exploration was finding more, I guess, non-shrine stuff.

Because even a lot of the stuff that you do, like there's the three high-noxes with each of balls, you've got to kill them and put them in a thing, and that just opens up to another shrine. A lot of the really cool stuff that you can do, like find that red dragon and get a thing off his chest, and then it just leads to a shrine. It's just more shrines. I think for me, it was like the shrines, or at least the best shrines, feel like a, like almost like they were cut out of a game portal or something, where they're kind of merging that type of puzzle solving with the Zelda, these mechanics, and I think that's my favorite stuff in the game, and the exploration in a second.

Like for me, doing the things, like going to do the dungeons and kind of engage with the story has actually been the worst part of that game. I just actually like those gameplay sequences. Like I've not found the bosses to be particularly compelling. But they're cool.

I feel it's really cool. I like the people keep on saying Zelda is a story that has a story. I find a little dollop stuff. If you go out and find those little memory stuff, like the relationship with Zelda and Link's that's really interesting to see how they build it up.

I wish there was a little bit more of that inserted into the game in clever ways. Because I feel like the sequences are like, oh, I'm here, I'm here in this town. How are we going to fight this dungeon? How are we going to get in there?

And then like every single one of those, it feels like a formula, you know, of like, okay, now you're going to do this very mobile thing to gain access to this, and none of it is particularly challenging, and a lot of the story and writing around it, I don't know. It wasn't, by no means, it's a difficult game at all. Like it's, I mean, I would say that you can find, it's a little thing. It can be punishing.

I think up front it is punishing as you're kind of learning those mechanics and stuff. But it's like, once you kind of do some trines, get some upgrades, you eventually get to the point where I'm pretty much okay. I feel like that's the thing. The dungeons and that sort of like set stuff of like, here's what you should do to finish the game is not difficult.

The difficulty comes from like just harsh things out of the world. I mean, I let you choose your challenges. I mean, even the fact that I could go beat that with half, only half an actual heart. So it's like, okay, cool.

But I'd rather have that than have to go through 120 turns, obviously. And I still want to go back and try Eaton Island too, which seems to be a really cool little extra challenge. But overall, it's definitely one of the best games I've played in a year or two, I should say. I've never been a huge Zelda person, but it's like, yeah, I will return that switch.

Feel accomplished. I beat Ganon. I don't feel at this point like I need to go back and not 100% to that game, which I know a lot of people do. I love the world that's massive.

It's verticality-wise. It's like one of the best open worlds I've ever seen. Like you can go from top to bottom. That's really cool.

And just running around and finding stuff was really fun. But I think after however many, I don't know, 50 hours or so. Nobody's going to complain about a 50-hour game. I'm certainly not sure.

What do you think about the other comparison to Far Cry 2? I don't think I even remember Far Cry 2 very much. I remember 3 was, 4 was when you go to the snow, Tibet, right? 3 was the island.

2 was what? 2 was Africa? 2 was Africa. 2 was the way harsher one where you had a lot of fun.

I like Far Cry 2. I remember people complaining a lot about the scout, the little road check marks, which is fine to me. But a lot of people hold up Far Cry 2 as like the urban world game, you know, like the purest expression of like a bunch of systems that interact with each other and nothing can happen. I love setting fields on fire.

I love that kind of thing. You know, just things happen and stuff. Yeah, the weird systems that stuff and all the way all kind of come together. They spend a lot of time.

You talk about like the entire game is playing through. I'm assuming you've heard they just shut down production for a week every once in a while. I mean, that kind of iteration and polish is, I know polish is still a dirty word for all these game spot. It's definitely not a mixed bag.

That game is not something I want. I don't mean to sound like I'm coming down on it. That game is not something I want to put down for like, I took that switch home for two weeks straight and then every day and I was probably playing at least five or six hours. So it's a hell of a game.

And I really don't want to sound like I'm being negative. I don't find everything in that game to be super compelling. But the way, the main thrust of that game was, I love those dungeons too. I love even stuff that felt bad.

Like everybody can play the weapon really right off the bat. But then once you get used to it, you get a little more inventory. That starts to feel kind of understandable and cool too. I kind of, I mean, this is like a backhanded compliment almost.

I kind of enjoyed the opportunity to try a bunch of weapons. Because otherwise, I know if they didn't have a release system, I would just pick the sword I like and never change. Yeah, so it's like, I'm not a spear guy in any game really, but I got a spear in that game because I had to. I was like, that's kind of cool.

It's got a lot of reach on it. It's, there's a good variety there. But no, that was great. The other thing I was curious, I guess you haven't played the new Torment though.

No. So there's a lot of Torment news in the news lately. I think they just announced the enhanced edition of Planescape Torment. Is it announced actually?

Yeah, I think I saw one tweeting about it. Yeah, I think I saw one tweeting about it. Yeah, and I guess there must have been some time with the new Torment announcing wise because Torment came out like two weeks ago. We've been talking a lot about trying to find out a way to do a quick look.

But maybe this will be our time to talk about it. We kept thinking about doing one of those. I think I told these guys, I played for like three and a half hours, we had a one fight. The rest of the time we were talking to you.

Which is great. It's all really well written. I was going to say, we've got our Persona 5 quick look going on tomorrow. I think there might be a fight in that whole thing.

Yeah, but that's Persona. I mean, yeah, some games start that way. Well, this is a PCS. Persona at least has the most dazzling interface of any game.

Persona's got some visual pizzazz to fall back on. That's one of my problems with actually the new Torment's Tides of Numenera. I think it's called. The UI will shift based on whether your conversation are going around.

So this big ass window will pop up for dialogue and then it'll go back down. And there's always little things moving around on it. It's a very busy UI, which I was a little disappointed by. Because apparently they launched on consoles too.

And apparently those console versions, what I heard, they're kind of a mess. Like in terms of frame rate and walking around. But they made that UI so you can read it from an HTTP across the room. And for the PC version of it, I wasn't a huge fan of how it pops up and down and kind of goes away.

And has all this weird little flashy stuff on it. I was not super enthused. I was trying to turn on a PS4 to test our PS4 streaming the day. And it couldn't get in.

Because I kept on hitting the A button for Zelda to approve it. And it kept on talking about it. It was like a cancel. So it took me like three minutes to figure out what the fuck.

Just get to Japanese PS4 and then it'll be fine. Because I'll log you right in. Now that I'm done with Zelda, I'll go back to X and approve. I guess the lineage of Torment kind of goes all the way back to the early days of Bioware, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, that was the first Infinity. Yeah, like straight descent from... Yeah, well, I think the fact that they're putting out late 90s, Infinity, and I'm straight to some of the same people, even?

Yeah, no, I'm not going to. What the legacy is there? Yeah, there was a connection. Yeah, what was it?

Because Black Isle was like the publisher of Baldur's Gate, I think. Fallout was before. Fallout was before and it wasn't the Infinity. So it was like the one kind of precursor.

But yeah, I think Black Isle was like the label of that. Yeah, it was a vision. Yeah, for role-playing games. I can't get that whole thing down.

But then it was like Icewind Dale and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Torment. And so they had a slew of, for the most part, really good Infinity-Engine-based computer RPGs. But yeah, Bioware only made the Baldur's Gate stuff, and then Black Isle slash Interplay made the other stuff.

I'm surprised. The Plank's Gate thing. I mean, I've always thought that license was lost in the archives. Yeah.

It's a weird license. Well, because that's the ND, but it's not anymore. The new format is not great. Yeah, Plank's Gate.

I like all kind of the same thing. They created their own kind of their own... I worked on Number Nights 2, man. And I don't know if any stories I can tell, but the one I always remembered was a 10 business day turnaround for approvals from Hasbro on all the...

Anything, if you want to change a little D&D storyline, two weeks is a fucking eternity. They had to go to France and come back to Washington to get, like, hey, I want to take a screenshot of this goddess holding the sword. And like, oh, well. I just imagined that Mr.

Sherry Sketch kind of changed this dude. Let's fucking go back to the president trying to figure out how you can do it. No. Tell him no.

That was often... Yeah. Just blinders of approval docs and everything like that. So I think everybody gets...

We can make a D&D game. Oh, D&D. No. I wonder often, like, dude, how come there are no D&D games?

It's like, D&D is one of the most, like, mind-numbingly obvious licenses for there should be a ton of good games based on Star Wars. Also, like, how many people necessarily know the specific characters and lore attached to D&D versus systems? Like, do you need to get the lessons to evoke the feel of what you would probably... Like, 80% of what you would get.

That's the route of Bioware, right? Like, Dragon Age's D&D, Mass Effect, Star Wars, about Star Wars. Like, wait, that's... Yeah, yeah.

That's right. They kind of made their own versions of that. And you're making all the money from it. Like, you're not paying out that whatever 20, 30% of your profits.

And to your point, I mean, you could even just get more creative with it, really, because if you have some of that license to just, like, bend it. Yeah, because Mass Effect was just cool. I don't think it's necessarily going to be, like, the Mass Effect or Dragon Age blueprint stamped into a different, like, universe or something. I don't know what exactly the rumors are.

I see people out there saying, compared to Destiny or, you know, like, a horror thing? I have no idea. Actually, no, no idea, but... It's five years is a long time to do something without talking about it.

I see a lot of money. Oh, maybe it's a team of, like, some think tank inside. Or maybe it's a super small team. Or maybe it was a super small team for a long time, kind of cooking up the basics of this universe.

Just like, okay, yeah, exactly. Like, here's, like, every brand Bible we'll ever need for 10 years of video game. Now go be hamstrung. Destiny probably is one of those games that would have benefited from a lot more kind of pre-production, I think, because we all heard the story about the last year of that.

Well, I think they did a ton of pre-production and threw it all way. Like, you know, they probably had all the time and money in the world, not all, but plenty to do a whole lot. And then at the end, threw it all way. Like, oh, shit, we've got to put this out.

This contract is this contract. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure people are embarrassing with the receptionist to the end of that. Like, we can't let this happen again.

We're going to take this time and get this right. Might as well spend another year on it. I would have said that coming out of Mass Effect 3. Really?

Like, at some point, like, that's, you know, like, they're part of a much larger company that has, you know, this is a larger public company. You know, like, this can be said last week, this game very, like, this very technically rough game. And, you know, so there are probably business reasons why this game should be in the state. Yeah, it went to the top of the tracks in the UK, I saw it.

Yeah, but it's old fewer than Mass Effect 3 did in its opening week. Yeah, that's the way you like it for comparison. And I know, like, over the years, like, the targets that Mass Effect has needed to hit early on only grew as they went along. So, you know, I don't think it's guaranteed that they will make another one, for sure.

So if you talk about the future of Bioware, I don't know that there's necessarily, like, EA's a big company. They need these projects that have years and years of time and millions and millions of dollars in them. They need them to return. And if they don't make that money back, like, EA, you know, they were, I think they probably had to their best a little bit when they started saying, like, oh, this design is, like, a standalone thing.

Like, yeah, you know, no, although, but sure, you are going to get out there and say kind of both things of, like, hey, we would sure probably love to make more of these because this franchise is well-known and well-regarded. Invaluable, sure. But I also think that they're probably in a position where they could walk away. And I haven't seen the ending of the game, so I don't know, but that's the way that they framed it was definitely, like, not, they did not announce this as a new trilogy, at least over that.

So I think that they've given themselves an out to where if they don't like the way the books look at the end of this, they don't have a re-up, and they might not. EA's got a certain history. Sure. A certain cutthroat history with a lot of its acquired studios.

Yeah, I mean, you know, like, you can, I mean, look at the number of studios that got a Bioware name and umbrella slapped on them over the years, Bioware victory, and, you know, Mythic became Bioware. Bioware San Francisco. Right. There's a whole studio.

Yeah, I want to say, there's a Sacramento team, too? How do you moralize it would have to be for somebody like a Mythic to have another studio's name just grafted on the front of your studio's name? Well, I mean, it's important, but they were EA before that, you know, so they already, like, look, they made the deal. This is what comes with it.

They don't own it anymore. It's why it's a CBSist.com now. Yeah, but don't be saying that. You know, it's not the official name.

I do, no. Yes, exactly. Like, the branding debacle with the Bioware name as they tried to branch it out to, like, just everything that resembled an RPG was not good for the existing Bioware brand or for the brands that got that thrown onto them. And so they retracted a lot of that, I think, and, well, I mean, obviously they shut it down along the way.

But a lot of the people that you think of as the people that were the faces of Bioware from before it was an EA company through that transition, you know, whatever, you know, the doctors are not there. I had to remind myself of that fact. The doctors left and, like, a lot of the writing staff changed within Master 2 and 3. And anyone that was key personnel in the sale of Bioware to EA, anyone that was deemed key personnel and put on a contract, like, yeah, that's probably a two-year deal.

Like, they're long gone. They cash out and done. But they were, that was mostly artifact of the Old Republic, right? They wanted them kind of in-house to make the Old Republic.

It wasn't the core, that wasn't the core of Bioware. That was a large part of that fucking deal, if I recall correctly. Like, the Old Republic was a $400 million game or something like that. And they wanted to have everybody in-house.

So, yeah, they ended up being on Bioware Austin and they did all that stuff. Yeah, you just saw, like, well-known writers being pulled off of the stuff happening in Canada to go down and help the Old Republic. Well, like, Dr. Greg, we moved to Austin.

Well, I mean, it was creative. Yeah, for sure. There were a lot of people that got pulled onto that thing. And it sounds like that thing is actually doing so well.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it's doing fine. Like, their transition to free-to-play went well. Free-to-play is awful. It's the worst free-to-play I've ever seen.

But it gets you into the game. Like, you can't sprint for a long time. You can't use vehicles and shit. The last time I played was a year ago.

Like I said, yeah. The cutscenes are really well done. Can you just straight up sprint if you pay? Yeah, please.

The first level. I think we waited a lot to get that. And those levels are huge. You just have to get around.

You just have to get up-readed servers installed in your life. You pay once. And if you pay once, you're kind of part of a buyer's thing for the rest of your career. Yeah, they have, like, three tiers.

Like, you're paying a monthly subscription, and then it's just like it was when they launched it. And it was a paid MMO, and maybe they do a stipend or something. And if you're just free to play, it's going to be not the most appealing experience. Honestly, I haven't played that game since launch.

I played like 120 hours of it or something. The writing was really well done for an MMO, especially the execution on their story was better than a lot of stuff that came before. We even got a few emails after we talked about Mass Effect last week from people who played the whole public saying, Hey, that's kind of where a lot of the good buyware is right now. Even the recent expansions are pretty...

And it sounds like their transition to free play has done really well for them monetarily, which probably then gives them even more leeway to go out and do bigger, better stuff. So, kudos to that team for doing that. I mean, that's a hard transition to free to play for as much as that's probably baked into every single business plan of an MMO these days. And even back then, it's not a guaranteed transition.

I think they came out of it stronger than they were. The bummer for me is I don't want to play an MMO to get a good story. I want to play an MMO period. I want to play a nice self-contained single player and then kind of mainline that.

That's how I play the Republic. It was just that I had clan chat with John Vignocchi who was playing fun at the time. They do do weeks where they go and all these grants you get from these storyline quests are like 200%. So you can go from one to 60 or whatever.

The thing is, just doing your story quests. You're playing an MMO, you're running around a big level trying to glitch stuff. It's kind of like Kingdoms of Amalur, which is a fake MMO. They know there are people like you out there who just want the story and the only deal is killing 10 rats against the next area.

They do a pretty good job of doing that. When that happens, let's go back and play the Imperial Agent. If you're going to play a storyline in that game, that's the one. They've rolled out more story sense.

But back at launch, that was the thing. I hit the point where it launched, there was a huge lull in the story probably two thirds of the way through. We were killing rats and just trying to grind out fucking less? Yeah, where I was just grinding out these meaningless quests to get to the next cool shit.

And that was too wide of a gap. And also, I was playing the game mostly over our Christmas break. So I logged all that time in probably a week and a half, two weeks. And I was like, oh, I need to go back to work.

I can't fucking keep playing this game. And then bailed on it. But I have fond memories of my brief time with that game even though at launch I think it was still missing stuff. The writing and the story stuff was still good enough.

It should have been Cotor 3. It's not, but it's still a pretty decent approximation. Just playing for the story on one of those weeks where they let you ram through it. Did you guys think that the Cotor games were pulled up?

I don't know. I was thinking about that exact question. I've never played either of them. The first one is probably for the Star Wars experience of it.

It probably does hold up. Just as a work of Star Wars fiction, it's definitely up there. And I think enough of the simplified D&D type gameplay should translate. I mean the game didn't look amazing even at the time.

So it's kind of like, sometimes when games look really good at their time they actually look kind of age worse. Yeah, I bet the combat aspects of that game don't. It's fine because you just still run up to a guy and jack him like six times with a double bladed lightsaber and a bunch of 20s fly off. Yeah, sure.

It probably works still. Yeah, that part, games haven't really changed that much actually from there. Like you play Dragon Age Inquisition, this may be Sacrilege or something. I'm dismissing the efforts to make those things so much better than they used to be.

But I find a lot of, along that stuff, it hasn't really changed that much. So if you control one character and ask people do their thing. You can talk to the other guys and take them all over. They've parted on both of the iPads.

I think at least the first one was on Steam. Yeah, too. Yeah, Darren, the guy who does all our music, I think he has like a pilgrimage to the world of Kotor like every year or whatever. So yeah, he comes back to it like over and over and over.

I've never played too many people talk about that game with like an incredible amount of reverence at all. The story is supposedly like fantastic. People were down on it at the time, yeah. It wasn't finished.

It wasn't finished and like there were mods out there to restore content that was in the install directory but not. I was just very wistful, kind of like, ah. They did not feel good. I mean, to a degree, Fall of New Vegas is also very rushed.

Right. Didn't they make Coach War 2 in like, I don't know what it was. Oh, yeah. It was something crazy.

It was something crazy like that. But Fall of New Vegas, they all learned a lesson that had a pretty decent scope for that game. But yeah, they're very much at the mercy of other people who put those games on. They had to get that amount of time and yeah, it was not the happiest memory served there.

No, Coach War 2 is, I think the character, like Avalon because Avalon is one of my favorite writers in games. I'm glad he's doing like new stuff. He's working on Prey, working on that System Shock Remaster and he's kind of out there freelancing, which is great. I think it's a good thing for games.

But no, Craya, all those characters in Coach War 2 were, I think Revan and that dude with the big old metal mask in the first one are fantastic, but the characters in 2 I think are just fascinating. And much more, I mean, that's very, everybody, what he says is a better character in writing than their bioware when they do sequels and stuff like that. But definitely in terms of Shades of Grey and going down into, like Star Wars in its core is a very simplistic role. That was the whole thing I was heard of Dr.

True is that they kind of flipped that whole like force dichotomy. You have to have, for a role playing game, I mean it seems to go from awful good to chaotic evil, but I think what Avalon and a lot of other writers noted on 2 was fascinating in terms of making a black and white world into a very kind of Shades of Grey thing that I'm surprised that anyway Lucasfilm would have approved it at that point. I was going to say like at that time, like what other Star Wars stuff was happening around then? Was that before?

I mean they had a really nice spirit for a while there, right? Because they had like Republic of Mando and stuff like that. Sure. I think that was around the same time.

Yeah, it was roughly mid-2000s, 2004 or something like that. I mean I think all that stuff kind of got overshadowed by, you know, it was the time when super crazy stuff like I think Resident Evil 4 and whatever was coming out, so it's not at the top of one's memory necessarily. But it was a pretty nice few years there for Star Wars games. Probably everybody was busy with Revenge of the Sith.

Revenge of the Sith was 2005 and then I think Code of 2 was 2005. Yeah, but it was the whole thing where like the games were actually better than the movies at that point, just straight up. Yeah, and you know Star Wars has had, yeah, it's funny like video game history, but even way back, you're just reminding me like, way back when they had a TIE fighter, like the space combat sin, like people love that game, you know, gameplay-wise, but I think like people's sort of hidden passion for it was around like the, it's like a fiction that made Dude, my passion is not so hidden for that stuff. Yeah, no, no, no, no.

It's like part of the secret society of the TIE fighter people. It's like you're getting your orders from this like starched military uniform, but then like who did representative of the R comes around from the side and like ask the four-year-olds. But it was also just the thing that like added some of the, you know, as you're a kid growing up with Star Wars and then you're like getting older and you're starting to like perceive the world in shades of grey now and like you can look past just straight up good and evil and then like along comes something like TIE fighter wars, like yeah, here's what the other perspective is on all of this or whatever, here's like what these guys, and they're still pretty evil, but it's like, you can see how, but then some of the rank and file soldiers, it's like, you know, just that whole like war movie like kind of perspective where I can show you and then, you know, it's the power of video games, it's a new dimension of Star Wars, it's all this, all this good stuff back then and before I was more like whatever light side Jedi, but it was really cool to be confronted with these decisions where you're like, you're actually like kind of repulsed, you're like the thought goes through your head and you're like, oh my god, like I could do this really atrocious thing right now and like betray all the people who like care about me or whatever who've like stood with me and, you know, truly turned to the dark side here and it was really cool to like set up this kind of situation. Yeah, it just reminded me how much, how much this kind of banality of evil stuff there is in TIE fighter, you know, when they're telling you, it's like, yeah, go down that convoy of, it's like, it's like a supply of like water.

There's a rebel spy on board that civilian freighter, like go pull that thing up, cause fuck him, he's a terrorist. Yeah, I'm just following orders here. Yeah. Well the part, I mean it's always been an interesting part of Star Wars.

Yeah, it's like an empire suppressing a rebellion, you know, like the rebellions aren't the good guys until they win. Right. Jason, you didn't play anything? Yeah, kind of, yeah.

It's time for the Tokiden time minute. I installed Tokiden 2 yesterday. Wow. That's a big step for you.

I'm proud of you. I don't know why. Yeah, I don't know why. That's not a commitment to play it.

The game's still not grabbing me like I was hoping, seriously. They're making very, very smart steps, you know, as far as making this like an open world, like action RPG, you know, so it's a deviation from Monster Hunter in that respect. It's really good art, really good music, but the combat like is, there's a bunch of nuance to like, you know, some of the new weapons and stuff, but man, your AI partners are just like doing all the heavy lifting. Like they're getting the boss in like a sun lock and just kind of hanging back and just like slashing.

So it feels a little mashy like in a lot of other Megaforce games, but I kind of- Wait a minute. Yeah. I don't think I realized this was a Megaforce game. Yeah, it's a Megaforce game.

But it's not quite like that. Nevermind. Yeah. I said the same kind of stuff about God Eater in the beginning, like it wasn't grabbing me until much later in the game when all that stuff like really came into play.

So maybe it'll get better. I don't know. But yeah, I'll keep at it for sure. Here's your cooking minute.

Nice. If you came in like 20 seconds on the budget. Cool. Yeah.

All right. I'll save that for next week. It only rolls over for one week. Gotcha.

Aside from that, that's Hollow Knight, man. Yeah. It seems like my jam. It involves a platformer, you know, it's got kind of that monochromatic visual style, like Salt and Sanctuary and stuff.

A little hands-around animation. Animation's really good. That's another game I've had installed for a good long time, but I haven't actually. This one's kind of hard to you for me for whatever reason.

I don't have any additional powers yet after playing for like an hour or so. A gameplay is a lot like, you guys have played like Metroid, right? What is that? Super Metroid.

Okay. If you can combine that with like Castlevania Symphony of the Night, I don't know what you would call that. But it's a little like that. Only the Rave 50 name.

Right. Yeah. That works for me. We're going to go with that.

But yeah, like all that I've unlocked, you know, currency, you go back up to your hub world and stuff and it's like, now I can buy a map. Okay, cool. All right. Now I can buy a compass.

That shows me where I am on the map. Now I can buy pinpoints for things that I've discovered. Like there's a vendor down in this area. But I've got to unlock the ability to put pinpoints on my map.

And I still haven't bought powers because they're not available to me yet. I can't hear an Azure or anything like that. So, yeah. Yeah.

I'll keep at that as well just because it's been so highly... Yeah. I think he might be doing a quick look on that. Cool.

Aside from that, Snake Pass. Yeah. I tried. Snake Pass is out this week.

It's out right now? It's out right now. I'm switching so much. I saw it on the Xbox.

All I know for sure. I saw it on the Xbox. I think Steam as well. But that's got a really good visual.

It looks incredible. Yeah. Really nice. Brad, you mentioned like a Viva Pignota vibe.

It very much reminds me of a Viva Pignota vibe. It very much reminds me of a Viva Pignota vibe. Yeah. It plays like a rare platformer, but you're a Snake.

Is that kind of what this is? It's a little weird. There's platforming, but I mean you're a Snake. So you can move with your...

You kind of like point your head in a certain direction. Pull the right trigger to go forward. But you don't... You've got to weave your way like a Snake.

The more you kind of swallow, the faster you go, right? Exactly. It's not exactly intuitive, but once you get it, this feels really good. But where the platforming comes in is where you're actually winding up bamboo poles and shit like that and weeding your way through this stuff in order to get it to higher platformers for the purpose of collecting shit.

Orbs and crystals and stuff. Now you're talking. Yeah. The objective lies seem very simple from what I just saw.

Yeah. You were just picking up glowing orbs and stuff. Yeah. It's been fun.

And after you get the hang of the controls, it seems pretty good. I like it a lot. I've only played like an hour or so. But yeah, I'm going to keep going with that too.

No, I think that's about it. Just kind of cramming these small tiny games into my pallet as much as possible. Oh, Salt and Sanctuary. I saw them saying it.

Yeah. Sort of. Put it back a little bit in Europe, I think. Yeah.

Put it back in Europe. Some weird stuff going on with the cross bikes. Oh, right, right. Anyway, that's not working yet.

But it's running a little rough. Oh, no. It looks a little rough around the edges too. Unfortunately.

I don't know if this is the platform in which to play this on. Not for sure. It's out there if you want to get it. But yeah, some of the textures, a little muddy.

Frame rate, not quite there. The people who only own Vita and no other gaming platform. I had so many people, like when we did our quick look actually, come to the comments and say, no, I'm going to wait for the Vita version. Let's come in.

Well, here you go. No. We did Vita coverage. Early Vita coverage in the other offices.

They brought that in. They totally had HDMI out. It would not let us take direct Vita. Did Ron bring that in?

No. I think it was third party. This was before. Oh, yeah.

He was still out. When I was at the game before, he read in Sunfort Golden on the Vita. He had HDMI out and he was like, oh, yeah, we can capture from this. Yeah.

I'll say about the Vita man. Vita's probably my favorite handhold game. Yeah. I've played a lot of games.

I've said it a few times, but I think the Switch is really going to be the thing that finally puts the Vita to bed in terms of like, you'll see more and more smaller games just make it a way to the Switch. It'll just be a better supported, more modern device. Honestly, for as much as I don't like handhelds or don't really have a lot of room in my life for handhelds as a commute driver, the bigger screen definitely makes that thing feel better to me. I never even dock that thing.

I have the Office Switch. I bought Zelda for the Office Switch. The screen looked good. I've spent almost no time playing Switch and can't hold it.

It's a plastic screen, apparently. It's not glass or anything like that. It gets dirty. Apart from that, like, yeah, doing that, like, wandering from couch to bed to the outside on my porch.

I mean, this is not revolutionary behavior, but it felt really good. I know some people say their hands get cramped. I feel pretty good with that thing. Also, I'm now living that weird split of like, well, I really don't like the way Zelda looks on this TV because of the frame rate differences.

It's a real shame that you have to make that decision. I would probably rather drop, if I could, I would drop the TV resolution down to 720 if that meant getting, like, the performance that you get in handheld mode for that game to take up anyway. I don't know. It's a pretty good device.

I started feeling the itch. I thought it was going to be okay for a while, but I just, I've been kind of like cycling through, because I really, well, right after Zelda came out, I was talking about after I played the first, like, 10 hours, like, I should really buy Switch. I was like, I also think I should get a PS4 Pro, but then I played Horizon on my old PS4 and that game looks fucking beautiful. Even now, any pro passion, like that, like, I kind of put me back, like, I don't really need to.

Well, what if I told you, you know, what if I told you you could play Neo Turf Masters portably on a Nintendo Switch, a good sized screen. What if I told you, you could play World Heroes, Metal Slug 3. There's like six or seven, like non-75, there's like six or seven, really? Yeah, there's like six or seven Neo Geo games on the Switch now.

And granted, all that stuff comes to the PS4 as well. And I kind of, I'm trying to work my way through what the mental state is here, where I refuse to buy those games on PlayStation 4, even though I'm buying all of Hamster's other arcade archives releases that are not Neo Geo based. But I'm totally okay buying these Neo Geo games on the Switch, because like, the handheldness of it offers something that like feels kind of alright. And I'm trying to justify the purchase of that thing too.

Oh sure, yeah, I mean, like, yes, here are my top two games for the Nintendo Switch. One, Zelda, two, Neo Turf Masters. Like, that's three, Waku Waku 7. It's weird to hear they did something like non-75 though, because, yeah.

But that's not even like, generally that's not even like the top ten of Neo Geo games. I mean, Waku 7 is not even the top ten of Neo Geo games. It's a good golf game. I'm feeling the itch as well.

So Lisa told me that she was going to get one for my birthday, but I couldn't find one. Yeah, they're definitely hard to get right now. I was fully anticipating them having stock in some retail store. Just over the weekend I saw reports that they were there, like that GameStop is now doing their grimy bundle thing.

I was like, hey, do you want a copy of Bomberman? We'll get you to Switch next week, you just need to get this copy of Bomberman. Amazon's being in. Like we said last week, they were deviling production.

From what they expected to, so I assumed it would be. Also hard to find right now? 1080 Ti's, which is what I've got to talk myself into. $700.

The ones that are out there are like 850 right now. I'm talking myself into it. I've got a 4K monitor. $700.

You need to take advantage. My PC is right next to the 4K TV I've got. That's HDMI cable away from seeing what Dune looks like on this OLED. I just need to do it.

In California it's like 760. I'm not going to laugh for a week. I'm not going to go to restaurants and spend money on food. I'm going to buy some chicken breasts.

In a couple of weeks, a couple of cases of ramen in a video card. You can eat all the ramen in front of your new... It's an investment in yourself. It's going to be years of use.

That's a good year and a half of video card. I was thinking more like 4 or 5 years. I had the SLI in there for a while. We talked about it on UPF or something like that.

Other 970, I have a 970 home. But then it all works okay. I started seeing the hitch. Once you notice it, it doesn't go away.

It was terrible. It was huge hitting. But then even Tomb Raider and other games that really upperformed from SLI. Once you start seeing that hitch, every tree starts pausing after every 2 seconds.

It's one of those things that was maddening. So I think I'll happily... That's definitely better than what I have. I can actually play Doom on that machine.

Doom on well. Doom on a nice PC going 60 FPS is... Someone asked me recently, what is the new crisis? I think Doom might be the current.

Doom is too well optimized to do that. They came to the conclusion that crisis is still the critical crisis. I'd say Witcher or something. Witcher Hairworks is always the one that people think.

Doom is super well optimized. It runs on a laptop or something like that. I ran Doom at max everything on the 970 at 60 FPS. The key to that question is that Crysis is willing to do things that will melt into the video card.

Witcher is one of those games where on your high settings it looks fantastic for the most part. It can go off the charts. When we got our 1080s in here, I totally did install Crysis. We tried running it and it didn't...

It's not going to look like a modern game, obviously. There's one of those X11 games like Fallen Ashes of the Singularity. It's like Battlefield 1 and stuff like that. I think a lot of the 1080Ti reviews have been saying that Battlefield 1 at everything max is one of the few things you can't get 60 FPS at 4K.

But I'm happy with... On a Ti. On a Ti, really. 4K is a lot.

That is true. It's a lot of K's. Does a Grand Theft Auto 5 do 4K? I would think that fits.

I can run a 1440p on the 970s. I'll report back when I find $770 to spend on your card. So my hardware purchase of the weekend was I bought an external drive for a PS4. How did that go?

It went well. External, you said? Yeah, external. I bought a 2TB.

It's like USB 3, but it's not some backup drive. It's on Seagate. It's $85. I keep waiting for somebody to do benchmarks to decide how good a drive should I buy.

What should you actually get? I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Even if this doesn't work out for a PS4, I could use an external 2TB drive for something. Was this a drive that was recommended?

It was blue. I was like, hey. No, it's a... Actually, I think it's a Western Digital.

It's a MyPackUp Pro. It's a tiny-ass laptop-looking drive. Those were my key successes. I keep thinking about if I got a 4TB drive that plugged the power in as fast.

I need to get a new power strip if I want to plug anything else in near that zone because it's just packed. So BuzzPower was definitely where I was looking. So I went through that process and then just downloaded a ton of games because I suddenly had way more room to do so. And then found myself playing Super Reign for a good long time.

And yeah, I don't know. This is not a benchmark or anything like that, but I will say that stuff loading off that drive seemed fine. I have seen a few reports saying that doing some of the speed stuff, it was not a great-looking benchmark that I was looking at, but it was someone starting to do the numbers on it. And it looked like there is potentially a benefit.

You just plug it in and the PS4 goes like, do you want to format this or what? I'm like, yeah. I gotta do that. I feel like I can have one game on that system at a time.

I had to delete Final Fantasy recently and it's like, oh, no, no, no. That was apparently the 2D Brawler thing that we were talking about on UPF or something. That is what they replaced Chapter 13 with, like a Final Fight. Because of this Final Fight game is what I hear.

I did read you can access that straight from the menu of the new chapter. I got five hours into Final Fantasy and I still kind of want to go back and play it. I feel like I got maybe an hour and a half into it. I got the fishing still.

Maybe not. I like it in my notes. I like playing them. I want to get out of here and spend that too.

At 4K. Do you run WoW at 4K? I can, really. Yeah, I can.

It's a little choppy, but I'm sorry. Sorry. Alright, we need to talk about the news. There's actual news to talk about and 90% of it came out of Activision Blizzard in one way or another.

Destiny 2. You won? Sure. Yeah, they announced it.

I guess because of Leech. It's been in the process of Leech for like the last year. Well, it's like promotional materials got out. Yeah.

Photographs of posters and stuff like that. It was always known it was going to come out this year, right? Yeah, basically. I mean it got delayed out of last year so there was always a chance that maybe they're going to skip another year.

But not a lot to know about it. They went with a Numeric 2 and not a Roman 2. Which looks kind of shit. I feel like that logo actually looks kind of weirdly cheap with that 2 somehow.

That could change probably over time. Yeah. Maybe. The poster is that it looks like the city is on fire.

Right. It's trashed. And then they put out this teaser trailer. Yeah, so the teaser trailer just came out like minutes ago.

So they burned the original Destiny to the ground. Basically. If that's the metaphor, that's pretty smart. Yeah.

We just raised everything we did before and rebuilt it. The teaser's got the Nathan Fillion robot drinking a bar. It's a real weird vibe. Yeah.

When you think about what Destiny is. He's like country western playing in the background. He's cracking. Yeah, it's a weird vibe in that thing.

Supposedly the actual reveal trailer is coming on Thursday. Oh, is it teaser for a teaser? Yeah. According to this.