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Start your free trial today. Welcome everybody to the Giant Bombcast. It's us, your three-hour party people. Yes, that's right.
Yeah. After the three hours, I'm done. That's it. I gotta go.
That's right. I'm Jeff Kersman. Jan Jerome Ochoa is here. And he's in trouble.
I thought I was in trouble. I really thought I was in trouble. I can't believe this. What would you do?
You gotta bring enough watches for the whole class. What? We get trench coat? Yeah.
I'm not sure. Yeah. As a child, I really liked trench coats because I thought they were hella sick. And then now as an adult, I like pounds of watches.
I mean, we were of age around Matrix time. So, like, we were very susceptible to that propaganda about trench coats before. Jess Ryan is here with the Matrix chatter that you crave. That you crave.
And the goth chatter. I feel like in the early 90s, this is like kind of like my late high school or early to mid 90s, my kind of post-high school pre-working, well, I was working anyway. Like, I wanted to get, like, is it a peacoat? It's like a trench coat that basically goes down to about your knees.
It's not like full length. So, it's like a kind of a duster. Okay. A peacoat can definitely, like, sit right above the kneecaps.
Yeah. No. A peacoat? A long ass note.
My ex bought a duster, like a cowboy duster. Okay. We lived in Hoboken. Yeah.
And he had a cowboy duster. And he had a katana. He didn't accomplish it. And he had toe shoes.
And yes, he was a programmer. Why do you ask? Yeah. That's a...
Did he also do the devil sticks? Oh, you know, he... I think he used to and he didn't have it anymore, but I think he... I see devil sticks in the...
All the boxes here. Let me say you're better off without that. Yeah. He was very unique in a very stereotypical way.
Okay. Was it toe shoes, like the individual toes or like the ninja? Individual toes. God, those fucking...
Well, um... He wore those to a fucking wedding. I shit you not. Oh, yeah.
He's awesome. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a cool dude. Sounds awesome.
It's rad. It's a rad guy. When you threw that, it was like so unkind. I was so patient.
How do you not... Where is this guy now? What's going on? You broke up with me.
That's what's fucked up. That's what's fucked up. That's how long I was obviously... What is that?
How many birthdays have we been together and you didn't purchase me new devil sticks? What the fuck is going on? We're done. I want to wear that kind of like knee length trench, whatever you want to call it.
Not a duster. This is different material. And then jean shorts. You know?
Yeah. Come on. That was a look. That was a fucking West Coast look.
That was a... Hey. No trench code. You've owned a trench...
I feel like you're of an age where you owned a trench or at least had an opportunity to become that person. I mean, sure. We're all faced with that at some point in our lives where we look down at a fork in the road and we go... We're going left.
We're going right. We're going down the middle. Clerks is big. I'm in New Jersey.
Who else more than me felt the pressure to assimilate with the Kevin Smith population? I feel like Jason. You feel like Jason? No, I feel like Jason has all of these objects.
Yeah. All these objects of power? Yes. Yeah.
He's definitely won a trench with a long ponytail. Not the toeshoes. No toeshoes. We know about the ponytail.
That's been documented. No, I never... Clerks came out when I was like 11 or 12 maybe. So as much as I saw that pretty soon after, it was still above my purview.
I had friends that like... I had a friend who worked in a video store and they shot their own black and white fucking bad public access thing called Video Store Massacre where everyone gets killed at the end and they just do a bunch of bad effects. And it was... Yeah.
No, that was... Yeah. Clerks hit hard. Clerks left a lot of damage in its wake.
Is it at the Clerks convenience store? I don't know why. I did too. I have a photo somewhere of me standing in front of it and someone across the street looked at me and went...
I took a picture of me milk mating. Okay, nice. And I took a picture next to the bathroom like... I gotta say, it was really...
Podcast listeners can't tell but I'm doing finger guns at the door. Jesus. I gotta say, it was really interesting to see just how impressionable the Kevin Smith sort of era... I don't want to end it.
I don't want to say it's over. But like in the renaissance, in that golden era, right? Of like 90s, early 2000s. It really had such a resonating effect.
I went recently to Red Bank, New Jersey, which is... Even though it's not where, you know, that movie was shot. It is sort of declared like Kevin Smith H. That's when you opened a comic book store, right?
Comic book store, yeah. I think I don't know if it moved. Also, Red Bank is like, very nice. Yeah, very nice.
It's amazing. So anyway... No, maybe it is, but it is just very nice. Every now and then you slip into Borat, whether or not you want to.
Sorry. It's a part of life. So I went to go see a show there recently. This Hulu program I really like called Letterkenny.
He was doing a live thing there. And if you've watched Letterkenny, you're like, oh, these guys are obviously obsessed with like Kevin Smith, you know, stuff. Because the entire show is dialogue. It's like quick dialogue based and just insane inside jokes.
So when I was there, they're all on stage, you know, after the show ends. And they're like, everyone's applauding. And they all took their turns being like, it's so amazing to be here at Red Bank. And they're all wearing hockey jerseys.
And they're like so jazzed about it. And it was really nice to see that. Like how impressionable. That's pretty cute, though.
It was. It was great. They're all legit. They're like shoe Canadians, right?
They're not. They're all legit. You know, there's a sincerity there that you can't fake. Oh, like the best part was they were talking.
One guy was like, I love Bruce Springsteen. And everyone's like, yeah. And then everyone started doing the Bruce chant, but it sounds like boo. And because they're not from here, they were like, why are you booing us?
We're not going to Canadians. Very good. It was really like, it was really a special moment. I got to say Canadians being confronted with New Jersey in the most direct, impactful way.
Pretty great. That's so. It was great. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know. I feel like there's like a roadmap of like. It's like, well, I'm trying to think like, what is the full?
It's like, it's, it's. You're talking about our Mount Rushmore? No, not the New Jersey. But like the, there's the like the, the roadmap of influence from like clerks.
And then somewhere Fight Club is on that line over out here. And CKY. Like there's just some kind of like. Boondock Saints.
Yeah. Well, yeah, sure. I guess so. Yeah.
There's probably some kind of force on that road, but, but yeah, I don't know the exact specific type of person that you can kind of fucking create out of those influences. And I met almost all of them. Yeah. They're all, they're all, you know, between the ages of 35 and 45 and 35 and 50 right now.
Like that's who those people are. And they're still talking fast like those movies and still making the same references they made then. They are. I got to say you put Wayne's World in there.
Just like a little. Sure. Yep. Like chapter zero, kind of like Wayne's World over here.
Yeah. Sure. Absolutely. Michael Myers wasn't well liked at SNL.
I just learned this. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't know that.
He just looked really like keeping to himself and just kind of stuck to like really just embody those characters type of deal. He wasn't like super popular backstage. He kind of did his job and did it out. Interesting.
And then I went and watched all of them. He wasn't doing coke with everybody else? No, just a solo coke. Solo coke.
Excuse me. I'm just going to. Solo coke. I'm just over here.
I did watch a couple episodes of his pentavarit thing on Netflix. Pentavarit? Yeah. It's about.
Pentavarit? So if you've ever seen So I Married an Ex-Murderer. Mike Myers plays his father in that. What's the word pentavarit?
Pentavarit? It's just, it's referring to like a five litered Illuminati. Like the pentavarit. So his dad.
I think it was a day calendar assumption. I don't know if it's a real word, but in So I Married an Ex-Murderer, his father tells this like conspiracy theory about a pentavarit that is run by these five global leaders. And I don't know if that was like the inception point for what this show is on Netflix, but that is, like you go back and watch that 25, 30 year old movie and they specifically talk about the thing that the Netflix show in 2022 is exactly about. And I thought that was a kind of funny little.
That's weird. I don't know. It's weird, right? Isn't that weird?
It's a weird thing to hang on to for all those years and be like, I'm finally getting back to it. Finally, someone has given me the budget to really explore that one of that throwaway line of dialogue. It's funny. Who put out the Austin Powers video game?
The one in the game? Rockstar. Rockstar. The random people, also known as the Austin Powers people.
Because I was thinking with all this multiverse of stuff and like, you know, the melding of properties, how come Austin Powers hasn't wound up back in a video game somewhere? Can we make a GTA that takes place in the 60s and you play as Austin Powers? Pretty much. I mean, there is the London 1969 add-on for GTA 1.
He'll find his way into Call of Duty. Like he'll just. What do you think about Shrek or Austin Powers? Honestly, like, Shrek almost seems too normal.
Activision publisher games, I think. So there's, you know, there is some, yeah, there is some kind of dark lineage. I feel like it's going to happen, right? There's going to be some kind of Austin Powers renaissance, whether we want it or not.
And I'm going to say, I don't. I think his Pentaverse show is pretty much that energy. Okay. Yeah.
All right. So maybe it leads to, maybe that energy then leads to him finding a way to bring it back for real. And I don't. I think he could muster.
I think there could be an appetite for that. I'm not saying me personally, but. Sure. But I feel like there's just a, there's a Duke Nukem-esque funk on the Austin Powers character when you try to bring it forward.
I mean, obviously the Austin Powers character is a character out of time brought forward, but I feel like bringing it forward again. Now I get it. Now I get it. Now I get it.
I'm like, oh, cool. I know. Every now and then I will catch like 20 minutes of that, of one of those movies. And like, there's some good jokes there.
Yes, absolutely. The movies are all right. Yes. I feel like I saw that third one.
It was just on every time. And this is, you know, what happens when you live with roommates, I guess, is just like they're watching TV all the time and you're just walking through rooms and it's just like the same five movies because, again, I had a roommate who all he did was get high a lot and it seemed like the same TV was on every single time. And I just saw a lot of Goldmember. Just some individual scenes of Goldmember.
Like as I walked through rooms, I was like, oh yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, no, that's, yeah, Smoking a Pancake. That is funny. Smoking a Pancake.
And it really burned me out all the time. I feel like I was pretty neutral too positive on Austin Powers until like that year of it being on Showtime or whatever every fucking five minutes and just catching Goldmember over and over again. And just be like, fuck this, god damn it. If it was the spy who shagged me, do you think it would have had the same effect on you?
I don't know. Because if the Goldmember is the weakest of the trilogy. Yeah, it probably is. Yeah, it probably is.
But it's just a different... It's a trilogy, right? It's a trilogy. It's a trilogy.
That first movie is 25 years old. Yo, Elizabeth Hurley in that? As a young child? Oh, what's up?
What's up there? Freaking Heather Graham in the second one with her cute little bunny teeth. It's all good. It's no Boogie Nights, Heather Graham.
It's no Boogie Nights. It's no Roller Girl. Boogie Nights. Boogie Nights.
I apologize for still talking about Austin Powers in the year 2022. But do you think, what is going to come sooner? A remake of Wayne's World? Or, like, not a remake per se, but, like, it's just those two right now or Austin Powers?
Well, they already did. They came back. Yeah, but they did. They did do Wayne's World schtick, like, for commercials and stuff.
And for SNL recently, yeah. Oh, no. There was... Dana Carvey and Mike Myers did schtick on...
It was in the last four years. I'm pretty sure they did an SNL bit. They definitely did, like, an Uber Eats commercial recently. Okay, yeah, yeah.
I don't... I think Austin Powers... Like, they've done Dr. Evil stuff.
I don't... Yeah. You're absolutely right about that being, like, the first stop on the fucking road map because if it wasn't for Wayne's World, I would not have started a public access show. There you go.
Right? He's going to have, like, a little... Are you trying to get views in the Alco? Like, that's the thing I'm watching.
He's going to have a little warning in Spotify. Follow and subscribe. Just, like, hit that button. He's going to have a cold warning in Spotify.
It's like, all right, don't listen to this. You know, you've got to be wary while listening to this podcast here. Oh, fuck. Spotify's going to make their first movie, and it's going to be Wayne's World.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's just going to be, like, the no stairway joke. Because that's the only thing they've got.
What happens first? Either of those two or a new Back to the Future? I don't think we see... I think we see a new Back to the Future.
It is a reboot. It is a different cast. It is... Yeah.
Yeah. I don't think Zemeckis would do it. I don't think Zemeckis would do it. I don't think Zemeckis would do it.
Do you want to count some shitty fucking eight-episode thing for some fucking streaming service as being a back? Because I think that is possible. Yeah, but don't forget, that is just as prestige as a feature film in 2022. I think there's something legally that they need all the parties to do it.
How could it be forever, Jen? There's no way that's forever. Yeah, I mean, it can't be forever. If it's a content cartoon, and they did one of the Telltale game, it came along years later, years later.
I always meant to check that out. That was positively received, right? The game? Yeah, it was...
I remember people digging it. I didn't spend a ton of time with it. Was that pre-Telltale oversaturation with those foul games? Yes, it was.
It was the beginning of it. Yeah, it was definitely coming. You could see it from there, maybe a little bit, but it was a little bit before everything went super sideways for them. But yeah, I don't know.
I guess in the context of if you think of Back to the Future as being alongside something like Ghostbusters and look what they've done with Ghostbusters, then I guess there's a million different ways to reboot that thing and do something different with it. It's always like, some kid finds a demorian inside in a barn, and it's got a cowboy hat on it, and there's always... I'm just like, there's no doubt in my mind we'll see that brought back. If it means the Back to the Future ride comes back to Universal Studios, he took it out a long time ago.
It's the Simpsons ride now. It's been out for like eight years or something. Oh, what is that? A timely, a time-adjacent thing?
That's weird. I might have been... No, I don't think it came out for when the Simpsons movie came out. Did it?
But that's the whole Simpsons-themed area, most taverns there. Which is odd, now knowing that Disney technically owns... I had, I'm not gonna lie, not exaggerating, the best donut of my fucking life at the Simpsons, like, food court or whatever. Very good, shit.
It was this big. It was like a foot across. Too much donut. Too much donut.
Strawberry with the frosty strawberry, and it was huge, and it was like cheap for being like the biggest donut you've seen in your life, right? It's like a donut to share, right? I'm a glazed boy. Oh, it was so good.
It's such a shareable donut. Oh, that one. Did you go, has these on too? think that's fair yeah okay yeah that's reasonable or what if it said you just got four there you go yeah you go yeah sure i feel like that's the corner it was this thick it was like five inches thick and like 12 inches why why four funnel cake stack yeah that's more and it was way better than it had any right to be in the center of the center of that thing consistency wise it would be a nightmare it was perfect it was so it was so fresh it tasted just like a size of regular really good donut like the consistency was perfect i couldn't believe my taste buds it was amazing you're so much around the corner i'm starting to think about funnel kicks again everybody um i also think like uh i was going to go into a little rant about like i want a home solution for funnel cakes but then there's got to be a better way but also at the same time it's like yo maybe you should just leave those exclusively for summer because you're like a human dumpster if you try and do that shit at home i think you just need a deep fryer yeah in two months we put it out through the world it's gonna wind up at trigger joe's okay yeah i'm speaking as a human dumpster i'm gonna say uh you probably don't want to do that year round um but also speaking as a lazy human dumpster you don't want to deal with the cleanup of a fucking fryer and all the fucking shit like it's not worth it once you go fuck this i'm gonna go boiling oil is one of the scariest cooking adventures you can go on like deep frying stuff hot hot oil is the scariest shit ever it catches on fire if it's too hot it's really scary to put out yeah i'm gonna put it in my basement in like the unfinished part of my basement where like you just you know everyone's got a part in their house where you're like i don't care what happens here it's just fucking it's just like the worst place where all the bugs live it's where all the bugs live and all like the appliances shit like whatever so i would deep fry shit in that room that room sounds more flammable than most rooms as a result yeah i mean you know all right i'm gonna pour that hot oil on my foot and then super kick someone with it oh and then and then a bad time good idea good idea bad spot fucking bring a fire extinguisher if you're gonna set your foot on fire in a wrestling ring bring a fire extinguisher this is like fucking easy shit it's yeah yeah yeah it's it's bad heat it's bad heat dumbass all right let's talk about some video games the music is playing all right great golf gang oh man golf gang uh golf gang is out on steam it's extremely fun um so good the default mode um is one where is a combined race against time and number of strokes so it kind of averages out your grade based on how fast you can do it in the least number of shots and it's uh i'm playing with a mouse it does have some kind of controller support but it's like a billiards game kind of pull back the mouse to cock it and let off the button to shoot and um it's very fun it's a fun mini golf game with really good courses and we played it on the show on friday and got into the modifiers a little bit and i think that's where the the true genius of it lies like there is this kind of like when you are playing competitively collisions on by default and so you can knock all the balls around and all that sort of stuff but you can turn on exploding collisions you can turn on low gravity you can turn on the ability to jump which is not a cool down which just creates a bunch of additional fun chaos uh all that stuff's built in uh and it does have seen workshop support there's three or four different courses of varying degrees of completion in the workshop right now uh that i think we're gonna check out tomorrow on friday uh when on wednesday we're gonna get live and take a look at some golf gang get live um it's uh it's really well made it's a really simple i know they've had some patches around like lobbies and some of the matchmaking stuff maybe being funky um we didn't have any trouble getting in a game um when we played on friday so i don't know about that but like the the actual playing of that game super fun i was i was really impressed with it uh yeah the mechanics they start adding in even in the later levels is is odd and it winds up working which is fun uh there's like a gliding mechanic i believe in like the third or fourth world there's a hang glider you can go through a ring and gives you a hang glider for a set amount of times you kind of like have full ball control to glide over the next area ball full control my whole life full ball control just a certain amount of support that a guy needs and with offer code bomb you can wait okay you can bingo your way that's right um and like there's a ton of these these multiplayer golf games and you know some of them are here to miss but this one i think because of the uh the charging mechanic or whatever and just how fast-paced it kind of it increases there wants you to be yeah uh it's it lends itself really really well with the multiplayer yes yeah it's a good it's a good action golf game it feels good to have been more and more of those over the last you know a few years here of people trying to break golf in different ways and i appreciate the way this one breaks golf for multiplayer i'm going to say this golf might be the best sport to turn into a video game you know you're willing to let go of the boring real life mechanics yes sure the possibilities are endless i think even you know they got too serious like like all sports video games they got way too serious and way too real but like there is that sega genesis era pga tour golf totally it's just fucking golf it's just a dude swinging clubs and stuff but it's still like a really good relaxing and not difficult to understand video game and then at some point they're like they just added a few too many mechanics and a bunch of it's too real got too real for me i'm not into it um i haven't seen any windmills i mean there's moving pieces on these golf courses but i you know in the mini golf pantheon i feel like you need an actual windmill in there somewhere uh to really to really bring it home yeah the other thing they're missing is like a little track that the ball would go through you know the follows like you put it into something and then it's just like oh where are we going with it that'd be good that'd be good um and yeah i don't know the whole thing has kind of a monkey ball-esque quality to it as well i think just you know because it is vaguely chaotic uh and i've always said that about you yeah uh vaguely monkey ball-esque vaguely chaotic um the control stuff i feel like um i want to be able to i want to be able to like successfully do something locally with two players and i just don't know if that's going to be a thing how could you like yeah exactly two mice connected to one computer or a land situation if you got into the controller aspect of it because it does it does play with the gamepad if you want to then this is easy as doing split screen but yeah i so for whatever reason it like wasn't enjoying my gamepad but that could just be a one-off um but yeah it's uh it's just the right kind of right kind of chaos yeah uh yeah it's pretty fun if you've got people you play video games with that might be one worth playing with them i guess um let's see i also got into the closed alpha for multiverses oh which is the warner brothers platform fighter oh that's what it's called yes uh multiverses i see who's the early main who's the review or i guess who's the mario of this game um i um i've only played a few i've uh i've heard it's taz okay for taz is too op okay and finn has a very good like down b move in the dog or spin the kid okay i played as a dog and uh jake and thought he was pretty good too but uh i don't know they are you know at some point like hey they're making a smash brothers game and i feel like we have spent a good long time talking about how those are fucking pox upon society and so on so forth um i don't know this is uh this game i will say it seems like better than i initially expected having seen some gameplay a month or so ago and i'm looking at it like this looks fucking abysmal and even through the tutorial where they have you play as wonder woman and shaggy there was something about the movement with those two characters that i felt just felt fucking terrible um just too flitty too light just scary in a way that just like the characters had no weight to them or anything and just the analog stick movement was just ramped up to full speed very quickly like dead zone stuff just felt really odd to me um and so at first i was like this seems shitty and then i started switching characters up and trying some different stuff and so i got a jake i told his name is jake uh i was like okay the movement here seems a little bit better this seems a little bit more in line uh this seems a little better and i started having a bit more fun with it they are trying to have like a two v two team focus for the game so i got abilities that play into that that is such an odd choice i think you gotta find you gotta carve out something right because otherwise you're just making smash brothers or brawala or you know whatever like every other game does that already so at least try to they do have the option for 1v1 so it's not like they're dissuading you from doing that i think it's on them to make those abilities things that like if you're not playing co-op are then useful so like wonder woman has a lasso that will grab enemies and pull them over to get hit but will also grab allies so you can pull them out of danger so that's cool so there's another character there's a big fucking dog a big floppy like a big clifford no it's not clifford i wish it's marmadue no it's not it's nothing i had heard of scooby-doo that's the one scooby-doo who's that guy no i don't know it wasn't droopy dog was it rain dog is that a thing rain dog oh that was a character made for the game originally for the game so i guess that's why i didn't recognize which is weird and so i believe i believe rain dog has a it's like the lasso it says they beam you attached to the other player and then when they're attached they can just go fucking crazy and jump off the edge to try to knock someone off knowing that you the dog can pull them back and save them from dying it's half reindeer half dog oh yeah that's what it is yeah it's not like mortal kombat's rain but you're a good friend of his you want rain dog yeah he can't like control the weather as far as i know but so that's an interesting idea right because it then lets you play like way crazier if you're attached to rain dog oh he's got cute you could be like a support player yeah kind of yeah they actually do flag a couple of characters that supports oh so they're kind of like i think trying to accommodate that conceptually and it's a neat idea um but yeah i just i don't know that i'm i'm never going to get into that game deep enough to care about the 2v2 team comp stuff or any of that shit so um so it's all probably kind of lost on me um netcode seems okay for what you want i only played a couple matches and they were they were fine um i gotta ask are the characters like verbally emoting yeah and everything there's a lot more speech like the characters for better or worse are a lot more lively than they were in that game i think i'm just like there's a part of me that is just like somehow um i'm morally opposed to this ultra instinct shaggy thing that uh that came up that they have then tried to capitalize on years later uh is big chungus in this game bugs bunny is and i'm gonna say maybe i don't know is his like ultimate move being big chungus i don't know i don't know i don't actually i don't actually have the answer that question i tried but he was like he does not i don't like the way he plays so um but yeah i don't know like you know velma's in it and loses her glasses and you know like they they are trying to capitalize on what those characters are known for in ways that uh you know seem authentic for for whatever that's worth except except for like the again like this you just hold down a button and shaggy just fucking goes and then seems to do more damage for a period of time and i just oh also yes uh aria stark is it what oh you know the warner brothers uh it's like a cartoony version of this game of thrones character it's fucking bizarre is she like a link sort of shadow i don't know i didn't play it was weird that was weird when does gumby get his own spot fighting game fox launches their nft fighting game um oh god count down the days yeah uh they'll figure out a way to get gumby out there yeah sure who owns who owns all the interplay ip we can bring back clay fighter we can finally get gumby in instead of character who looks just like a bootleg gumby um the crossover of the century yeah finally ikiba clay and gumby and then block heads yep yep yeah the 2v2 block heads versus gumby and prickle oh wait prickle was who prickle was a dinosaur looking guy oh right and then pokey was the horse right yeah i've been watching gumby recently i gotta i gotta recommend it it's a it's a time it's a kind of clay horror it was on nickelodeon for a lot of years when i was probably a little too old to be watching fucking gumby but i sure did watch the fuckload gumby then like what the fuck is this it's so weird yeah that's why i hate playmation i also love how pokey's like such a coward he'll just like peace out with episodes sometimes be like never mind his eyes out of his head and then just bolts and they're like he didn't want to animate him shivering in the background so we just had to leave yeah skitters around like a cat weird idiot he is good uh multi-verses i don't know like i said you know from from seeing stuff on it for a little while now it seemed like a potentially extremely bad game playing okay this is fine it's i don't think it's for me oh but also it is like rotten with battle pass stuff and you as you level up characters you're unlocking perks for them that are just straight up like oh if you have this perk equipped you do 8% more damage on your horizontal attacks and stuff like that that's just like weird percentage type stuff that mortal kombat did something like that with or injustice did it with some of the gear system stuff in ways that were just kind of like annoying um but it was always kind of disabled and ranked or you didn't really use it as much in rank remember right um i i think i'm morbidly curious to see if this winds up uh occupying space in the competitive scene and just seeing how it's going to be done whether or not people will have like uh people to team up with exclusively right those types of team comms or if it's just gonna wind up being a solo game like how smash has become yeah or smash is sorry yeah that'll yeah i'll be curious to see i think some of that ends up being up to warner because they are trying to buy their i mean they're like funding pots at evo and like they're basically trying to make this a thing uh and they're trying to spend a little money to get it placed in various tournament settings and all this other stuff so for whatever that's worth they're willing to put up the money to try to buy their way into having a community but we'll see you know that only takes so far the game has to be good yeah um but the succession characters in this thing sure there was a larger leak like this build has all the characters in it there was some talk that like scorpion and sub-zero would show up in here eventually and you know warner has a lot of characters right up until they sell them all off um if they end up starting to sell studios then maybe that gets a little strange but um but animaniacs win sure that would be yeah i mean it's just it's like at some point it's just like who was in the space jam thing yeah exactly like just go all in with every single thing that was in that here's neo here's like they're already i feel like by throwing the game of thrones character in there i think that's like a boundary being crossed in terms of just like their willingness to just say fuck it we will we will draw cartoon versions of real humans we will throw fucking whoever the fuck we got in this thing i love semel's suggestion freakazoid they're never gonna do it they'll do it and it's gonna break your heart so why don't you even freakazoid by the way no no just bring that threat and then sleep alone yeah i don't know don't bring that because yeah i love freakazoid that'd be bad for a lot of reasons i think uh let's see um jan you've been playing some elect head uh-huh this came out a little while ago i got a little while ago yeah uh it was on one of those uh indie switch streams so i thought instead of waiting for it to come out on the switch i'm just gonna play it now because i have a person computer um it's one of those puzzle platformers where uh you you're a little chibi robo-esque character where whichever surfaces you end up touching whether standing on or uh wall sliding on you are electrifying that surface and that will occasionally uh change the environment so platforms will move stuff will start shooting out at you and that ties into the whole puzzle platforming aspect of it uh this is one of those games just like vvvvvv where i just want to try and break it in such a way where i just need something to just like zhuzh itself over it's like come on just move and then i'll solve this damn puzzle um but it doesn't do that it plays really strictly with its rules you eventually get the ability to shoot your head off to electrify other stuff while you're moving the body around and everything um and i want to be eating it and then i looked at the collectibles and it turns out i know i technically haven't really beat it i've completed these levels but i've only wound up finding two of these these little special remotes um so i may invest more time in it i do like when you reach a dead end you have to illuminate a television set or screen and just a big picture swoop this sounds like x it is nothing like this this is gex uh just not every game with television edit is gex says you silent hill is that gex there's tvs in that it's a little bit gex bug 2 is more gex than most things honestly um yeah it's any little platformer um if you were in the mood for it it did come out cash was it i think it was technically 2021 yes it's a while ago um yeah but cool idea with the whole like powering up platforms you walk on the platforms and the kind of logic behind the electricity stuff is pretty neat for sure it uh just just looking at the little character i move around just reminded me of chibi robo so much i just need more chibi i think we all need some chibi robo in our lives right yeah i mean you know i don't know what about jumbo robo huh all right you're also playing v rising oh my god what is the v what is the v and v rising vampires are back y'all fuck this yeah yeah we got to get out of the way of this i i the two vampire properties i'm down with the other one it is never going to be more than time uh and blade i think we all agree we're all down with blade we are all down with blade yeah always one two trinity yeah great uh triple h is not he's great in that movie for him you know yes he's great in that movie yeah uh v rising is like the the biggest bait and switch that i've ever seen um and i know that's a bold statement i'm gonna stand by it because when you look at the trailers it looks like oh this is like a vampire diablo i could kind of get into that um and it is nothing like that it is it is basically the v should just be valheim because it is a survival crafting base joint where you are chopping down trees as a vampire uh mining stones plant fibers and and sucking dudes off their blood their blood um and then you're crafting and building little bases and everything it can you suck dudes in your base you can lure them in you can definitely lure them in great um and and i don't know i wish it was not that because i'm kind of in the mood for a diablo like type of experience and then i feel like i've just really kind of um been burnt out on the whole crafting system because it's super deep into something like valheim this is they do encourage this being like a multiplayer experience yeah uh and i can quickly see this being fun with other folks and you're building a base and everything like when we were doing the checking on valheim for a while um but playing the single player just like playing valheim single player and kind of i don't want to say miserable but uh just be a tougher trudge uh playing it and everything uh because then everything takes so much more resources and whatnot and you build your base and you got to put blood crystals in it and everything um you have the option to make a pve world or pvp world um i believe the multiplayer does go up to i want to say eight or ten um i don't know it's the idea that like you're gonna play pvp with the same group of people for like months because you have you build your base on a server i assume yes yes so all right i guess you could uh it's that where you are it's open to the public so folks could just pop in or you have to protect it so folks uh it's just friendly or people you at least know um oh i guess it's up to 40 people okay never mind that sounds insane um the combat in it is not the best uh i've only spent like about like three four hours into it i have my little rinky dick base with like a coffin um i just think it's an odd premise because your vampire peeps obey laws of the vampires i guess so it's hard to go out in the daytime because you start taking hits yeah and everything just like in valheim there are random giant enemies that will spawn throughout the world and mess up your stuff and chase you into your base um i don't know i think maybe just the the presentation of it just being isometric diablo style kind of takes away from the wonder that you would experience in valheim right right yeah it's like valheim it's like the scale is super different so those giants actually feel like giants versus here you can actually see the draw distance pretty far with like the camera so you can see what's popping up from pretty far away it's like well that would have been surprising but i saw you like two minutes ago like chopping down the street stay away from from that area i feel like valheim was pretty good in terms of just like some shit came out of the forest that you were not prepared to deal with you know you're like oh fuck i didn't think this was in here i gotta go um like those were those were some pretty fun moments yeah it is a lot easier to build stuff in this versus valheim because of the nature of like the camera angle and everything yeah um because that was my biggest problem with valheim is uh just impossible to build stuff precisely sometimes it's like you get a hang of it and now i feel like if i went back to valheim now it's been i don't know eight months or something like that i don't remember how to do any of that anymore i would have to learn all of it all over again and now i'm good yeah there i didn't explore it too much but there there is a mechanic with depending on the type of like random civilians you wind up drawing blood from you change your blood type you are balancing like a blood meter uh and sacrificing that to your blood ulcer that you keep in your house i'll invest more time at rory i know rory's also playing it and having a similar experience to me but like kind of just wish it was more mindless loot gathering than building as a vampire it uh it's also wearing the vampire motif very very seriously and not like in a fun way it's like how are vampires it's like oh we're vampires okay nothing worse than a self-serious vampire self-serious suckers out here and making it happen in the streets i don't yeah i don't know that i have a lot of patience for for like that style of vampire lore i don't know that i ever did honestly like that's that's me man what what uh what we do in the shadows has done for vampires let me just tell you like vampire pr has never been more positive and they owe it all to that show i don't know steven dorf i feel like did a good a good job for vampires and you know blade yeah but i mean it's just been so long like yeah they need a new a new something or other not discounting that that that moment but now i mean yeah underworld kind of kill yeah momentum yeah like it's hey look i love underworld the first one okay i was gonna specify the whole franchise i mean let's go through it um sure the essence of vampire movies yes is morbius gonna gonna re-kill the vampire you know for her again i i feel like it's it's quickly working its way into like mean economy that no one's gonna i think it'll have zero effect on on anything long term it's just like people are gonna goof on it uh and most of them will goof on it without you having seen it and someday we will all forget about morbius yeah but i'm waiting i'm waiting i don't have an example on the tip of my tongue but like there are certain things that get thrusted they fumble and they they are just like clumsy success stories where they stumble to the top uh and jen go point to yourself but also like i don't know i feel like morbius might have that energy where it's like this shit's so dumb in bed we gotta make another one because it's almost like people just have to see how they didn't do it to the mummy remake well they didn't make a sequel to that and that was a real big stinker that was really funny to watch i still have hopes that the dark cinematic universe will thrive okay yeah that's uh jury's not on that one we'll see let me just say like uh just for like the balance of all things it is good that we're getting a couple stinkers here now right like just to create that balance that that popular entertainment so desperately needs like less stinker cats like it's good like a comic book stinker is good you know like not all fats are bad not all calories are bad calories like this is that uh sort of uh analogy if you will like it's we need this for the balance yeah someone needs to like look at a chart and go like oh we can't just throw any fucking goddamn thing out there we have to care about equality to a certain extent but it puts another another guard set guardrails on the whole thing you know so i don't know i i think i wind up liking valheim a bit more mostly because it just didn't take itself too seriously in the setting i don't think i can get behind the vampire stuff if anything it made me want to download dragon quest builders too sure uh you're gaming yeah just because like if i want to do a survival based building type of sim or whatever i don't think i want it under the lens of guys of vampires or whatever i'd rather it be like cutesy whoopsie like oh cool there's a slime guy yeah and these guys kind of look like little gokus totally the thing that was i think valheim i think a lot of valheim's comedy or whatever comes from the nature of the game itself because i feel like the lore itself is like super like look at our fucking fonts they scream viking fonts and look at this like i think that game that game takes stuff a little too seriously for my tastes too but i guess i'm probably misremembering my memories with it well it's like the the game itself is fucking comedy because it's like oh i'm doing a corpse run and i'm running a skeleton is now running after me and i'm running in a circle for 20 minutes just fuck this yeah but it's like ridiculous uh like the gameplay there definitely has some silly aspects to it for sure um because all the boss fights were super serious yeah there's definitely an aspect of just like okay we fucking like do we have the right shout or whatever enabled we have the right thing here go do this and do that and we have the right stuff and we need more of these and we gotta get on this boat and go here do this and it's definitely like a like that game's an ordeal right i mean when you're taking that game seriously it's like okay fucking strapping we're gonna go do this and eventually you i think figure it out and you can play it a lot more loose but i know in that the early goings for valheim it was a lot of just like all right i want to do this again so uh let's make sure we fucking get it right and get out here and make it and yeah i don't know i don't know i bet they added a billion things to that game oh for sure yeah i think i'm just missing like the wonder aspect uh in v rising yeah that i felt in rising yeah rising that's a vr game cool wait um hey you don't give me a vampire vr game yeah suck off dudes first person let me let me add them that's right let me add those dudes i think this is vr chat uh oh apex legends mobile came out i have played a little bit of that it's apparently doing quite well in terms of downloads and all that sort of stuff it's uh i'm playing with controller i'm continuing to play with controller i don't ever want to play any kind of shooter anything on the touchscreen like i get that like it works and they figured out sorts of ways to be like it automatically shoots when there's a guy in the radical you just gotta aim good and like some of the different ways they try to make those controls work more easily for a wider variety of players but i just don't want to fucking play a game that way it's so wild watching uh younger kids that are only acclimated to playing touchscreen fortnite yeah go at it yeah wow it's like it's very yeah no i know and so i opted not to in this and and tendered a playstation 5 controller to my phone and even then though it's and i feel like call of duty was the same way this is actually better in terms of just like how the shooting feels and stuff it feels a lot more in line with what you expect at apex mobile i remember once i wired up controller it was still floaty and shitty in a way in a way that it felt like a mobile game um touchscreen styling and not like oh when i hook a controller it becomes proper call of duty or or whatever apex feels a lot more in line with like when i hook this controller it plays the way i expect apex to play um and um dr sunches in chat says someone here needs to try the backbone if they make a backbone that works i have to take my fucking case off every time i want to fucking controller up maybe i would yeah piece of track like what like oh hang on i want to play a video game let me crank my case off and then hook this thing up and oh wait the bus is here i gotta go like it's the dumbest shit yeah i i bought uh i think i mentioned this in uk or whatever i bought like a razor kishi kishi yeah and the biggest drawback with that thing it works well but the biggest drawback is like i gotta take my case off yeah dude like who's gonna do like this is crazy it's crazy at least make the controller should be part of a case be like okay this comes with a case you can keep on your phone permanently and then this controller works with this case and have to be a very smallish normalish kind of case or whatever like i think that makes sense but anyway it is hard to look at your inventory and stuff on a small screen even though they have made those screens bigger over the years i definitely was like i should play this on my ipad instead and then i was like i should just go play real apex legends if i want a big screen what am i doing um but yeah i don't know it's a whole new progression and it's like your stuff doesn't carry over it's not like you all unlocks it it is a different uh like it aspect of the later seasons of apex like what they fabricators like some of the other stuff that you can find that is this kind of after i stopped playing a lot of apex so i'm not super familiar with all of it but um they control pretty well and uh in the first couple matches which are the matches where you have a fucking bunch of bots in it and stuff i'm sure like any like any proper battle royale game um shooting feels fine on controller and all that sort of stuff so you know i don't know if you're if you are the sort of person that wants to play a mobile shooter which i you know again there's a lot of like okay am i gonna be on the road doing a thing because i'm sitting here in front of all this i know it's i don't need i don't really need that but also like you know i don't know you're not i feel like the last time i got really engaged and i know this is kind of like overlap with what it's like playing the switch for extended periods of time like fucks your neck up like you can't i know this is in general like you know my kid was playing the the rocket league mobile game which is pretty good it controls well and i think it's i think it's also a very interesting like different dimension for mobile where it's like this was really thought out in a clever way and it's and that's sort of great but i just i don't know like you just get like neck chin and you just sort of turn into jelly a little bit and i realize you can have that happen when you play switch but not so much because you can also like position the screen away and make your life a little more comfortable but i just can't i can't see anyone really you know snuggling up for an extended period of time playing a shooter i know that's maybe some old man shit but it might be old man stuff yeah you mentioned kids think about how many parents are playing apex legends mobile while they're waiting for their children now like that's that could be a market that's dozens yeah three dozens perhaps so you're not playing uh there's no cross-platform button no no this is a separate this is a different game uh see now now i might be enticed to do it because i wouldn't want to play against anyone no you're not right like that terrible experience and i hope they don't get to a point where like we've decided to merge or whatever but like yeah there is an aspect of just like hey also like and i'm sure this is like a i bet the people playing with touchscreen have gotten really good at aiming and shooting in a way like it's but in my head this is like a quake 3 for dreamcast situation of i bought the mouse and keyboard for the dreamcast and the broadband adapter and was able to murder everyone there's a part of this is like i'm gonna hook up this controller and fucking murder everyone because fuck a touchscreen um and i don't wonder how that will work out probably not i bet i bet the people touch screen probably aim fine and will probably fucking smoke it's like people that use the gyroscope in splatoon exactly just whereby or insane with the flick stick stuff and yeah there's a yes you want to talk about a generational shift in video gaming uh it's probably that right it's probably the like i'm gonna use flick stick in fortnight on controller or or whatever and i'm gonna look at that and be like no that makes any fucking sense to me it looks abysmal to play what's the battle pass stitch looking like it's got one okay it also like uh like call of duty mobile it feels like it is popping up five different things just like we're having a launch event and then also here's the battle pass and also here's this event happening over here click here to claim this and click here to claim this and then load this up and there's a little new circle next to this you should probably click on that and see what the fuck is there and you're gonna go like i don't know what's here i'm supposed to claim is it more skins is it more like fucking free currency what am i looking at like there's a certain aspect of it that like is under explained as someone who's never played a ton of a mobile shooter or anything like that it's always like in call of duty got really rotten with that stuff where i you know checked it out probably a year after it came out and i'm like it's just throwing nine different ads for nine different things at me and it's like i don't it's a good zombie gun skins and here's one that looks like a fire hydrant and you could fuck this one i don't even know if i'm looking at it at a certain point and apex it seems like it's like already kind of in that direction a little bit where it's like here's our launch week bonus thing and then you get this currency to unlock fade points or whatever i don't even know i don't even know what the fuck i'm looking at um so i don't know i think all those games need some kind of pass to make that shit understandable to normal people because i'm sure if you play a bunch of it you're like oh well this is this and whatever it's not actually that difficult but like coming in launch day or day two of being out and having it bombard me with that stuff i'm like i don't even know what the fuck any of this is what the fuck is this is is there a solo mode at all or is it still uh three um there was a handful of different modes but i don't think there was a solo mode in there but i'm sure they'll roll it in and out that's what you know they always everyone's always changing things up now well i'm downloading it now yeah it's it's it's neat it's worth checking out um i would just personally i'm only playing it i always still haven't installed because it has decent controller support um is anyone else playing rogue legacy 2 i beat the first boss and then i kind of took a pause on it i might have something happen i am like the second area and i almost beat the big giant double skeleton boss of that second area it's not that hard of a fight but the area that you get through to get it i hate it i just hate it plants right it's way more linear it's like it's like you're at the dock so there's water you're kind of kicking your way off but it is it is like run to the right to get to this boss fight it's not like here's this maze of rooms and all that stuff that i feel like is my favorite stuff from rogue legacy i get the person that gets back into that and stuff but like it's it's killing my desire to have more than one run at times so like i will load it up and be like all right here we go and i've unlocked teleporters so i can warp you know halfway through that zone that i hate so much and then get there and like okay all right get here and go go do it and and get to this boss fight and get very close to beating it and lose and be like that boss is not that hard i can just need to do one more shot of it and i think about what it would take to do that i want to fucking do it now and so i walk away from it and i come back later i still need to have that warm-up run and i never i just keep having warm-up runs and then never going back to do it for real and i get that game seems fucking cool i know people are talking about you jump past that area and unlock the boss or whatever but there's stuff you you want to beat that boss uh to open up and have it be done and so that's not really a great solution um and i just i'm just i feel like i am being yeah i don't know i'm not having fun with this part of the game and it really seems like the other areas from from what you can see of them because they you know a lot of the other areas that you have access to are like hey you can't get through here without a special ability you need this do this you need this do this um you can't really get too far into them so this feels like hey this is the thing you have to do to really proceed and you can cheese your way around it if you want to like fuck around and go a little further but like i i'm thinking about turning on the house rules kind of like adjustment cheat type stuff just to blaze past this part of it once and for all because i just don't want to fucking do it anymore it's actually i'm really loving everything else about the game but i've been but being forced down this path over and over again it's just like i just don't want to fucking do this and it's really bummed me out but yeah it still seems cool so i zoned in and beat that first boss many warm-up runs rather than just walking down the castle just make a beeline for it and uh god i think i just hit the fatigue really really quickly because i was really hot on the game when it when um i guess when it officially came out um but geez i think i think i probably should just turn on house rules maybe turn off some of the different modifiers because i'll be like man this character would be really good if i wasn't upside down right yeah like this is pointless or this was this is like here's a funny joke and i don't i'm not gonna play this way to get the 25 whatever the gold bonus is like maybe i gotta forget it um yeah i don't know and uh jesse you've still been putting some time into chrono trigger still good that's still good uh this game's funnier than i thought it would be honestly there's a lot of like really charming funny moments in it i love that there's a guy who's also a motorcycle his name is johnny and you have to race him to fast travel somewhere and if you fuck up you have to do it again it's like but i raced all the way there why am i back here um he's hilarious i just recently got the uh the time traveling ship thing so i thought i was going to fight the final boss and apparently you can just like go to 1999 and fight the final boss here but like good luck is what my partner said like you could but it's not gonna work out so like there's kind of plot things happening but you could just skip to the final boss it's like that's pretty wild i didn't think they'd let me do that so it's still really surprising i'm still really uh interested in what's going on yes the ship is called the epoch and i named it i renamed it i was gonna name it high wind uh to troll and also my partner uh but uh i also i renamed it epoch but i spelled it like tupac oh so that's how my naming convention is going right now so yeah and then the rest of the time i've been playing some game i can't talk about but there's gonna be an unfinished coming out about it this week so all right all right all right why don't we take a break we'll come back and we'll get into the news all right we're back and now it's time to get into the news hooray uh headlines from around the world of video games a little bit of a slow one this week everyone's getting ready to show june is literally around the corner absolutely yeah so like your corner is eight days yeah we are two weeks away from the video game announcements starting to happen in earnest and so as a result there's you know there's some stuff going on what if nothing happens right what if it's like guys you know what these games like no it's not happening everything's delayed that's um it feels that way feels like a plausible thing yeah that is a goof but damn yeah no this is uh that was yeah there's you know keely's been out there because he's been the headmaster the head wrangler for a lot of this stuff for a few years now and now with the pesky esa out of his way he's you know more or less running on a pose and he was out there over the weekend i think saying like hey there's gonna be less stuff like a lot of the publishers last year who thought that they needed to run a show realize that they don't have enough games to fill a half hour and so you know you'll see those games show up on whether it's like a microsoft type thing or keely's got his own show or i think ign has their own show um future has the thing that they always do their pc show oh okay okay um i got a press release for it that was just like it was it was more about the debit card that was sponsoring their show than about their show and i was like that's super weird but also congratulations on getting sponsored that's nice sponsored crazy um and and some other stuff so yeah i don't know there'll be places for games to turn up from publishers that don't feel like that they want to dedicate time to running their own show i guess is the is the point um but yeah we're gonna start getting that in a little bit here and stuff will happen you know i presume i mean with the delay and everything we will you know this is more like getting closer to three weeks away a little under but like microsoft is going to have to show starfield even though they just delayed it like presumably they had presentation in the works regardless of whether that game was getting delayed or not so they'll probably do something on that thing people seem to want to see more of that it keeps screenshots of it keep leaking out but i don't know uh they'll probably see that i don't know what they would show stars they don't have to render just black exactly yeah they finally found a way to have an acceptable frame rate on console version one of their games like what if uh what if all that was just black right could it sometimes be like a bluish sure you could go there okay more black you go where there's more black right go for it that doesn't really seem like a star field it seems like just a void the void between the stars exactly come on come on i'm sorry to call it space jam hello you heard hey jans uh turns out space is pretty big yeah okay turns out sorry bud wow i just felt so small totally damn well you know the milky way what if we call it the final cake galaxy what is it our game hell yeah delicious and i just want to walk for miles i feel like the naming rights of the galaxy should be up for bidding uh in a couple years here milky way's held it for a really long time and no one likes it's not the worst candy bar well it's the second word it's no mounds it's no almond joy but it's down there yeah it's it's it's d tier i don't yeah i agree for sure um but yeah i can't wait to visit the um you know boring company galaxy that's uh you want to find a way to get me on a spaceship out of here that would do it put me on here i don't care if i die before i get out of the galaxy just fucking assure me that at some point my remains will not be here with these fucking dipshits that's the right way to go that's the right way to go like having your remains frozen and thrown into space yeah so that's some lands on some alien planet billions of years from now and they just sort of like worship your frozen corpse or they take it as an act of war and go like whoever the fuck sent this here we're gonna blow them up yeah you exclaiming norman reedus sounds like like a new way to not say like jesus christ norman reedus norman reedus kind of troubles that joke or get himself into i don't know he's a motorcycle man lose lips with norman reedus yeah he's uh this is not the first time that he has basically said this but he did an interview with a publication called leo where he claims he is starting work on part two of that part two of that is the exact quote uh but he's out there claiming that he's currently working on death stranding 2 yeah they didn't learn their lesson the fucking first time out apparently it's because norman reedus doesn't know he's working on death stranding 2 i refuse to believe he's aware of what's going on when kojima's involved i think it's just sort of like he's like ah this guy's crazy i'll do whatever he says he's there for the art yeah yeah you know come on based off of kojima's twitter do you think he misunderstood it and kojima really just wants to watch paddington 2 with norman reedus i hope so yeah it was a movie that made him cry uh and he loved it so it's yeah probably paddington 2 and i can see a paddington mod and death stranding well instead of the baby you have a little paddington you're carrying across the country and he's just in marmalade in this game you're a baby yes and you're carrying a tiny norman reedus across a fucking weird beach princess princess beach princess fucking beach uh in the quotes from this interview he's kind of talking about the process of like making a video game as opposed to making movies and how it's different and some other stuff and he says it took me two or three years to finish all the mocap sessions and everything it takes a lot of work and then the game came out and it just won all these awards it was a huge thing so we just started part two of that oh it's so funny because like you know him being from like the world of tv and movies it's far less secretive you can say like yeah there's a whole but we got this whole roadmap this whole plan to have all these sequels 40 years from now and then like meanwhile video games are just like so freaking secret tight do not say anything so maybe that's just like a culture shock thing for him i think it's actually like in some ways it's way worse right because that secrecy does exist you have closed sets you have cases where like like think of the interview quotes that people give where they're like oh i can't talk about that or fucking kevin fager you know who the hell is gonna kill me you know like the the level of secrecy around all the fucking marvel movies all that shit like that video game level of bullshit is seeping into movies in that way i actually think it's more of and and i'm maybe i'm grasping a little here but to me it almost seems like actors don't respect the video games and they're just like oh yeah we're starting to do that like they just don't know they don't care enough to to keep it secret and they haven't been told they probably need to be told like a little more clearly like they don't fucking talk about this we haven't announced it yet actors seem incredibly busy so i don't think they have a lot of time to play video games yeah but it's why it's so weird when you find out that uh you know an actor or someone is a gamer it's peculiar i think there's a lot of downtime on sets yeah a lot of trailer to you know how many other actors like i guess let's say mainstream actors besides north and redis uh they've been tied to games lately i see well i see the professional gamer there was a guy who claimed he i can't remember who this is now but this was a story years ago but like there was someone who claimed they were going to be in the next mortal kombat game and then they weren't oh that's right they're like i'm the voice of john cage or something like that and and then that turned out to not be true it's like what was that like what were they doing that they thought they were doing the voice of that or and so there's always that situation of just like oh maybe kojima is including norman redis in his next project but maybe norman redis is so fucking detached he's just like whatever man let's hang out with him whatever the next game is he's just like death stranding was so weird and i'm sure it's not mocapped all in chronological order either and it's all like on blank sets with no props so it's like whatever you're mocapping and acting for it could be anything but maybe he's just presuming it's the second death stranding i don't know also where does that story go like do we need a sequel to death stranding no no no we do not but uh and then you know they kind of went on to ask a little bit about performance capture i thought this was more interesting because it's kind of like talking about the whole digital actor thing um it's less about hey there's gonna be death stranding but uh in fact this could be just an anecdote for the first game it's kind of the context is a little unclear in the interview um because they have that new 5g camera too where you yeah that one of those 5g cameras he's beyond everything you need to know right there right yeah at some point like that's the like oh yeah they got the 5g cameras 5g cameras is it conflated like what's that maybe they're maybe they're maybe it's also called 5g i'm gonna give them sure anything's possible um yeah anything anything's possible uh so you can see a green room and as it turns left it builds cities and as it looks up it builds the sky and you put that into a computer with dialogue i asked hideo do you ever need a camera crew or an actor ever again and he was like no you'll never capture the soul of a person you will always need an actor and i was like thank god you're telling me this i thought i was gonna be out of a job this is amazing by the way the fact that norman reedus and hideo don't have like a podcast like i feel like everyone slept i feel like everyone slept on this the first time around with their translators right like you can do it it would work i promise you we slept on that opportunity the first time around all this goofy interaction between these two was happening it was right there like what this needs to happen i want to start explaining things that he doesn't know anything about to a lot of people i want fly on the wall documentaries of kojima making games and like what what the hell is he doing how is he doing like the interactions between him and the staff and stuff like that because you don't really get to see that sort of stuff like you know i want that i want spinal tap but kojima koji pro edition yeah yeah i mean there's there are big crews on those games and you know it's i think we're even doing it right here a little bit like you know kojima is responsible for some part of those games and so are a ton of other people yeah would you want a camera there to ruin that mystique or something i love mystique being ruined give it to me um anyway uh kojima responded on twitter with a picture of him holding a spiked bat and uh vaguely threatening or maritas uh to which i think at that point you can just take that all to be his reaction i think makes it a lot more credible uh than than it would have been otherwise he has an old episode of walking dead on in the background as well this is probably yeah i mean this is probably old shots of of from like death stranding one times or something like that i just happen to have laying around me like that or maritas you know um yeah i have a hard time when i think about like a sequel to death stranding i mean sure you could do it but what do you do where do you take that story why he's all grown up yeah right i mean sure like you could but the that already kind of is yeah you're kind of the it's happened already yeah like that that bit of story is already kind of done or whatever so it's just like you're right i just i i you know and of course i'm gonna say this like i don't want that out of kojima there's no part of me that is interested in a death stranding sequel beyond the question well what do you do with it um and that's not enough to get me to play a game that plays like that if you have a dramatic departure gameplay wise um i think that universe that world that setting sure why not um you could tell another story in that environment i just don't think that that environment is all that interesting once once you're on the other side of the reveals that they have in that first game there's a lot more just like yeah i don't i don't care about what they do with this anymore i was morbidly curious uh not morbidly curious but morbidly curious about the director's cut of death stranding um just trying to envision what was perhaps cut from that game he did address kojima did address that and say that he didn't necessarily like the name director's cut because it doesn't imply that things got cut and this is more like we added some stuff it's not necessarily okay this isn't necessarily cutting room floor stuff in the traditional sense director's edition yeah yeah he had he had some fucking insane terminology that he was like what about this i was like no i don't think he's gonna i had the dumbest thought this morning maybe not dumbest thought i have tons of those um where i was driving home and was like i think your solid five might be one of the best games ever what sure you're allowed yeah go ahead it's really good and i should the story falls apart yeah i should name the director's cut one of those weird names that he's already used for you know director's cuts like subsistence substance yeah you know why why not yeah yeah definitely uh yeah mgs5 is really just mechanically rad like it right you just do so much cool shit in that game and i really enjoyed the dumb weird story too kind of like right up until you get to that jeep ride and like no one says anything you're like oh okay like what are we what hang on and all the weird you know unfinished content cut content all this was meant to go the game never over like all that fucking conspiracy shit i feel like everything that those people mined or made up or whatever always sucked way worse than what was in the shipping game uh so like it being an unfinished weird mess uh is better than the dumb shit that fucking came out of it but i i don't know the the final kind of moments of that where it kind of pulls back the curtain once and for all about who's who and the big boss thing isn't he uh and that gameplay like that's just a fun sandbox to get in and mess around in yeah i know this is like apples and oranges in this comparison but then i remember just really hating my time with red dead redemption 2 because it was so systems heavy and just takes so long to do any and everything and you could argue the same thing for any of the metal gear games but for some reason it works for me at least in mgs5 where like the system heavy is just so snappy yeah yeah i think with metal gear and this is this is i think one of the big differences for me when you get that big kind of sandboxy open world what can i do what can i get away with like i think i want a certain sense of whimsy sure in that like a certain amount of just like it has to know that i'm going to try to do the most ridiculous bullshit imaginable and has to have some interesting answers for that whereas red dead never wants to blink it never wants to win you red dead kind of just wants to be red dead all day long and that's it's anonymous at a certain point and just like it had you know like the first one had goofy dlc and stuff like that right yeah where they go we can put that over here here's where we can do our fun thing yeah just to take the stuff ultra seriously but i think gta i think does a really good job of kind of splitting the difference in some weird ways um yeah yeah they do the red dead just the nature of red dead you know because it's not car crashes weird explosions it's i can get on a horse like you get some ridiculous bullshit in that game like people have i was i was i took out all the really great glitches in that game like when that game first came out before it got patched and people you know npcs were flying around like condors and moving around like like coyotes and stuff i was like i want the whole game to be like this like come on yeah like give me a toggle to switch broken mode back on or something but yeah i don't know it's yeah yeah yeah i don't know maybe i could be into a death stranding 2 if it's radically different or that's my thing i'm a little upset that uh selfishly i guess that uh if this is it this is the next because you're getting like i suspect that that crew has grown large enough for this to not be the only thing they're working on you're getting an assumption that death stranding 2 will be a direct continuation with this with like all the same mechanics and stuff like that this might not necessarily be the case it might be returning characters but they're you know interacting with the game world different mechanically for all we know yeah that's the hope right i think in any aspect that's like if a large part of that game is hold down the triggers and walk down this hill so you don't fall like i'm no interest sam becomes the mayor and it's a city building sim sure sure at least you know that would be something different but like but i think that for me for something like that to work i think the story and that universe has to be a lot better than it is and i that so like you need to have a very different but also very rock solid like if you think about now you're solid to mgs5 how different those games are while ostensibly being you know still kind of self-action games and some other shit like it is night and day and some of that is system space some of that is like oh we've found out interesting new ways to have ai respond to your actions and you know behave in this larger environment and and all that sort of stuff but it still has fun with those systems the same way middle year solid one did and i think that's why i still feel kind of grounded in that like middle year 5 is a really good example of how to fuck all that up right they're like oh we've uh we've decided to go all in on this totally ridiculous side story thing it has none of the nuance none of the the fun touches that mild year solid had had up to that point and instead it was just like you're someone who doesn't get what make those games great making those games and man i finished that game goddamn the dust it's the dust the fucking dust oh my god you know i i could definitely see like the way we've we've positioned norman rius not knowing quite a lot about video game development he could have fun yeah it's great and i really do want to hear these conversations but he probably could be working with kojima on another project yeah he's just assuming his death stranding to and he might just be like we started part two of that might just be like oh the relationship between him and kojiko studios vis-a-vis mocap yeah but i mean the story though was like it won all these awards it was a huge thing so we just started part two of that like he's pretty directly talking about it it's way more fun if like he really has no idea he's just like i don't know they told me what's happening too and then it's put me on a plane and here i am and in japan everyone's talking japanese i think it's i'm assuming it's death stranding too they say my name's not sam anymore but i don't know i don't know he sees himself as like an auteur right he could just pull like a wes anderson and just have his troop we definitely see him as an auteur so like the question of how kojima sees himself i think is an interesting one we don't really i don't know if he sees himself as an auteur he does if he's a vampire yeah i just death stranding too is such a just a haunting haunted phrase a string of words that i don't like hearing like it just my ears oh no come on come on okay i gotta say i'm with you on that but i'm okay with it yeah you know voice of dissent here that's why there's a part of me that has to sit here and believe because they also post okay we're hiring that much openings and all such stuff and they moved recently i think to a bigger building so i think there's reason to at least speculate that they could be working on multiple projects at the same time and that's the only way because if they're like oh we're rolling right into death stranding too i'm like oh god the world is bad the world went bad whatever man what if he saves it i think hey you know i as someone who thought mel your solid one was like kind of underwhelming as a short video game but thought that mgs2 was fucking incredible sure he's done it before uh i guess that about mgs1 yeah it's like there's there's so many cut scenes it's like there are aspects of that they're like barely a video game what is it like being on the cutting edge of video games um i've been out here for years gracious gracious yeah no i i thought that the pacing and a lot of stuff at the time granted video games have changed around that game but like at the time that game like you got a psychomantist fight and you were not i'm saying i'm saying i'm not saying every aspect of it is fucking bullshit or whatever it's not you know a fucking sonic the headhog game or whatever but like but i think that like the pacing of it is there's a lot of cut scenes at a time when the playstation was getting into this insanely cut scene heavy territory where you had final fantasy 7 and you had all these other games coming out like movies now at a time that was not necessarily a positive you know that time that was like a kind of controversial movie just like i don't like my feeling coming away from metal you're solid i realize that this is probably actually wrong now but like my feeling coming out of that game was like this motherfucker should stop making video games and go make a movie if he wants to make a movie so fucking bad like fuck this like this is like i'd like to see what coaching would do if he made a movie i think it would not be great because i don't think i don't think his work is all that great in that realm it has to all be together because he has to be able to play around with the format of what is a video game and what is a narrative i think he benefits greatly from editing um i think you know he's not a solo actor he had other people you're working with he was working with and stuff like that that could cut some chaff off and i think if he did make a movie it would be 20 hours long because he wouldn't know how to edit it down and i don't know if he could make a good movie because the things he wants to do take too much time to do and can like only be done a video game format we can save quit come back later uh basically you know give him a netflix series yeah 26 episodes to figure something out like that would let him stretch out but again i think that like the whole thing that makes him interesting the whole thing that makes him someone worth talking about in this in any of these spaces is the way he melds together the non-interactive and the interactive and finding new ways to do that sort of stuff i think that's the area he's carved out and i think that's the area that those games that his games have done really well but like i didn't make mgs one like that well this was before that there were a lot of examples to draw from so it's a very different thing and it didn't hit as a welcome different it hit as a this is a boss fight boss fight boss fight go cool this key down so i can open this door and then three more boss fights and we're done a bunch of codex stuff and a bunch of cutscenes so it's a game that you sit there and watch damn uh more than you play and that is not necessarily a welcome thing that's not controversial i think i have a question go ahead dan i was gonna say give him an ar game i want to see a pokemon go but it's a finite ending because i feel like i mean if you could get those like a boktai fucking ar game it would be awesome so cool it was boktai was him wasn't it yes yeah yeah it all comes back to vampires damn you goji right sorry to get into the analyzing of your interesting opinion there you can go read that review that review still just um but it's yeah i mean like the playstation and all of that storage space like led to a sea change in a lot of games and you know think about i think final fantasy is an even more striking example where you've got these cases of like these were always long games but they were long games and cutscenes were just like kind of there in engine boom boom boom boom and then suddenly you've got like oh here's this big sweeping thing and you're like i'm just setting the controller down now i'm going like this this is a really fun video game it's always like is that why you come to video games well you said you liked mgs 2 a lot that stuff didn't really change much between mgs 1 and 2 i think the i think a lot of things in the industry had changed around that by that time because you'd see a lot more examples of that and that style of game making was a little more acceptable but also the great part about the great show of course we all changed but also every time i've gone back and played mgs 1 it's been like yeah this is not a good balance of game i did i played it but i played it once i played it once in like 1990 whatever six seven i don't know that's the right thing to do and a lot of times yeah and i remember it he jumps off a missile he doesn't fucking john who backflip off a missile it's so corny oh jesus christ jesus christ um yeah norman reese snake is snake is jesus i've come to find the mgs corny who heard it the best part about mgs 2 is playing with the expectations and all of the trailer stuff having sneak in it to the game but yeah like that aspect of the game and that willingness to do something that dramatic is where i reconnected with the games that that guy made because i thought metal gear on the ns was an amazing video game when it came out i'm fucking blown away as a kid playing that thing um and so melior solid in some ways was just like well this isn't even that like they didn't even make a game as good as that from a video game perspective in some ways um but mgs 2 like the and the storytelling goes off the rails in a way there that is fucking fascinating uh that still that is you know like people get all their fucking like oh kochima predicted that like you fucking get into the fucking end of mgs 2 you just weren't paying attention time actually uh yeah well sure yeah but if you look at today and you look at the fucking the explanation for why the s3 happened or whatever like it's it's fun um but yeah no the the way that the way that mgs2 fucks around with those expectations and all that shit like seeing the seething fucking anger out of that fan base i just wasn't fucking ready to handle it and was just like so fucking angry like for what i can take all the words you're saying right now and apply it to death stranding i doubt it i rest my case i doubt it uh because death stranding is actually just shit or wind waker wind waker's good i don't know what we're complaining about there people people just bitch about those art so well sure yeah no definitely i mean yes if you want to talk about like pissing off fan base like i'm for that all day long like fucking with people's expectations on that aspect and going like no we're like especially the wind waker holy shit i don't mean to fucking we're talking about three hours about nintendo fans that were just like i want my mature zelda are the most childish fucking morons on the planet absolute dipshits.
Fucking stupid. As someone who was in that room when that art saw got revealed, it was fucking incredible. You're like, oh my god, like, Wind Waker's fucking, like, look at this. How can you fucking come away from that and go like, ugh.
I want Link to murder a motherfucker. Fuck off. Like, stop playing video games. Go away.
Like, it's just like, ugh, my god. What year was that? Uh. 2003, too?
No. There's no way to know. I'm just seeing if we can come up. There's no way to know.
Yeah, he can't look this up. It was three. Blades will bleed. Oh, fuck yourself.
Um, straight up. And yeah, I think trying to bring Death Stranding out of that conversation is really misguided because that game's just straight up back off the board. I hope you hear him when Del Toro comes back. Yeah, sure, why not?
Me too. There's one of the text message tones that I think it's the one when Del Toro contacts you because everyone has their own chime. One of those is really fucking good and I wanted to pull it and make it my text message noise and I was like, oh, but I don't want to have to think about Death Stranding every time I get a text message. Am I misremembering or completely fabricating a story where he was just like, I'm never making a video game again after, I don't know, like his mo-caps.
I want to say like he... Del Toro was out? Yeah, like Del Toro was just like, that was painful and I make movies all day. I don't think...
Del Toro didn't do mo-caps though. He was just a face actor, wasn't he? I don't know. I want to say, again, like I said, I could be just completely fabricating that.
Was it Mads, was it? No, it was definitely not that. But anyway... Mads is always down to hang out and smoke cigarettes.
He's not. He's so cool. I don't know. I would with him.
Yeah, seriously. I would start smoking to hang out with Mads. I took a bad answer. Just chill with you.
Bad answer. Don't smoke. Electronic Arts is said to be actively pursuing an acquisition or merger. Oh, shit.
Well, yeah, right? I mean, everyone's always talking to everyone. Like, certainly that's never been more true. But this sounds like it's a litigate game pretty close.
This is from a site called Puck.news, which to my surprise was not a news site about Puck from the real world. Oh, I thought you were going to squeeze in a little... Midsummer Night's Dream? No, hockey.
Hockey. I don't know why that's from them, but... I was going to say that's the last thing that came to my mind. Yeah, last thing, me too.
Japanese Pac-Man? What are we talking about here? So this... This story went around in its first.
I think a lot of people were like, well, what the fuck is Puck News? Who knows? But then this time we got corroborated a little bit around that EA had recent discussions with companies like Disney, Apple, Amazon, and NBCUniversal slash Comcast, which is the same company, and that the Comcast deal seemed to have come the closest where they started working out different configurations of the company, what that might look like. Then, hey, are we going to spin NBCUniversal out into its own thing and then have Comcast emerge with EA and Andrew Wilson of EA continues to run that or what have you.
I guess when you think about the amount of money being thrown at video game companies out there, it probably makes sense for EA to be taking a little more of an active role. We hear a lot about this, but it's usually like, hey, has anyone come to try to buy you lately? It's usually the line of questioning that you ask a Ubisoft or something like that. It's not like, hey, we're out there trying to make this happen, but one gets the impression that on the heels of that Activision deal, which then, as a result of this, they were talking about, oh, EA was trying to buy Activision for a while, which totally makes sense, but hasn't necessarily been 100% confirmed.
But like, yeah, I guess it makes sense for them to try to get paid. EA is probably still, they don't, but also, I was about to say EA is probably still the largest third-party publisher out there, but what does that even mean in this day and age where actually is it epic for putting Fortnite on other platforms? Like what is, you know, it used to be like EA and Activision trading that thing back and forth as Call of Duty got bigger. Activision kind of started taking it from them more often than not, but obviously FIFA was a very big deal.
It is a very big deal. Here's a fun game to play. Okay. What do you think it goes for?
Oh, God. What did Activision go for? I don't think it's as big as you might think. EA?
Activision went for 69 billion. Nowhere near that. I don't think it goes for that. So I think it probably, hmm, I mean, we have to look at market caps and then have to actually know things about business to do this the right way, but.
No, no, no, to be clear, let us do the armchair quarterback the wrong way. Like we're not, we're not claiming to do this the right way. It's fun. We're having a conversation.
I think that the climate for acquisitions and all such stuff only getting hotter since that Activision deal makes EA more money and offsets what you would think of in terms of just like, oh, Activision's a bigger get than EA, but time is passed. Yes, there's a real life inflation. Yes, there's also a real life inflation. But yeah, I think that it probably offsets that in a way that, let's, I don't know, I'll say 68 to 70.
Right in that range is probably what EA could get as someone who hasn't done any fucking math and wouldn't even be able to do it if it was put in front of me. Yeah, I'm going to go in that range. But I think I agree with you in spirit that like EA maybe isn't as big of a get as Activision in some ways, but don't you think that EA has a much more diverse portfolio whereas Activision is really just, it's Call of Duty on the Activision end, and everything else they've kind of let spin out. King has their mobile stuff and Blizzard is in a state of disarray that is not as reliable as it used to be.
Sure. Whereas EA is at least threatening to put out a need for speed game someday and they at least do have a handful of sports games, but the licensing fees that they have to pay to those sports organizations offsets the value of that a little bit and all that sort of stuff. I think another thing we're forgetting is how big the Sims are. Sure, yeah.
It's like a huge market. Maybe it's like a 60 billion. Yeah, if you want to come in and say, hey, we think we can exploit the Sims really well and we're a TV company and so you can put all of our IP into the next Sims game and we think there's synergies there or whatever else. yes, yes.
I know. Then maybe that makes sense, but I don't know, you're probably not looking at it right now and going, oh, Battlefield. What's the next Battlefield? It's more like, Apex is a really big deal on the free to play side and it's making them a ton of fucking money.
They have a little bit of Star Wars stuff. They've got Need for Speed on the Horizon. They've got Unravel. Unravel.
they've got some harder stuff. They've got Dead Space Reboot. Yeah, I don't know, because this is almost certainly not a video game company at this point because I don't think Microsoft could get away with owning both EA and Activision. I think Antitrust would probably come up and be like, fuck you, come on, we barely want to do to buy Activision.
And I don't think Sony necessarily has the wallet to go after it. So it almost, I mean, that's why when you see Disney, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, like those are the sorts of companies that make way more sense for someone to buy EA. Yeah, I think seeing it all laid out on paper now, I kind of see Comcast being not like the pick, but like being a logical choice to perhaps buy. It sounds like that deal fell apart, there's a lot of things you could leverage there if you wanted to go make your Sims movie.
I don't know, maybe not all that stuff sucks. Maybe all that stuff is bad. But I can see someone having the idea of like, oh, EA has decades of intellectual property that we could pull from in a variety of ways. But I do think that, assuming that EA eventually does sell to a company like this, I do think that this like ends any kind of hope that you have, that people have been burned through these times that probably don't have this hope anymore.
But if you're sitting there going like, I can't wait for them to fucking finally get their head out of their ass and make a new Ultima game. Like, I think any kind of merger like this, any kind of situation where they end up at some larger media company, I think really firmly shuts the door on all that shit. Oh, totally. Like all their existing franchises get turned into series or movies.
You know, they don't dig into the catalog and go like, we've got to revitalize Wing Commander. Or, you know, hey, what can we do with Command & Conquer? They tried to do something with Command & Conquer. They still should, but I know.
They're seeing the Halo show have the amount of success it has. And it's like, well, we could do that with Mass Effect. Sure. Yeah, I guess actually like the Bioware stuff, like you could take your Dragon Age and your Mass Effect and...
Yeah, they see The Witcher on Netflix, right? And then like, you know, we got a handsome man that slays demons. There's a bunch of them. Yeah.
And then just thinking about the catalog now and just how you could easily transition it, especially with the glut of programming on streamers, streaming services now, like The Sims, that's a reality show. It's pretty much the real world, right? And then I really enjoyed... The Sims and people get to vote on what people do and they have to do it.
Except that you make people vote on what they do. It's like, no, you don't get to piss today. And then, oh God. That's a good thing or bad thing is probably up for debate.
Well, I think it takes two and then just make it a marriage reality show. Sure. Obstacle course, like Wipeout, but for couples. Couples that are about to get divorced.
Right, yes. This is a forced court. Meets Wipeout. Meets Wipeout.
I think this is how TV shows get pitched, right? This is probably... Again, we're giving out free ideas. this is...
All right. Consulting fees. Wipeout. I mean, that's okay.
That's pretty good. That like Rob Riggle will host that or something. Yeah. In my mind, without killing someone.
Like, let's push the envelope to a place where we are breaking bones and concussing people, but not actual murder. And like some John Cena adjacent dude was hosting that show. I don't know. Yeah, that seems like something that is wouldn't.
And they were there to show people like 60 miles an hour off a slide. Oh my God, what insanity. That Frogger show came in. I don't know if they're going to make more of it, but that Frogger show finally did debut.
Was it actually like branded? Yes. That was the biggest draw. It was a Wipeout style obstacle course that they then just called Frogger for some reason because Konami made eight bucks off it or whatever.
What the fuck with me? Where was this thing? I don't know where it went. It was fucking Hulu.
I don't know. One of the streaming services. Really? Yeah.
It was on Peacock. Okay. Yeah, Peacock. Yeah, Peacock.
Hosted by Kyle Brant and Damon Wayans Jr. That's right. Didn't we? Oh, we did.
Yes, that's what it was. These fuckers were using prop mics. That's right. Yeah.
They did 13 episodes of that fucking thing last year in November of last year. So, well, they're filming up, you know, I don't know. Maybe it's been picked up for another season, but that's just the most bizarre video game IP usage I can think of in, or maybe, I don't know, the idea that you're making that type of TV show and you just decide to slap the Frogger IP onto it. Well, like, the whole set is designed after Frogger.
Yeah. Can't believe what I'm looking at here. It's bizarre, because I like Frogger and I get that Frogger had a kind of resurgence as a result of Seinfeld and they did make a bunch of other Frogger games that were absolute dog shit. Oh, they're terrible.
But I just have this come together in a way that we're like, no, this is the perfect usage and it's Frogger. Everyone loves Frogger. Frogger's like Pac-Man. I'm like, yeah, I'm like, yeah, Frogger.
It's like in the same pantheon. Yeah, you got Pac-Man, you got Frogger, you got Donkey Kong, like, scramble, let's fucking go. I'm also learning today that there was a David Williams Jr., so I'm learning a lot. Yeah.
It was probably just like something that came out of like some sort of corporate retreat, you know, and people, you know, talk and they got off the ground. I think we own Frogger. I think we have a Frogger. In the game, you'll play as George Costanza.
Right. Hey, I'll watch anything with Jason Alexander in it. They should have made, like, that would be a game show I would rather watch. It's like someone trying to move the cabinet across Fifth Avenue.
Yeah. In traffic. Sign me up for that shit. Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Television is bizarre. Really?
They came up with Frogger and they said, hey, buy the rights, and then they did. The new tiers of PlayStation Plus have started to roll out in Malaysia and Taiwan and some other Asian territories. There's going to be a phased rollout that will happen in North America in June here, so we're, you know, a few weeks away here, but this is kind of the first rollout of the revamped PlayStation Plus. It's not the Game Pass model of getting all of the new games on day one, which anytime you ask Sony, and people keep asking Sony, hey, where are you doing?
They will reiterate until the cows come home that they think it would ruin their video games if they had to sell them in this way, which, you know, I don't know, for the amount they invest into their single-player storytelling games, maybe that makes sense. I don't know. Again, we don't have the books in front of us. Who can say?
That's their position. That is their position, so they're not doing it. Also, what they're not doing is providing good, appropriate versions of original PlayStation games for people to play on their PlayStation 5s. They have gone, ding-dong, done it again.
They keep getting away with this. They have put the PAL versions of some of these games back out yet again. Even in territories that were NTSC territories from the beginning and didn't originally receive the PAL games. The difference here, if you're not familiar, because this is a solved problem now.
We all have our big-screen, flat-screen TVs. They all run at their own resolutions and everything's fine. Back when we had old-style TVs, NTSC was the format here, and it ran at usually like 30 frames a second or 60 frames a second. PAL ran at 50 frames per second, which means that the games that ran at 30 tended to run at 25.
And a lot of games through the Super Nintendo era and all this other stuff handled this in different ways where most often, or I guess I shouldn't say most often because I haven't gone and compared them all myself, but a lot of games just ran slower to compensate for that. They're like, oh, we got five fewer frames per second. We're going to slow down the game in that percentage to make it work, and shit, fuck it. They'll never know.
And so this led to situations where if you were comparing lap times in a racing game like F-Zero with someone who lived overseas, they would be completely different because time is still time wherever you go, weirdly enough. But if the frame rate is different and the game runs slower, you're going to have way different times if you're playing the PAL version of the game than the NTSC version. Anyway, so Ape Escape, Jumping Flash, Loud Arms, Everybody's Golf, which is Hot Shots Golf here, all appear to be based on those European versions. This is based on Vue Games Chronicles reporting.
They have gone out and seen some of these versions in action. And the PlayStation Classic when it came out also did the same thing and people complained then and they did it again. And it's fucking wild that this is still a problem. People are trying to grasp its straws and try to figure out like, okay, why would they do this?
And the nearest they can get to is like, oh, well, the PAL versions support more languages. So if we just put that version in, it's got full e-figs support or whatever. And so we support those languages out of the box. Nintendo solved this problem by offering both in some situations.
I was going to ask, is it impossible to just put up both versions? Yeah, what's the problem? I don't know. I don't know.
I can't. This seems like something that is so possible to not fucking. up and yet they did in the exact same way that they fucked it up on the playstation classic and i just like at some point how does this keep happening i get it's like probably like oh well we already pulled all those isos and turned them into the right format and we already did all this the work to make those versions run but like it's not it sucks this is shitty this is not how people want to play these games and and also again if you take this to the extreme of like trying to serve your customers with like we're honoring the legacy of the playstation first of you know ignore the part where like the games they've decided to include is just like you know it's like fucking no you got it wrong to do this on top of that is really fucking wild yeah like why do it all if you're gonna fuck it up like this it's just like you get such a lack of i don't people that fucking care somewhere in the chain on this process they're being overruled and be like oh yeah we could do that yeah we can also fucking get it done and out the door so we get back to making real video games over here go play your grand turismo 2 dipshit no man the ceo called me a dipshit damn it his newsletter no less um thanks for the recommendations on these restaurants though oh fuck this is the thing that i think people were like oh there's no way they'll do this again and they super fucking did it's not incentivizing me to to enroll in these other tiers if this is what i'm gonna be getting you know yeah it's driving me further away and making me thinking about maybe just cancel it maybe i don't need playstation plus right now yeah i definitely don't you i mean you know hey if you're if you play online games on playstation you still need it yeah um but as someone who probably plays way more games on pc than either of the current consoles like personally i don't know that i necessarily need to need it um but yeah i don't know this is coming out here in a few weeks and maybe by the time comes down the u.s they'll be like oh we're not doing that for the u.s because we care here or some insane thing like that but i that almost be worse um so we'll have to wait and see if this ends up being a worldwide situation or if this is something that they will if they will correct for even these asian territories that have the bad versions now or what it just seems like it's already rolled out in other territories that supported ntsc i don't know if the work's been done yeah and that was like it feels like a lot to think that it is an oversight and just assume like everywhere else was pow right or like is the work for these being done in a pow territory so all the people working on it remember those versions of those games like here's the right one governor put it out mate and then like they push out the door i don't i don't i just don't know how this is okay i feel like there are like limited situations where you want to play the pow version of a game and it's usually on commodore computers usually when you're playing amiga games i feel like there's situations where because those games were developed in pow territories and designed to run at that speed when you then take them and throw them on an ntsc device it ends up running faster in a way that seems weird the music sounds a little different you know it's just like sometimes it's when i'm emulating a commodore 64 i emulate the pow version of it also like that's the like i have even though as a kid i play those games faster when you play them in pow you're like oh okay this seems like a reasonable speed for this game to run this music sounds better and not like jumbled bunched together in a weird way like this is probably the right way and i've so i've come around on those specific situations but not these this is ridiculous it just seems to at least not offer both versions unless i don't know did they lose all the ntsc versions yeah yeah i don't know here a second ago i lost a truck i've got them on a hard drive over here if they need them get hold of me do not get hold of me we have your games um yeah and so it's led to this really funky situation and you know granted you have to jump through some hoops on this but like you don't have to modify your console to do it like you can play playstation 1 games better on an xbox than on a playstation 5 pretty wild and that's just fucking nuts i don't know like there's there it's not a clean one-to-one comparison i get it but like it's just fucking weird very very this was meant to be somebody caring about itself and this was this feels like something that should have been like a feel-good look back at the past and like yet again just like playstation classic it's dumb um all right last story here here is a feel-good story from the past pac-man 42 years old oh congratulations pac-man happy birthday to pac-man his first colonoscopy he's gonna put it in that box and send it back he's about to shit he's about to shit in the box happy birthday oh shit oh shit let me find the noise nice was that the right one that seemed enough you know uh happy birthday yeah that's an always idea what pac-man might make while dying or shit in a box yeah it wasn't quite the right feel i think my thing didn't save the setting it used to be more pac-man anyway namco considers me 20 seconds 1980 to be pac-man's birthday uh on his id yeah that's uh and and so they've got some pac-man stuff coming i feel like namco goes through this cycle not once a year but every so often where they're just like here's a bunch of pac-man shit i don't know and so pac-man stuff is coming for tonight i imagine this will be t-shirts and stuff and not necessarily you can play as pac-man here's a backpack oh okay um i don't know i'm sure that's and pac-man museum plus uh the newest collection is coming out into this week for multiple platforms um and they recorded a new song jan i've provided the link to this in hopes that you might play the new pac-man song i don't know if this is being done in a way that we will be able to hear it oh y'all probably won't oh you know what hold on i can open this here y'all won't be able to hear it though that's fine i'll listen to it myself i'm playing it now okay uh this is we are pac-man and um it's something it's a fun little video i guess but look that's enough of that yeah it's no it's no pac-man fever i mean come on yeah i mean look 42 on the cusp of a midlife crisis um pac-man buying a motorcycle yep i mean that's actually the thing they're putting out we'll have a difference pac-man in it so starting to get real serious about hair plugs like real serious doing research putting his putting his name and number and a bunch of websites he shouldn't be i think pac-man is mad at kirby for stealing his shine of like the fun circle dude i was thinking that the guy who eats like i was thinking that last night i was thinking about kirby and going man i got really mad about it i was like hang on hang on kirby i don't know what does kirby look like when he swallows pac-man in smash does he get the carrot eyebrows yeah i was gonna say like paradox i don't know i'm looking this up oh yeah he's got the little carrot eyes and he's got a horrendous little nose oh okay i don't like that design of pac-man where he has a nose i find it perverse um disgusting even like there's there's art over the years i'm not sure to the character you know he's a little circle he doesn't have a nose where this nose come from so let's look at some of the original like pac-man art that they did alongside the original release like he's gonna honker yeah they gave him that big curvy dick nose like 42 years ago but it was a mistake yeah it was like you know how megaman looks on the megaman cover he doesn't look like that in other movies yeah um that's why they can have a pac-man that looked like the pac-man art there's some drawings about the original japanese art with a big old nose i think is yeah you're right it's it's too much it's too much disgusting but there's a lot of uh there's just a lot of different pac-man designs that there's oh there's not a poster but i don't think i'm gonna jump through the hoops to buy a poster off of namco's japanese website there's like an exciting pac-man poster that i thought was pretty cool exciting because it says exciting okay it's not um seeing kirby with a nose too is double perverse yeah that's extremely incorrect to do to the boy i'm glad we can put that picture in people's heads yeah uh yes you can push the pac-man button and live it out uh as you need to i'm interested in this pac-man museum thing we're putting out pretty soon but you know at this point most of those games because that's some of the newer games on it like there's some versions of like the championship edition stuff on there and it'll be nice to have an excuse to go back and play some of those again but like the old games like whatever it's like every number of devices within 25 feet of me that can play those games is absurd at the same time which i have to probably play pac-man yeah yeah uh definitely and so we say happy birthday pac-man happy birthday pac-man we should have pre-prepared a little little uh a little piece of art that has the giant bomb logo with the perverse pac-man nose on it and the eyes with the chunk out of it yeah that pointy honker eyebrows yeah oh no that was the original idea i was to be able to change out the the logo on a pretty regular basis depending on what the new releases were but that was a very long time ago i think we did it for halloween one year oh yeah that's on my uh one of these guys one of these guys one of these guys i lost it oh uh he was here once all right well why don't we take a break then we'll come back all right with all of your emails all right we're back and now it's time to talk about emails the music playing square bombcast at giantbomb.com is where you send the emails to us and we will take them we ran out of time last week i've got some that were pulled for last week's show and some that were pulled for this week's show and we'll see where we get to with these emails all right how about it okay um lex from cork ireland writes in uh to talk about some overwatch here he says uh the subject line here is overwatch league really does seem to be fucking up overwatch 2 oh just something we kind of speculated that maybe the e-sports vacation of overwatch was making it less fun for real people the overwatch league we started this weekend after 222 days of no matches uh they are the only franchise e-sport therefore the only e-sport with off seasons at all really the live show exclusively on youtube attached around 90 000 viewers live which dropped around 70 000 after some bad technical problems during the first match last week which is now three weeks ago or whatever uh we were wondering uh why overwatch 2 is releasing now in the state that it's in and says it's because of the league needing to start again and aaron keller the current lead on overwatch 2 has pretty much said as much within the community the 5v5 change is also widely thought to be from frustration from the loudest and highest level players all the mobile abilities that made the first game fun casually when brought to a high level caused huge frustration characters the shields and crop control abilities meant the skills of the e-sportsman had less chances to shine in favor of grouping up in clumps of unkillable tanks with healers pumping up their health this weekend saw a lot of fun individual plays from players popping off on widowmaker and soldier 76 but it begs the question what makes overwatch interesting when it's going so far in the shooter direction and away from its original selling point what game from the heady days of everything being sold in e-sports seemed like the worst fit to you or killed your interest in an otherwise fun game oh that's an insightful commentary from our e-sports commentator lex from cork heartland thank you yeah um insightful yeah that i think that's been you know you're gonna find a lot of different um opinions on on the way some of these games are going but i do feel like i've seen a real outpouring of people saying hey the direction this game is going and is only making its problems worse um and yeah i mean they do make a fair amount of money on the overwatch league and i think that you know for me i i want games that i can play for years after their release and have a fun time online and i realize that's a very hard thing to do um because eventually a lot of the lower skill players are gonna fall away and you're gonna be left with the killers and me as someone comes in like i play this game in eight months am i gonna have a good time no i'm not um but like that's the ideals i just want to be able to enjoy a video game let's not say i want to take it seriously um and all that sort of stuff like i'm okay taking it seriously when i'm playing it but it's not it's never gonna be a lifestyle for me like that specific aspect of gaming is just not why i'm here i like to play a wide variety of games i don't just want to play 600 hours of some competitive shooter and not touch anything else like that's people love to do that i think that's i think that's crazy like sure go on especially if they're able to make some kind of money doing it i guess i don't know like that's the other kind of larger i don't know like it's interesting looking at esports today when you think about the decades of what esports has often been i don't think it's that much different like it's much more legitimized now but i think that's just because people stopped fighting it um and more companies started realizing there was money for them directly so like activision running the overwatch league themselves and and all of this other stuff uh makes a lot more sense than like mlg or some other fly-by-night organization popping up we're in tournaments never gonna be rich especially me with cocaine uh and then like raising a bunch of funding and and like you know exploiting a bunch of kids that are good at a video game and then disappearing in the night or something like the esports to like crypto bro like fucking pipeline i feel like it's like that's one of those like hey this is one circle kind of diagrams of just like the same energy is pouring off of both of those things and it always has been like there's some esports stuff that is less douchey these days but the underpinnings of it still feel really creepy to me in a way like i don't know going back to like a half a conversation ago uh but um i feel like it's the the way that games tend to evolve in this genre it seems to me as someone who's really outside of like you know fighting and competitive esports stuff is that a game can start casual and become esports but like once it's pretty esports it's hard to make it approachable to casual people who don't want to be esportsy about it and i feel like that's just the nature of the beast and i don't know how one would you know uncomplicated uncouple it from like the high level technical stuff once it gets like kind of introduced to it like i feel like smash brothers over the years like i used to be way into the first smash way into the second smash started you know petering out by the next one and then finally you know the last one that came out and now there's like 600 characters and i'm just completely overwhelmed um so i don't know like i wish there was a way to make it more approachable but it even feels like casual players are so much more high level like i used to be able to play smash brothers at like you know people's christmas parties or something like that and now it's like i'm just not even gonna try because everyone like has learned the tech even like people that are not even like big into the actual like arena competition era uh area of it all yeah i think smash is an interesting like it's i think it's kind of it can be a poster child for the sort of thing in some ways by virtue of like how prevalent the concept of playing without items has become yeah i'm fine it's always meant to just be like here's a bunch of weird chaos i mean it was meant to have some mario party-esque bullshit in there fuck it like here's a weird item that's gonna turn the tables and you know hey it's goofy have a good time and you know like mario kart or something like here's your fucking weird blue shell situation that turns the situation around for you and all that sort of stuff and the way that that community has embraced this other mode of that game as like here's the serious way to play has then gone to you know because a lot of people you know he's saying like 90,000 people are watching these overwatch streams the thing that happens this has a fighting tournaments a lot too where you see someone do really well with a character that you maybe play a little bit of or something like that but you see them do some shit and you're like oh i can i can do that oh that's what i need to do and so your own play style changes to kind of fit in more of that esports you kind of mold because that's the the tech of the month or whatever you know and then it'll be patched again and things will change and whatever whatever but you have like situations where you'll probably like i'm sure players will watch an overwatch match and be like oh shit these three characters if we do this with this we can do this and so you see that team comp probably roll out big you hear about this in dota a lot too where it's like you know everyone after the international goes and tries to do all the shit they saw watching the international i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing like that's that's that makes perfect sense but at the same time that's some point like it's just it starts to make the game a little bit less approachable i my highlights of competitive gaming have always been arcade stuff and i realized that that's just never going to be an option again um but it was always that idea of just like well i'm gonna go to this place and play with the people that play at this place and i know here i'm okay i'm in the mix i'm not winning every match but i'm not losing right hey there's another arcade like the idea of just like we're gonna go into san francisco and play street fighter and you're like whoa really i'm gonna drive to the city and play all right man we're gonna get fucking stabbed and we're not gonna win a single match but let's go and you go in to see people that were fucking doing shit that you've never seen before in your life that games you would already played hundreds of hours of and so like that always kind of existed in a certain state because then you would watch them now even to like the most like entry level like players yeah that's super casual like me that don't give a shit just want to mash buttons and see if i do decent you know i can't compete with you know my previous worst holiday party i was last place every time i was like great okay this isn't fun yeah right right like this is like what's the point of this anymore um yeah definitely i think everyone's using their mains and being actually competitive and i just want to you know drink eggnog or whatever and goof around i think the thing is like smash brothers just isn't that game anymore no yeah it's not like mario kart is probably still that game uh like what else like what other like i was gonna say it's not quite answering the question but a twist on it is i feel like game freak and nintendo don't quite care to a huge amount of the competitive pokemon scene but those people have definitely made um i mean like a pokemon showdown is a huge thing and competitive pokemon is technically 2v2 but there's a whole scene that insists on doing 1v1 and the games are not built to properly support uh pokemon 1v1 uh types of matches with like a full roster of six like competitive pokemon is is you only have four pokemon that you choose from like a list of six or whatever uh but in pokemon there's people come to that fucking franchise for numerous different things whether it is just playing the games shiny catching and everything that the competitive esports like scene just feels like such a niche community that i feel like game freak barely touches and does stuff to accommodate for those folks that they just make their own stuff you know they make their own ban lists with a whole panel of people it's wild yeah i mean it's i don't know different communities crop up and do all that sort of stuff i think it's it's fine and generally speaking it shouldn't be a problem in the most popular games if you're if you're going online because if the matchmaking is doing its job then it's always going to try to match you up with someone of similar skill and and you should be able to have a good time and not just immediately stop the problem is when you get through two years of games released but this happens fighting all the time and you know you come back and the only people left playing tekken 7 are absolutely badass at it it's like i can't you know i mean no hate toward people who play these games competitively absolutely not like it's certainly on me for not doing the time to get that good but also i think that games would be better served to a wider array of people if they found more ways to have enjoyable competitive experiences for people that don't play it i wish that like like for example i wish that smash for example i know they can't possibly do this but this is my idea if you're at you know your freaking holiday party and everybody is completely destroying you uh and it's just like i'm gonna play one round and leave because everyone's clearly in a different league than me and i can't you know have fun because they're all beating the shit out of me i wish there was like a flexible difficulty that could handicap those players like clearly this player is really really really really good and this person has played this game in you know when it came out on n64 and has not much much dabbled with it afterwards it'd be cool if that's a thing that could happen like on the fly yeah on the fly would be that'd be interesting because i think i'm pretty sure those games do have because like matchmaking online can work but then person it's just like out the window you know this is a very niche problem you know but i don't i mean i guess i don't think it necessarily is a niche problem i think if you're thinking about ways to make games appeal to an even larger audience like this is a way to do like you need to find ways for larger crowds of people to enjoy your competitive game and and finding ways to to make that happen whether it's like oh we've got different different matchmaking hopper entirely which that doesn't always you know like you play unranked matches but that's it's still gonna be you're still gonna run out of that problem like you don't want people in this game or we're crazy at it so like i don't know what the solution is there because i realize it's like you know like obviously these games competitive things i love watching the high level fighting gameplay and i think it's fucking great that people are able to put in time and get that fucking good at it but it's amazing yeah but at some point like that's you know just from a pure business sense that's dlc i'm not buying because i punched out of that game a year and a half ago you know um whereas if they had better ways and there are a lot of ways to do this making games free to play sometimes ensures that you've constantly got new players onboarding all the time because there's zero barrier to entry there's a lot of ways to do it but i think there's just there needs to be more room for that kind of like and we're fucking around we're having some drinks and we're gonna play this fucking game and whatever we're having a good time and i don't think it's cool that the only games that fit that anymore are almost like in some circles thought of like kids games and all this stuff like i spent a lot of time my late teens drinking beer and playing street fighter having a wonderful time um and it'd be cool if something like that was a lot easier to attain even in a world where we're playing online and strangers um especially you know like i'm not gonna have time to get a crew of people together i mean the ideal is you find that group of like-minded players and you say hey every thursday we're gonna play that's not always feasible either so i just yeah i don't know i just i don't know what the answer is i just feel like that there's just a there's room for games with serious competitive scenes to find ways to be more inviting to players who are never going to attain that and are never gonna be able to strive truly strive for that to be able to still have an easy way into having a good time i don't know it's a difficult we don't have answers all the time it's a super hard problem it's an interesting thing to think about though definitely yeah um let's see uh what are your thoughts on paper straws they become the norm here in canada and i hate them to me they're worse in the environment because i don't get any use out of them they just go straight in the trash yeah i'm a fan of sippy lids and sippy lids on ice and drinks oh i hate a sippy lid wait what's doing that you know like it's like a normal coffee cup but it's plastic yeah coffee cup lid but it's plastic and you instead of like putting a straw through that bad boy where like it's gonna get dented and it's the plastic yeah but you're still you know you just sip it and then they're gonna make paper versions of that i just don't think that's the solution like the solution is my solution to the shitty sippy cup where the flow is all wrong is to go get a straw and stick through that hole and so they're using extra plastic to make the cup and i'm still jamming the plastic straw there so i'm just surprised that like we haven't come up with anything better like i just think the obviously the paper straws are not the way to go because they just don't work right like i don't have much trouble i don't know like if you're a slow drinker i guess they eventually decompose but like that's what it is i feel like uh that's the big complaint is that they don't work that they eventually just kind of turn to mush if you're not sure don't join your straws but so the end of the drink is eventually you know fall apart yeah i mean i drink fast enough that that hasn't yeah i've never had that happen to me we have like a bunch of reusable metal straws in the house and i like go back and forth on whether or not that was like the right move just because they like the metal stress can still get gnarly and they still like they're still there's you know they have their own problems it's better than throwing away plastic but easy easy solution whoever works in business and listens to this podcast please at least toss me 20 bucks when you take this on simple just put a hole in the bottom of everything now just like drip feed that i got everything like a hamster like feeder can you imagine right you know they actually saw this in in third world countries including the philippines they put soda in bags right cut a little little hole in the bottom just drip feed that soda into my mouth it's still plastic i just don't think we're all gonna do it as much it's not as much smoothies think about smoothies just pouring that into your mouth isn't the best part of eating a drumstick you just bite it from the bottom and then just suck the ice cream out it's like a makeshift cake crossing situation where you throw a plastic bag cut the corner off and you're just like squeezing cake frosting in your mouth all over your face i think you know we've solved this with hamsters they've got those little drinky mechanisms with a little metal ball in there yeah one of those and we also have a situation ball in the bottle what about like um motherfucking like how do we not come up with wasn't there like a vegetable plastic at some point like wasn't there something like that we turned all these trees into straws a bunch of plant-based forks in the office when we go to an office i just think how do we not have like a material that just completely dissolves into carbohydrates after like two hours of exposure to moisture like what's the problem make everything we're coming up with fucking filters for instagram let's crack that nut before we fucking come up with a way to save innovators yeah same people yeah they get poached at mic they're like yo you got two choices in life you can solve the microplastic crisis or you can come up with the sickest fucking instagram filter known to man and guess where the money's at which one pays better exactly exactly that's the problem capitalism baby doesn't incentivize the right things make everything out of jello yep i trust jello i trust jello that's not always said that it's not vegan though not always the best people but i love jello just the same not a vegan straw donald from christopher new zealand writes in and says shadow the hedgehog is just vegeta i i don't know i can't corroborate like i can't comment on that i just don't have enough vegeta exposure i know shadow yeah um so you're gonna have to fill in the blanks here for me i mean it's like a ambiguous slash evil yeah frenemy sort of to to sonic he has an edge to him that makes him the coolest character in the entire fiction he's a brooding angry yeah deep past shadow would would grow mustache for a little bit yeah for a little bit shadow a bad man would shadow kill about an entire village of people he's already done that there you go he has yeah pretty sure yeah i might get all worked up about like jim carrey not showing up in sonic 3 potentially just gotta put that out there yeah he also thought and he just dropped this on he also thought that at the end of sonic 1 where they were like in the movie they were talking about like coming back for christmas that that meant sonic 2 had to come out right before christmas my hand on his shoulder i was like oh you stupid dumb idiot that's not how things work and uh yeah but i mean look he's got a point now you live you learn move everything he needs to learn in life as a preteen he will learn from watching the sonic movies two three four five six seven however many that they do that's the the real parents the sonic films yeah um ben in boston right says are you worried about who are you worried about remedy you recognize that telltale games was in trouble before the closure because they expanded so quickly and so extensively remedy has also lately taken on a lot more than ever before with as many as five games on the books all of a sudden are you worried about remedy or is their situation different i think they're in their own category yeah i think their situation is different i think the industry's situation is very different now where we suddenly everyone did really well made a lot of money over the pandemic like there was just a lot of money in video games and so everyone expanded everyone hired up um a lot of studios grew from one game two games two games three games whatever you know like there's just been a lot of expansion on that front along with the consolidation and studios getting purchased and something i would not be shocked if someone acquired remedy at some point i don't know if they're on the marketer looking insofar as everyone's always looking but um but i remedy is doing some really good work right now they've got some decent ip like the control stuff is a little wrapped up with five games um so it's not fully theirs and i guess the max pain stuff is probably still rocked up rockstar that week's theirs again right like that's they got that max so i i did not ever cross my mind that they are in trouble no uh if every game they have books right now tanks then hey we'll see but yeah i mean they got crossfire x i'm just gonna say you have that i mean hopefully that paid well up front right i mean because crossfire is a huge money maker overseas so hopefully they didn't take that project hoping to make a much profit on the back end they're like oh you want to crossfire okay like hopefully they negotiated that as the way that worked out for them um bobby yaga yeah uh god crossfire x why are we even well um liam and ireland writes this has been a lot of chatter lately about whether god of war ragnarok will release in 2022 or 2023 where do you all stand on this 23 23 yeah i think they could still get out by the end of the year it's possible but i i am leaning towards next year as well because that's a safer bet in yeah totally mm-hmm also years half over right now yeah years half over we haven't heard uh they did put out that video was it last week uh they hear the accessibility options in the game which they're that far along then clearly they've to show here the accessibility options then they've done a lot of they've done a lot of work i know that uh i'd be happy to be wrong yeah someone has to shit this year yeah yeah right uh i think stuff is cleared out in such a way and been pushed back that i just my expectations have just gone down and expecting stuff this year at all yeah yeah and i you know i don't know if so many you know i don't know what their plans are for showing games this summer if they decide to do anything on their own or there's always possibility that something shows up during keely's thing a couple weeks here um but i would expect that somebody would do their own thing a little bit later down the road and announce it two days ahead of time exactly yeah hey we got a playstation all those things i forget stay play i'm gonna stay play on thursday it's gonna be 45 minutes and it's not gonna be related to playstation vr 2 um let's see chris from alabama writes in we'll make this our last email uh so we've had a lot of talk about game stop stores but how about some stuff from the game stop managers conference oh they had a conference yes the managers conference yes they had a conference where's that held by the way that i need to know i feel like it was arizona i don't actually know but i think i want to say it was either vegas or somewhere in arizona but i don't know for sure anyway typically we'd have a couple of days of vendor training rooms a mini e3 floor style show one evening in the day of corporate stuff where everyone was either falling asleep hungover or hyped up on energy drinks one year they literally why would you leave that for less uh yeah i know i'm gonna leave with that one year they literally had giant tubs of free nos energy drinks so that everyone was drinking unhealthy amounts of them everyone remembers mr caffeine from the ubisoft press conference a few years back he did the vendor training every year imagine he stuck in a conference room with him for an hour going over their slate of games with arguably even more energy than the e3 show god no no no if you're not familiar where yeah i don't know yeah um so they would do so these managers conferences like companies show up to pitch to managers and they often would show games that were not shown at e3 uh you know they'd be like oh for the managers here we want to show you this this is what we're gonna be selling this christmas and you know hey we think it's a big deal you should give people pre-order it so it's this big time for companies to show up and pitch to managers and uh well i'll finish this email we talk about stories i heard from the fucking manager conference most non-hr appropriate vendor room every year surprisingly it was nintendo kevin perera would host a room every year along with some of the treehouse staff it was typically a race for him to break the other hosts with sex jokes about the product lineup there are also videos of him pitching horrible game titles to nintendo that seem to have been put under strict lock and key by nintendo because they are impossible to find online i do remember there being a human centipede game for the wii reference at some point also wibola so funny jokes we got jokes over here at the manager's conference you hear stories about like roving fucking gangs of game stop managers out on the town like fucking hammered going around getting into fucking hijinks all around town like people that had not left their hometown in fucking years or ever being shipped off to some country or just some other part of the country and drinking themselves silly i feel like every story i heard was just about like yeah and all these games like people that were there to do the show or vendors or whatever sometimes we hear from managers uh who write in or whatever that like all of it just sounded like this debaucherous fucking mess of a bunch of sloppy drunks that had no idea what they're doing i looked up the imdb of mr caffeine aaron priceman um he uh his first his first role i believe uh was in 1995 for a tv movie called piranha where he played camp counselor and now i really want to track down piranha and see how he does as a camp counselor yeah uh i i guess no there were complaints about mr caffeine the year he did and they did not bring it back i bet yeah um yeah yeah this the game manager conference always seems like a really just strange oh texas texas uh louise luis rod uh in chat is saying that it's texas that's that actually sounds right too i don't know garland or maybe just bring people out to is that where corporate hq was i don't know yeah um anyway yes the the doing the game manager conference talking to people that work at publishers and stuff like that about to go out there and put on presentations like some people said like it was actually really fun uh yeah it was just like this weird debaucherous thing and then some people were like this was a fucking nightmare like those people got out of fucking control hammered and were like hitting on me at the buffet or hitting on this restaurant nearby or just like just bizarre not bizarre a bunch of fucking drunken behavior from people who probably needed to be uh kind of down on a little bit more but um people feel like you know yes perhaps a little emboldened uh as a roving gang of game stop managers south park yeah um anyway thanks to chris for that that's gonna be our last email of the show bombcastgiantbomb.com that's where you keep sending them and we'll keep reading them that's all we got what else going on this week we got a arcade pit happening yes tomorrow will be a special treat my teammate next week because you know the team with jess over here broke up due to circumstances yeah who's behind that you know it's a it's not a mutual breakup uh teaming up with the homie shouts out to the homie and that's all i'll say oh okay someone that just constantly says shouts out so yep shouts out to the homie uh we'll be back next week one other episode of the giant podcast thanks for listening you you you you you you you