Game Development and Studio Specialization

Hello friends, and welcome to episode two hundred and eighty five of the No Clip Podcast eighty five. Feeling alive, Jeremy Jane. Hello, I am feeling I am alive. Are you alive? I'm alive. Currently I'm alive. Who knows what will happen by the end of this podcast? Frank Howley? If one of us was to die, which one do you think is most likely? And I don't mean you, I mean me and Jeremy. I was going to say like Jeremy just in the case of like an into the wild thing where he might eat berries or mushrooms. It's like because his unabashed like sense of adventure would unintentionally lead him to peril. I'm so scared of foraging mushrooms actually . I've found like I think I've only eaten foraged mushrooms one time, but I've found like porcinis and chanterells and like I'm just scared to eat anything that someone else doesn't identify. Yeah, I've have a there a mysterious bag of something in my house which we won't talk about that I'm terrified of going here as well. But I don't know where that came from. That's a that's a story for a different day brother. Yes, we're here. All three, just the three of us at the moment for reasons we'll get into in a hot second , but I'm delighted to be here with Frank and Jeremy, we have a bunch of stuff to talk about. I have a bunch of catch up to get into. I was away for two weeks, filming in Europe and also celebrating for those of you watching the video version, it's World Cup fever over here . And since Ireland did not make it into the World Cup, we have a defender playing for Caboverde, so that's cool. But otherwise we 're not there. So I'm supporting my team arsenal at the World Cup , seeing all our players play for different teams and hoping that none of them get injured . I was also at the Champions League final in Budapest and didn't get a ticket to it because that was an insanely expensive proposition. But I was gonna be in Europe anyway. So I just changed my flight so I could get drunk with the Hungarians and boy oh boy I mostly got drunk with the North Londoners because Budapest was just full of full of North Londoners. It was a good time. It was like it was like a I was about to say it was like a reverse invasion, but that became but the English just did the invading. Did you say you colonized it or there we go? There are colonizing. I was yeah, I was stepping down as sort of an immigration faux there that I could have stepped into . I think it would be very hard for anyone in England to move to Budapest or vice versa because of the sort of old world currency exchange issue that they have there, you know? Well, Jeremy, you've been to a few countries has there been any country that in particular like the the money situation was confusing ? You know, because like euro to dollar is only like it's not that different. You know what I mean? Like you can say,, it o'hs just expensive in Europe and you're kind of fine. But you know, has there been any country you've been to where you had to deal with the currency exchange ? No, I kind of just I have a small panic attack and I throw a bunch of money at the cashi er and I hope that by the good grace of God they don't rip me off and take like a hundred dollars for a box of museum. Right, that was the problem I had because I believe it's the Hungarian florant. I think it's ten dollars is three thousand arent . So and I don't know about you, but I get sketchy with like you know or zeros once you get above like three of them. You know, I don't know. Like I think my hotel was like a million or something like that. Anything that costs a million anything is fucked up. I hate that. Just think about how many the Hungarian economy just killing it. Think about how many millionaires there are in Budapest right now. Like that's just, you know, it's true. Yeah, they must have like a trillionaire must be the equivalent of a billionaire. Well, we thankfully, Jeremy, we caught up on that recently thanks to SpaceX's IPO. A lot's happened in the past couple of weeks. Summer games fest, video games coming out. We're going to get through a bunch of them going to talk about Warhammer Dark Tie Easports UFC six. I'm excited to hear about that, Frank . Were you in DC this weekend? No, but the map is playable in the game. So it is. Okay, we'll talk about that later. I did watch the entire event watched to my sort of sort of like we'll get into it later. You know, that was my ten days in Mariupol. I was watching I was watching UFC Freedom two hundred and fifty, Jesus. I also played a bunch of First Light Creature Kitchen , some of the next best demos as well, and things like that. So we have a bunch to talk about. But first of all, thanks to all of our incredible battle pass holders. All our patrons over patreon dot com slash no clip, patreons. You know what you call them, but I just did . And now I'm going to call some of the names of the most insane of all of our patreons. Charles Atkinson, Brian Baru, Yut, Dwayne the Rock Lobster, Anthony Thomas, Nico Pazetteri. It's Amy Ferrario. Senator Armstrong, Reedredge, Harry Flanagan, Jush, Arno, Matt Pearson. Macros . Quote, Tucker Morgan, David McGary . Gottison, Svan Huster, Fez, Bone Maul,ed John Acres. You went ? Time Robinson, Forest Brewt, Dark Insanities, Eric Hamilton Schneider, Christopher Tewy, Grizzly Mug Ever lack Zachary Snyder, Alex Usche, George Sakotas, Jacob Godserve, Inthea Jenn, James Med and Ryson. Thank you for the bow, Jeremy. Thank you to all of our amazing battle pass holders. We'll need that bow because Jesse Grasha Jesse Grashi ain here, our boy, sorry, Jesse's fine. He's with us. He's just not with us. He's with us. He's not, he's just not with us. And if he's the podcast editor, so he can't even put it in sad music here 'cause he's not hearing this. Yeah, am I gonna have to one of us is gonna have to figure this out. Sad music. I'm gonna Google, Google. Hey, hey, Alexa, sad music. No, don't know how to do it. We don't know how to do it. Jesse Grasha congratulations to him. He has found himself a full time job . He was a freelance king, but he has stepped over to the dark side . He's gotten a he's gotten a gig . I'm sure he'll talk about it himself a little bit. It's out of video game studio doing cool video work. So he's in a they're in great hands and he's in a great spot and yeah, kind of came in pretty late last minute. He got the offer and I was away so we just chatted about it last week. So he may be popping on the podcast here and there. He has to sort of see how he, you know , new job and all that, whether or not he can work it into his timetable . But from a production standpoint, at least for the next few months , he is committed to sort of knuckling down on that job and yeah, if anything changes down the road, obviously we'll be delighted to get more of his work. But yeah, Jesse, after five years, five years working on various snowcrafts. Five years since Jesse joined that? That's crazy. That's nuts. He's been doing so much. He produced bunches of podcasts, but different podcasts shows . He's edited on a good few NoClip Docs over the years as well, done assembly cuts and bits and bobs yeah and just a cool guy to hang out every week as well. So I'm going to miss that the most but yeah look he is he is he's got a young family. He's got a new job. He's he's playing the Sims right . He just has to make sure he doesn't delete the stairs in the pool. It's not stairs. What do you call those things ladder? Ladder Ladder thank you. Yeah, it doesn't delete. See I didn't I'm not good at the Sims Ladder in the pool and set his house on fire and make sure that death doesn't come over for a coffee . And yeah, he'll be doing good. So shout out to Jesse. He have more details, I'm sure on his own blow up a spot here on his own social med ias and whatnot . But yeah God speed to him and look out for his videos in the future I guess. We'll have to keep an eye on some of those . Three of us left guys. Oh yeah, and also no caps is just away this week. She's she's fine. She's not. We haven't done it. Yeah . That'd be dodgy, you'd be like, Oh shit, what happened? Something come out about Danny is that what happens and they're all getting out of here and Jeremy and Frank are trapped we're in too deep into you deep exactly co implicated maybe can walk away because of the, you know, the files . Yes, exactly. We're all on the NoteClip files. We have to be very careful about that. The NoteClip files are, as it turns out, are just a bunch of videotapes that I'm really trying hard to record and put on the internet. There's a video tape of me cheating at the blockbuster like arcade tournament they used to put on when I was a kid. I was playing NBA Jam with a game shark and they have video footage of it and it's gonna leak if I is that true? Did you play a game? How did you? No, no, you didn't. Okay, I was like, how would you even did you brought your own console? No, no, you don't remember. Well, I guess I guess this might have been an America I think. Was it is Blockbuster as presumably is an American chain? Yeah, they had they had some in London when I moved to London, but it is an American. We had extra vision which had no E in the extra. It was like X. It was like DX. Frank would have liked it. You could walk in and go and do the shot. I bet. Yeah, you got free rental if you did the crotch shop, I'm sure. When back in the nineties , blockbuster put on like tournaments to see who was the best gamer with like super Nintendo games and stuff. I never participated in one, but I always had I always would like fantasize about how sick it would be to go in and destroy the presumably other like thirty people who were all above the age of twenty when I was a small child . Were they like national tournaments or just like local ones . I think they were just local. Yeah, I can't imagine there was like a NBA Jam nationals where they had like a live announcer eating up like a real guy in the room. The guy he's just saying what the guy in the game is saying like a second laser. Like a crappy local version of 's Juan . Bill Clinton, you know ? All that stuff. Dad, that dirt, that dirt. There's another guy sit m theaking music with his mouth . It's good stuff . I once won a local Quake three . It wasn't even a tournament. It was just a bunch of us used to go to his game store, games dimension , which I would later get a job at best job ever . And they had a bunch of PCs you could just play games on. And they were land. So the guy you just go in and play Quake three against somebody one on one. It was the best and we used to do it at lunchtime, lodge. And then there was this one guy. He was like a local dude, but he was from Norway and he convinced us all that he is, he was the best quake three player in Norway. And so that there was this big like, okay, Wednesday at lunchtime, Danny's going to play the best quake three player in Norway . And we went down there and I beat him. But he wasn't like that good. So I was like, he's probably not the best quake three player in Norway. He's a fifteen year old boy who lives in Southern Ireland but there was a place a couple towns over for me where my friend lived that was owned by this guy named Mr. Dee and it was like Dee's because he was the guy that owned it. No there's nothing there files on this one . Okay it. was just And one small room filled with fucking cigarette smoke. He would just misery would just chain smoke all day. And there was like there was stock cars that were called, the little cars with the little handle that you race . But we would go in and he had like a PS one and a PS two set up and a bunch of TV's on just like a folding table and you could pay like two bucks an hour to just hang out and play PlayStation. So we would go and play state of emergency because my parents wouldn't let me have it for obvious reasons. Yes, Rockstar's most famous IP. Yeah, exactly A little hidden gem , and we just go there and sit in the fucking miasma of cigarette smoke and just like probably get like zooted off of secondhand nicotine . This does sound a little bit like, you know, I've got PlayStation in my in the back of my white van. It does sound like this guy was a pedophile, but I swear he was a cool guy . There was a butcher shop in my hometown on a Rundal Lane, I think it was. And it was Or Baron Strange Street. It doesn't matter and it was it never sold any meat. It just was like an empty butcher shop and it was these two old men in there who would like smoke and chat to each other all day. And our whole lives would grow up like and the door was always open, like it was an open shop. Like, you know, it's two old lads sitting in there. There's no products. It's been bleached all to hell. And then one day I just my curiosity got to better me and I walked in and I said, What's the story? Why is this? Why are you guys always open and why you're not selling editing? And when it fanned turns around and it goes, Taxes So there you go. It was just tax evasion, I guess. Maybe he's writing off the rent of the place or something like that, but he didn't seem to care about it and not telling me. So that's crazy. I'm so curious what their scam was, but I'm sure that , you know, if the one word response is taxes, I'm sure the ten word response is very , you know, implicates them in a crime. Exactly, yeah. Or maybe that was just as many words as they wanted to give some young , you know, gurrier who just like, you know, interrupt ed their story about the good old days, I don't know. That is the fastest way to get kids to go away. It's just if they ask you what you're doing, you just say taxes. Taxes, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Whenever my daughter's like, you know, what are you working on? It's like I could be playing fucking pudgy , I'll be like taxes. Yeah. Being an adult's hard. You're the one has to go to school for like eight hours a day. I just edit videos and play video games and feed my goats, you know ? Anyway, we should probably talk about some video games since we're here . I also just want to briefly touch on some news. We don't do news here very often , but have you guys seen the news coming out of all these Microsoft Studio closures slash threatening of closures. We record this on Tuesday afternoon. So I'm guessing by the time this goes up on Friday we're going to have some bad news here, but have you guys seen this stuff? Yeah, it's it's fucked up. It's double fine also was on the list which is, very sad . Not any sadder than any other studio. I feel like just because I've watched Psychodyssey and met some of those people, it feels you can like feel the human element behind it. Whereas the other ones are sort of like, I'm sure there are good people working here , but yeah, I'm trying to let me pull up the list. It's compulsion games who made South of Midnight , which I think we talked about in this podcast is like obviously I think it won a pea body but like it didn't really set the world on fire. I think I was interested in it from a subject matter perspective, but not to qualify that these places should be shut or not , you know, based on their recent form. That's kind of the problem with a lot of these closures. You look at something like Arcane Austin. Arcane Leon also perhaps on this chopping block, although I think that came from a reporter who subsequently maybe retracted it or felt bad that they'd posted it. To me that would be the most insane one because they are years and years into blade and I'm sure you know Blade is gonna be pretty solid . You know, I don't know. We'll obviously see , but that would be crazy. Ninja Theory is the other one , which apparently there was reporting out before a lot of this saying that it had been shot, but apparently compulsion, Ninja Theory and Double Final Negoti to try and avoid closure, which would presumably mean them trying to find a buyer to take over. So that's what I'm seeing so far. That's what's been reported on at least . Yeah, it's it's sad. I mean, I don't know. It's hard to like not to this is not to center by experience in this, but God, it's fucking bleak when it's like, you want to do a podcast and make videos and be like games are so great. This is such a magical medium that means so much . And then the sort of nuts and bolts practicalities of it are that yeah, I mean, even just like following a bunch of artists and game devs and a writ ers and people in all these different roles on various forms of social media . I just the sort of like gust feel of things is very bleak . I feel like people are losing their jobs and that is a normal thing in the games industry. Like projects finish up and then they're like, all right, we don't need all these talented people. Good luck. You're very talented and there are other projects getting made . But it feels like the last part of that equation less and less an option. People are having fewer places to bounce between . And so I've just seen like very talented artists have worked for several years now. Yeah . Yeah, it does I mean, I've said it before and I've heard counter arguments to it, but you do wonder if the timelines are longer, but you do what you do wonder if like something like a Hollywood situation where people are unionized and working project to project would make more sense than this sort of boomer bust reality we seem to have , you know, wandered into . But I also don't know because the culture of games ownership is game, you know, funding is different to the concept of studio funding. And you know, obviously Microsoft went on a tear here and bought up a lot of I suspect they bought up a lot of studios they could get for good prices too. You know what I mean? Like I don't know if Culomspion games is a studio that I actually don't know how that was founded, so I don't want to speak ill on it, but they're obviously not necessarily a big ticket studio like when Activision Blizzard was purchased, for instance Ninja Theory similarly have sort of worked on these artistic projects. I think they I think they also might do a bunch of work out of that studio in that mocap studio. Like there's a few studios I know that have really good motion capture teams and then they do freelance sort of work on the side just to make a bit more money and pay for the stuff. But they just announced a new Hellblade or I think it's just called Sen ua the new one at Xbox, but also has struck me as a and this isn't to like forgive the fact that they're getting close. I'm not saying that, but like that also struck me as maybe a bit of a loss leader like those games. I could be completely wrong. Maybe they make their profits hand over fist, but I didn't, you know, I would have been worried about them for instance. And then Double Fine is the other one where I don't like they have had like the selling we see in the documentary and stuff, like the selling to Microsoft was probably as much about just trying to keep that studio alive at all. You know what I mean? Like, you know, I think hopefullyy pschonauts do did well, but I'm sure the production effort on it and the cost was really quite high. Obviously they're based in San Francisco and that's a, you know, burn rate on people's going to be pretty big and they obviously seem to treat their people quite well. So maybe they're a bit more expensive than other studios. They brought out that LightS game keeper and then they brought out that other game that I didn't even know about. Was it Kiln? Is that what it's called? Yeah, was that what it was? Yeah, no cops was telling me about it. And I was like, God, how did I even know about this? How did Microsoft note like wasn't it was ? It was a prototype in psychology, wasn't it? When they do Oh yeah, Fortnite was one of the games that they worked on in it because when they announced it it looked very familiar to me, but I've not played it, it looks amazing. Yeah, it looks great but, it's like also , you know , why is it ? I'm not saying it's just me, but I just found it weird that like the game is one hundred and thirty six reviews on Steam and it's published by Xbox Game Studios. Like how was this not I just found it so weird? Like you know, I don't know. I just found it weird. I would assume any Microsoft first party game that's coming out would have a lot of advertisement behind it and I did not see anything on it. So I don't I think it's also it's a I don't know. There's to me it feels like an artist game. Like I feel like if you told any person who does a creative craft about kiln they be like that sounds amazing. I feel like if I was on the bus talking to like a random guy about it, they're like, why would I play this pottery brawler? Yeah. It's a I think it's a tough core fan to see it to sell. There are like, I don't know, it's yeah, there are certain games that are like game designer games or art likeist g ames. Like Chelsea and I were playing a game last night and I won't spoil what game it was. I've already talked about it in the podcast. We're just finishing it. But towards the end a bunch of characters were dying off and we were joking that if each of these characters had been a player throughout the game, that it would have been like a very challenging design choice because suddenly one person has to finish the game and four people have to sit around watching them finish the game . And I was like, I feel like for like Phil and the boys like a bunch of randoms they'd be like this game folk sucks dude. But like if it was five game designers in the room they'd be like clapping and stepping like on their feet like wow this is bravo this is so bold so yeah I don't know I just I feel like Killing is a game that like to me seems fucking amazing, but like my brother who just like plays, you know, a triple A open world games I wonder what he would think. I mean you could also be describing half of Double Fines games. You know what I mean? Like that is, that is sort of the remit or the cross that you have to bear when you're making interesting artistic games is that you're limiting the people who can who can play them and double fine, I think have stayed true to that and somehow managed to survive for a long time. But yeah, you can see how I'm not justifying it. There's a difference between saying like, oh, it makes sense that they'd want to shut this studio down. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is when Double Fime was bought , I'm sure we can go back to a podcast where it was talked about. And if I didn't say it then I'll say it now, I would be immediately worried about the future of Double Fine if they were under an Xbox banner. Like that seems to me like if they are looking for the games that make the least like or the worst OI, you know what I mean? Like expensive studio of Artisans in San Francisco making games that are like almost on paper designed for people who are interested in like high art games to a certain extent. You know what I mean? Like it just seems like the first head that's going to get dedragg to the guillotine or neck rather they didn't chop heads in half in the guillotine. Although maybe they did. Maybe someone got bored. You think so? Like one of the kids once everyone left the square and someone someone's head was, you know, on a particularly brutal day outside the Champes Lie , someone some kid was like, Okay, let's see if we can chop this fucking head in half. Do you think it happened? Or like if you were on the guillotine and as the blade was falling, you like yeah like sneezed sneeze at the at the start of the sneeze when you kind of you go to go you kind of go in go straight like diagonal through this skull. Honestly, that's fucking a horrible image. It is yeah, take comfort in the fact that Robespier himself when he tried to commit suicide when they were coming for him , shot himself in the head through the jaw and instead just blew his jaw off and then they dragged him through the streets of Paris , still alive with no jaw and then chopped his head off. So, you know , there you go. It's your French Revolution minute. There's metaphors for the games industry. Exactly. A hundred percent, there you go. Yep. Here's yeah, Xbox ownership is currently Robespear, but we all know how that story ends . I'm not threatening anyone. That's not what it's, this is a metaphor. The literary metaphor metaphor . Yeah. So our thoughts with everyone at the Stoe Studios, man, I just having the guillotine hanging over your head like that now it's an appropriate metaphor. Like they don't because they currently don't know what's happening. Like that's that's a really terrible situation to be in. And yeah, and I think a lot of these studios when they got bought by Microsoft probably didn't have much other choices . And I think unfortunately, given the state of the games industry and brutal capitalism in this current epoch , you know, I'm really disappointed, but I'm not really that surprised to be reading these headlines. Like this is kind of the inevitable end as it were of some of this stuff. So yeah, we really hope these studios land on their feet that maybe some more positive ownership, more long term thinking ownership comes in and and saves the day, but yeah, it's it's pretty rough. Go ahead and play some games from these studios folks. Go ahead and I'm gonna play set at midnight this week because ideally dallied on it and yeah, a bunch of great games from these folks. So we'll have to wait and see unfortunately what our thoughts with all those all those folks. Let's let's talk about we got some games to catch up on here. Just let's keep the bad times rolling. Frank, you want to tell us about this fucking White House DLC in EASPs. That's a bad time. It's cool. I think it's awesome. EA Sports, you have C six. Okay, so nine months ago when this matching machine came out, it was I really liked that mo movvie. It's a great simultaneously they released like Mark Kerr DLC that same weekend. So it was like, holy shit. So I got it on discount. Like Yesports UFC five for like thirty bucks and I played it for like several weeks. It was incredible. I really liked it. So now nine months later, the sequel is out or I don't know, the new one is out. Easports UFC six . I toss out an email and I was very happy and surprised. I got a code. So I've been playing it and yeah, it's it's like the WWE games where it's like they don't release a new one every year , but like it's not that many new features. It's like incremental. But if you've never played them, then like it's really surprising how cool and like again, the brutality of these gays, especially you have C six, it's like mortal combat. Oh, right. Punching people. You see people get like lacerated and bloody. Like it is so gnarly and like the when like the knockouts happen, they'll do like slow motion car ry. It's like so nasty and cool. Like it's literally like, it's I said this last time with YOSC five, it's like it's the best boxing game ever played. It's the best like it's not the best fighting game like T Fight Night round three might have something to say about it. It's good. He can't play as the sneak king guides in Fight Night three, but it's like the evil. And that was yeah, you can't play as sneak king in Fight Night three. The whole game is like sponsored by Burger King. There's like Burger King sponsors everywhere in Fight Night three, but yeah, you have C six is like is pretty good. The new stuff in this game is there's the standard career mode, but now there's like a story mode where they give you like a protagonist character and you have a rivalry and it's it's almost like Slumdog Millionaire or the Slumdog mill ier. What's the Hillary Swank Clinesewood film? Not slum dog baby. Million dollar baby. Yeah, a million dollar baby where it's like you start in a ratty gym and it's like, Hey, no one respects us all the gym, but we're going to fight like it's the dumbest like sports drama crap. Have you played any of the sports like I suspect this is the first time that you have come into contact with an EA sport single player? Yeah so like NBA NBA like I did the sport I did the campaign and like Defa started this whole thing maybe seven or eight years ago like they've had it in for a while. Formerly one games have had it for a while as well. Although that might have been pre ya. I think Cody's might have done that in their own. And yeah, like you said, NBA has it as well. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. It's like it's kind of a no brainer at this stage that they're like charming how dumb like they're I don't know it's I think it's so silly and funny because yeah I did the NBA one and like the voice acting and that was really bad but like, it's just it's just kind of shocking like there's like just cinematics for something that's like I just want to play the game I don't know when you compare it to the WWE game. Yes and like yeah how most interactions happen in that which is like a fucking visual novel no, shade to visual novels, but like it's like, hi, I'm your new manager and it's just like two models that have been a fucking dressing room and no one else in there. Yeah, textbog. So like things have come a long way. So it's like so this is the first time with the UFC games or due actually I played EA MMA unleash and boss Rutton was in the game doing he was like your coach. So they've tried story mode stuff but this is full blown cinematics and the neat thing here is like there's points in the story where you like fight like you get into fights . So there's a level that takes place . There's parts in the story of DFC game where you fight people outside the octagon. So there's a nightclub level and it's like it's like Def Jam or like tech where there's NPC surrounding and you're beating up like a drunk I don't know it's you're fighting in a casino. They don't do it that often. I think it only happens twice in the game, but it's like, oh this should be the game. This is so cool. And I don't think you can select those levels later on, but that was really amazing. There's unique fight opportunities. But and then the campaign itself, I've talked about this with you of C five. It's like it has this really satisfying progression where you have a fight scheduled in five weeks and you have to train and you're you're doing like punching bags or sparring. You can accidentally knock out your sparring partner and then that coach is unavailable the rest of the training session. Oh funny. That's great. So it's like the campaign stuff is really fun. It does this thing where like every move you do has like an XP meter. So if you throw left hooks, your left hook will level up to level two and things like that. So as someone who like doesn't care that much about I don't know, sports games in general has they've RPGI everything . So I really like that. Then the new stuff in this game similar to WWE's showcase mode, they have, I think it's called legacy or I forget what the term is but it's basically their showcase mode. There's three fighters and you walk through like a museum. So again, I don't know their names is there's one that's like Alex Holloway, the guy from Hawaii . You go around this museum and there's like Hawaii music playing. You can watch video montages of like everyone back on Maui loves Alex Holloway. Like there's Josh Holloway, isn't it? Josh Hollywood is hold on No, that's an actor. What the fuck is what the fuck? Max Max Holloway, Max Holloway. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Max Holloway sorry. Yeah, Max Holloway. And so they there's always like documentary featuretes in the in the in these museums you're walking through and then you can recreate their famous fights and just like showcase mode in WWE'll be like, all right, do a submission here and it'll match up between the in game fighting and then the real footage and then you'll hear like Joe like archival Joe Rogan. My favorite detail is like they don't match the sponsorships. So like in archival footage you'll see like buffalo wild wings and like monster energy drains. There's no dynamic fasteners or all the classic games , gamespot had one at one , Game Spot sponsored an event or like you'll see Assassin's Creed three, you know, there's a lot of that shit. It's cool. Yeah, because I was I really like Buffalo Wild Wings. So I was hoping it would be the game. But then the contemporary sponsors of UFC six is paramount plus is everywhere because I think that's where UFC currently has their deal and then yeah it's the stupidest deal in sport broadcasting history probably. So like nothing is that's why I was able to watch the I was watching it on my phone, the awful USC spectacle outside the White House. I've watched UFC for like two decades, ish at this stage and it has never been worse just not even like the vibes are all completely off just because it's because it's gone like super fash but the the setup of the fight there's just so many events they're, also meaningless. They're constant ly have players cancelling. So I wanted to see the spectacle of this freedom two hundred and fifty event they put inside the White House. And I was mostly watching A to see if any American fighter could beat a non American fighter. As it turns out, they were two for two on those by the end. The first two fights the Yanks lost, which I thought was quite funny. And second to see if the gambit of putting on an outdoor sporting event in the DMV area in fucking June , also known as lightning season was going to work out. And they were lucky. Apparently they had to delay the event an hour and then the lightning starm rolled in after final after Justin Gates hand was lifted . But yeah, it was it was it was like people will study this. Like it like the commercials were all like somebody said a very derogatory thing about Michelle Obama and their Wingside interview. There was almost all the ads were for like dip shit things, like crypto and fucking the AI and it was like all loads of the ads had AI in them. They're all just like jingoistic shit , like fucking shots of bush like at nine eleven. Like it was just it was like it was crazy. Like I could not stop watching it because it was like this is the most fucking bizarre event. They kept cutting to celebrities in the in the crowd who like I'd never heard of. It was a real like all the stars are here moment . One of my favorite parts was when they cut to known shithead Zlatan Ibrahimovich . Zladan Ibrahimovich is like probably Sweden's most famous football star . He was at this event while Sweden was playing in the World Cup. Like he wasn't at the Sweden game, like he doesn't play anymore, obviously, but just it was just like a shit head circus. The whole thing was just like, these are all the worst people. The atmosphere was completely terrible . You know, most of the I guess fad fans were out somewhere else in some park somewhere close by, but yeah it was, it was basically that level from hit man three. Like we're talking about video games, MMA games. The best MMA video game in my mind is the final level of hitman three. Do you guys remember this? Did you get that far? I haven't gotten that far now. The final level is on like a fucking , you know, a what's the name of that event that happens out here, Jeremy? One of my friends' son's actually, I think, working it at the moment. The Secret Society out near Gurnville. Oh Bohemian Grove? Bohemian Grove. Yeah, so Bohemian Grove's on right now, right? So it's like a three or four week thing where a bunch of rich people come into this like I think it used to be a lot more like spiritual and it probably still is like culture or whatever but it's like a bunch of rich people come in and they fucking I don't know jerky general offer yeah it's like a men's club essentially where they're like summer camp for rich conservative men u. And when I said Jerkish off, I didn't mean in a homophysical way because that also I forgot there is also that elements to it that it being a secret society and these being conservative men , I just meant , you know, being nice to each other. Each other's egos . Thank you, exactly, yes . So yeah, the final level of hit man three is basically like a big Suare get together secret society thing that happens on this island, but there's a UFC fight happening unless I've completely conflated two different levels. I'm pretty sure that's what it is. And originally the Economy McGregor in it, who is the guy who was like fighting? And I think you had to did you have to kill him? Oh no, I think maybe they added Oh no, this is what it was. The original level was just a secret society. They did DLC that put the octagon in there. So it was like a separate mode or whate ver. And originally they had Connor McGregor in there, but of course, in typical professional MMA form, he ended up being convicted of a horrific crime in Ireland , and so they pulled him out. And I think they put somebody else in, maybe. I'm not sure. But yeah, that's what this reminded me. It was just like the world's worst people sort of feigning interest in a spectacle of poor people beating the shit out of each other for money. It was like we're just we're just we've just gone back to the coliseum you know, but the veil was off like this whole event the veil was off. You could see it was just so dark and I it was like it was like it was like the most distilled , you know, purest form of this like techno fascism that we sort of live in at the moment and how fucking stupid the whole thing is. Like and how we're doing such a good job of manufacturing propaganda for other people as a nation right now. We're like we're become not just the Hollywood like Hollywood, the Hollywood of Hollywoods but like the Hollywood of American Century of Humiliation propagand . Yeah, it is unbelievably humiliating. Yeah . We wait to see how the Iran deal works out for everyone involved. Anyway, sorry, Frank, you like UFC. Yeah, so youth the freedom two hundred and fifty stage is in the game. There's not Trump isn't like on the thing but I'm trying to think but like yeah the thing opens and it's like the White House and fireworks and it's like we're here at UFC freedom two hundred fifty the greatest in the history of our sport and then it's just a regular fight. But yeah, you're fighting in front of the White House, which is cool because like it's crazy because now that's an official like the White House like it's just that's like maybe the craziest fighting game stage in history now and because yeah the actual like current historical context we're living in. It's like, that's fucking insane. And then you can play as Connor McGregor. You can have Ronda Rousey. So you can have all the great people fighting in the White House together . All the great ex stars who were eventually humiliated and lost their belts. Yeah, okay. And then you can you can make characters. The one thing I was super bummed, it's launch week and online I was not able to get into a single match. It'll queue and then you'll see like me and some random person and then it'll freeze at the loading screen every single time. But the benefit, there's an achievement for getting three ranked wins in a row . If you go into a lobby and the other person disconnects, it counts you as a win. So because the lobbies were bugged, I queued up, got into a thing. Oh, your partner's disconnected. You get a ranked win. I did that three times and I got this achievement. So now I'm like, great. Frank was fucking shaking his modem the whole time . He was just like so like so I'm happy but the funny thing about playing the UFC games online, there's people who like know how to play them so I get destroyed every time, but I love seeing people's fake characters because you can put tattoos. There's tattoo editors. So like my character has like ICP tattoos and like stuff like that. It's so goofy, but it's like I want to see everyone's custom characters, but or if you don't have time to make your own fucked up weird freak , you can just pick Sugar Sean O'Malley and have you guys ever seen him? No. Yeah, Google Sean O'Malley. And he basically is when you hit randomize on a character creations screen too many times. Yeah, yeah. He's at the clown Afrozen. So let's say but then he won he won his fight at UFC freedom two hundred and fifty. Oh yeah, so I think so yeah overall you have C six is cool. Now the one thing if you wait like a month or two it will go on sale. I bought UFC five last year on sale and I loved it. This is seventy at launch . It's like ninety bucks for the Deluxe edition. If you wait for this on discount, it's a good time if you buy it at a launch unless you're a huge UFC fan, then yeah, is EA part of Game Pass Ultimate ? It's so weird. I feel like they kind of went, I feel like older EA titles are available. Some EA games EA play things will let you do like two hour free trial. I don't know the deal this did not launch on GamePass, but yeah, you might be able to trial it , but I think UFC five is currently on game pass. So it's like they're basically the same game, but it is and then the one nice thing is they do you can do predictions every time there's a UFC event. You can do predict ions and then you get like in game currency XP lockable baby babies first sports betting they put anything about UFC, but my friend was with me. I was like, I bet this for the UFC freedom fights so we place our bets and then you get in game XP and stuff and there's lots of stuff to unlock, but yeah, it's a cool game but they will they constantly live up for years that's so dark. I mean, it's kind of cool, but also just like knowing where they lead with this because like UFC is just like full of, you know, John Anneck during the fights will be giving, you know, saying oh he you know, he was minus three hundred and fifteen before that, you know, and you're like, oh my god, can we not like my lord but, yeah, in any other game that would be cool. Like if you could do it in the World Cup game where it wasn't like all about sports betting or whatever . There is no World Cup game. So I guess they just patched FIFA this year. They put in like a free update that has World Cup stuff in it . But there has been a tradition of doing a World Cup specific game. In fact, one year you guys will love this. I think it was ' ninety eight for the French World Cup . They put out like put out like FIFA ninety seven or was it FIFA ninety eight? It would have been ' ninety eight, I think, right? Yeah, because they do the year ahead when the thing starts. Then they put out in January, I think it was FIFA Road to World Cup ninety eight , which like had some like World Cup qualifier stuff in and other bits and bobs, and then they put out a World Cup game. So there was three FIFAs that year. And that World Cup game was actually like brilliant. It was like a really good one . But yeah, it was they were taking the piss on that one for sure. And there is a World Cup ninety four pinball game. So oh really? Like USA ninety four that is cool. Yeah. And it has like the dog mask on it and like yeah so they've just the game itself is just soccer scoring goals but that one was really popular does it have Reyhaughten scoring against the Italians so that Ireland could beat them? No I don't know I don't think I've ever played. I've just seen it Bam I'll have to go back. They have in it Anaheim at the Hyper Bear Arcade, so it's pretty cool. I got to play, see if they have all the classic moments like Red Card for Leonardo and Baggio kicking the ball over the bar. My first World Cup. You never forget your first boys . Never forget your first. You think they made it the so the having all those moments would assume that they made it after but they would have made it before to promote it. But it would be funny if they revised it and had it. It was like a historical pinball machine pulled out of story of a bunch of Irish people getting sunburned in giant stadium, you know? I like the idea of a pinball machine that's like , you know, like one like the Odyssey pinball machine and it has all the you know what I mean? Like it's like preserving history and mythology in the form of pinball. What's he doing with those witches over there for what it's just like a fog of war for a year? Yeah, yeah, you know how the ball gets trapped and then they have like a separate thing. He gets trapped on the island. That's great. That's correct. Yeah. The ball comes out of the fog and has like lipstick marks on it or something For twenty years it's trapped in the fucking witch zone up in the corner. This guy's like, yeah, I couldn't get out of there. I don't know what's going on. Yeah, I'd like that. What would be the best? What would be the best like classics ? I mean, the Odyssey's pretty good. You might have you made I'm trying to think of like is there the road pinball machine? That'd be pretty gnarly. Cornack McCarthy pinball would be great. McCarthy pinball. There will be Blood one and it's well he didn',t do that, right? He did no country for all man, but like yeah where Sigura is chasing you. I would love like a like a Billy Wilder pinball machine that has like the apartment and sunset boulevard, you know, all the class . Love it. It's good stuff. River dance . That'd be pretty cool. A bunch of legs. Like it could be like legs, the two little paddles king of the ball. Michael Flatley's head at the top. You gotta fucking knock all his teeth out or something . Could be hey man . Pinball people, I got loads of ideas. I'm an ideas boy . Let me get through some of my games I played over the break because not a lot of them are particularly , let's say or current. I completed a Creature Kitchen, which is a game I talked about a few weeks ago and you guys had talked about it I think a year ago when it first came out or something . I really loved it. I thought the ending of it was very sweet. It's a game where you cook meals for creepy little monsters that you have to find that live around this house. It's a small indie experience . Kind of starts off as a spooky game, but I would say it ends in a very different place that I thought was very cool. Yeah, loved it. Really cool vibes, gameplay mechanics are fun, genuinely tricky sometimes , you know, it wasn't totally easy peasy the whole way through frictionless or anything. Really enjoyed it. I played zero seven first light. I listened. I was driving through Ireland listening to the podcast where Frank was frustrated with the five hour tutorial nature of that game. So I wanted to play it just to see how I felt about it. And I totally get where you're coming from, Frank. For me, I actually really enjoyed that whole part . I think a lot of it was I really, if you're skipping if you don't if you're not into the story on this, a lot of it is like building story, building rapport between James and his young fellow recruits Definitely layering in the mechanics like that nightclub scene is very much, you know , your first sort of stakeout stuff, but it's a fuck it's a really well made game. Like I really love it . And yeah, I really enjoyed the story aspects of it. Weirdly, you know, having lived in London and worked with a bunch of young people at GameSpot UK who are like we had, you know, we had sort of like made it into the machine and we were try ing our best. Like I was getting lots of sort of like flashbacks to life back then which I thought was very cool. But yeah, really enjoying it. Still haven't I'm still within that five hour tutorial zone, I think, Frank, so I'm making my way through it, but really enjoying it. The Legend of California had another alpha over the weekend . I don't have much else to report on it other than I think from what I heard and saw from the second alpha and what I saw from this one, I think this was mostly about network stability because they were pouring people in They had lots of issues with just servers getting down to very low , you know, pings when they had the last alpha. And on this one, it was pretty much perfect and yeah, I was it was like orders of magnitude more stable, which was pretty cool. So that was just over the weekend. So I got up to level three again with my ranch and still enjoying that game . I definitely am looking forward to getting when it gets released and if we can do a No Cliff Community Island, I definitely want to give it a go. I played some weird we're doing a next best video for this week. It should be up probably by the time about the podcast up or shortly after on the weekend . I played Order of the Sinking Star, the new Thecla game. This is the new John Blo putu out a pretty good trailer actually sort of explaining how it is, but have you touched it at all, Jeremy? Have you seen it? No, I've not. I'm definitely curious about it. I definitely have mixed feelings about the, you know, I mean there,'s some cool people that worked on it too. I have mixed feelings about it. I'm not sure if I'm going to play it yet. Yeah, that's fair. I downloaded a bunch of games and I wasn't sure if this was that one and it definitely didn't even come up on the splash screen but I was like, I'm pretty sure this is this game once I got in. It hasn't clicked at me yet. I really love the Witness. Like the Witness is one of my favorite games ever. And Braid, I think, is a great accomplishment for its time . And both those games had an art style that I felt was like very strong. Like one was like purely two D, but sort of leaned into the two D nature of it with the sort of weird clipping collage nature of it. And then the witness three D, but like very uniquely three D, like sort of using , you know, matte colors and shadows and, you know, really cranking off the saturation and making color part of the puzzle. And I think I just, I'm not mad about how this game looks. I don't like a lot of three D models with fixed two D cameras. It's just like something that has always kind of made me go, oh, I prefer this isn't two D I think that's a personal thing , but yeah I'm not I have a feeling it's a game that you have to play five hours of tutorial before it gets interesting as well because the starting is just a lot of moving blocks around and obviously by the end of this game I'm sure it is mixed matching all of the different gameplay mechanics and different characters you play. Different characters have different abilities and they have so you do sometimes you do the same puzzle with the with different characters and they have completely different ways of solving them and that stuff is, you know, intellectually interesting I think but it hasn't grabbed my heart I'll say so I need to see more about that. But yeah, we'll have some next fest stuff up in the next few days. Keep your eyes up for that open for that. And then me and my daughter were playing CatQuest three , which I don't know. She said one of her friends had like a tablet game called Cat Quest. And I don't fuck with any of those tablet games. Like she can play real games or she can play no games. Like I don't really do unless it's like an educational thing. Like there's a Crayola one, which is good, but I don't let her play like fucking tapp y games and stuff. Cat Quest, man, this thing's fucking fun . So we're playing this like two player, but and the other cat Quests, you know, the first one came out in twenty seventeen looks kind of similar. Maybe the graphics aren't as good. The second one came out in twenty nineteen . And then I don't actually know when Cat Quests three came out . But it's basically like what I like about it is it is a Okay, it came out in twenty twenty four Catquest three. So unlike the other two which are like fantasy themes, this is kind of pirate themed and basically it is a fixed perspective and you are a two D character walking around a three D world, kind of super paper mario kind of looking like you know the door kind of looking a little bit big open world and then you can go into places you can like kill mobs on the crabs and shit in the world It's drop in, drop out co ops so my daughter plays as well. And what's crucial is she doesn't have to use the camera because the camera's locked. And sometimes you go into like towers and stuff and then it becomes a two D like a side scroller, you know, like whatever, splunky or fucking any game like that. So again, she doesn't have to do anything with the camera. And I think for her, the camera is always something that like it's just a bit of an impediment to learning how to play games and all that stuff. So it's been so much fun. Like I thought that it was just some sloppy tablet game thing, but it actually is pretty pretty solidly made and like cool and it's got charm to it. Like you're sort of riding around on your boat like overboard or shipwrecked as it was known in the US, the classic PC one game . But the it has a lot of whimsy and fun to it like characters are interesting that we found a big yellow like rubber duck, just like a huge rubber duck, like with a look like a pirate like four times bigger than any other boat in the game, just like roaming around. We're like, oh , she was like, go over to it and we'll see, you know, see if we can say hi. We went over and there was no interactions available and I was just like around it. It was just ignoring me. And then I went to shoot it and the minute I shoot it, the entire screen goes red,s it' fucking eyes turn evil and like orbital lasers start coming down to hit us and my daughter was just fucking like a like the minute I hit her shoot what have you done? And we had to like run away from this fucking giant rubber duck so yeah, cat Quest three . That's my dad game for the week . It's it's good fun, but yeah, zero seven for slide I think is what I need to get back into. Start messing around with. Jeremy, you have some in addition to the list. Yeah, you sure do from CatQuest. Sure do. So from a quest. Yeah, you're right. From Cat is that I was wondering why you were smirking when I said 'cause I saw the fucking I saw the stars align. Okay , easiest transition ever. So I'm gonna stop finishing, finishing talking about cat Quest three. Please Jeremy tell us about the game you want to talk about. Yeah, so this is Fuck's quest too apostrophe S. So Fuck is the protagonist Oh, is he German or No, no, it's just no, it's not like Fukes, it's not like that guy from Berry I'm going to do my best to explain this in the most balanced way possible. I think the best way to start is read some things from the Steam store because that was sort of my experience with I saw some people posting about this game and I couldn't tell if it was like people were like, Oh, it's so good, it's bad or if it's one of those games that like, oh it looks shitty, but it's actually like secretly, it's like high art. It's really it's kind of like neither of those. Okay , it's like it's like a game maker RPG . It's like a shitty version of Link to the past, but like also very well made, but it's so it's so like fucking stupid but like in a way that's it's so intentionally stupid that like sometimes I'm playing it and it's I have such weird feelings where when it makes me laugh, it's like the jokes land so much. But when it doesn't make me laugh, it's like I'm embarrassed to be playing it. Oh, funny. But I think that that is the intent is like , for example, one of the earlier sort of quests you're doing is that you have to go to me get the name exact here, the local school, which is the doctor John F. Shit school for really weird kids for really weird kids and it's been taken over by the Army because there was someone was in possession of an illegal fart tape . Oh kid, the gay. And the Army for Reasons of National Security had to take over the building to seize it. Of course . And so you have to infiltrate the school to retrieve the illegal fart tape Again, like I don't know how to feel about this. Sometimes it's so funny and sometimes it's so unfunny that it like it makes me laugh because I'm like, why am I even playing this? Right? But I want to read some stuff from the Steam Store because I think it's so brilliant. This is the description of the steam page. In this game you play as fuck and you get to use crappy weapons and talk to horrible NPCs and find the Bible crystals and explore my game and find secrets and play further to see what the next part of the game is I should mention there is no Fox Quest one as well. Yeah, no, yeah, that's important. I had to make sure I was caught up on FoxQuest. It's like troll two, you know? Yes, exactly. A hundred . Yes, exactly. It is a reaction to what came before. No, sorry. Troll two. Yes, I'm thinking of Gremlins two. Sorry, no, no. There was a Gremlins one, luckily. Great film in the mature content description, this is probably also my favorite line of the steam page. It says, The developers describe the content like this, and then in Italics as in written by the developer. This game has millions of the most incredible swear words ever made swear words is in quotes. And then it says and also features intellectual darkness . It's just like I don't know, man, I have such mixed feelings about this game. This is not like a singing endorsement where I'm like, wow, I fucking this is like the best game ever. It like, it pisses me off sometimes. But I think that that's what it's, I think that's the intent so like I can't fault it for that. Okay, I also have enjoyed this steam page . The trailer has a bunch of like , you know, different features pop up journal. One of them is one different endings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a fucking banger. And then at the end, it says on the splash screen, it says Fucks Quest two on Friday, june twelfth , twenty twenty six, I have now invented Fox Quest. It's like there's just something so raw about it and it's like have you I don't know. Have you seen the about this game section? I haven't read the whole thing . It's just made up reviews for the game. Some of these Yeah, a game was made by some guy question mark. I cannot believe that some guy made this, maybe some kid or some asshole that some guy. This is too immature for me to believe that. This one's called idiot game. Ugh, this is such a boys game and it makes me do a bunch of boys stuff like watch chicken TV and eat meat dogs and it's all toilet humor. Why am I being forced to play this crap that doesn't even have a rich story mechanics. Yeah, that's my review. I wrote that. It's like no, it's and it is like there's so in the first fifteen minutes there are so many fucking like fart jokes that I was like, this is really obnoxious. Like I fucking , I hate this, but I keep laughing like as soon as I get it like servicing like it's just doing us to the joke isn't the fart jokes, the joke is that we're doing so many fart jokes that it's really annoying. It's like Norm McDonald's sort of Yeah, it is like anti humor. Anti humor. Yeah. Yeah, it's yeah, where Norm McDonald goes so dry that it's funny. This is like what if we just throw so much at you? It's like a maximalist inversion of yeah, it's wet humor. One of my favorite lines is early on your dad who is shaped like a weird fucking like the girl who turns into a blueberry and Willy Wonka says to you, you're such a disappointment by your age , I had four dads . So that's sort of the caliber of dialogue in FoxQuest too . That's a surprisingly good that's a good joke. That's a good joke. It's an inversion. And it's also like it says something about both characters. Yes. So like the when you find the fart tape and play it, it's such a bad joke that I was like, this fuck it, this game sucks, but then like the four dads by my age thing is like, it's so funny. It's just shooting shots and seeing what works. And I have to appreciate it for that. And it's just also I just like, I feel like games have become the state of indie games is that like a level of polish is expected from indie games that I feel like it's important to remember that like, you know, games it's an art medium. Like some of the best movies that I've ever seen in my life were really rough and janky and stuff and games should be no different. So like playing a game that is this fucking weird and jank and I mean it's not mechanically jank it it,' likes well , but just like , yeah, I don't know. It's like intentionally fucking rough around the edges in a way that either pisses me off or makes me laugh really hard, depending on the joke. So love it. FoxQuest two available for four hundred and ninety nine on Steve. four hundred ninety nine. You can't get that mad at it. You know what I mean? It's a whole quest. Yeah. I don't care whose quest it is. four hundred ninety nine for a quest , you know funny fuck for fuck from Fuck Quest for Fortnite, I say. Whoa, that's pretty good. Stick that on a cab Oh my god, how did we move from that one? Frank, Warhammer Dark Tide , explain. Yeah, so Warhammer Dark Tide, this is a game that showed up on like it was June, one of June's like free PlayStation games or added to the premium catalog. This originally came out. It's fine. There's like three different like console releases originally on PC twenty twenty two , then a year later on Xbox. It launched on GamePass, but I didn't play it. I didn't hear anyone talk about it. It came out on PS five december twenty twenty four and then still didn't hear anything about it. It became a free PlayStation plus game this month and now it's experiencing like the PlayStation Plus effect. I've been monitoring the Reddit and everyone on Reddit's like where the fuck are all these new players coming from? How'd you played Vermontide? Yeah, I played Vermontide. And so I had a friend explain to me. I always so intimidated by Warhammer. It's I mean like amen . I'm one hundred percent with you. It is like Lord of the Rings is inviting. Warhammer terrifies me. I'm like, I can't, I can't even put my first step into this world. So one, my friend explained, Warhammer is like, as we know, like middle earth, like dungeons and dragons type shit. Forty K, that's the space marine stuff. So even realizing that 's a distinction, I was like, oh my god, like, so now I know there's two different things. Vermontide was like middle ear stuff. You're fighting rats. And for whatever the aesthetic of that's like, I don't, there was also a lot of rats games. Plague tail came at the same time. It was just like, I don't care. It was two rap games and that's two man. You only have one. You only have one . It was just like it's cool. I played a little bit, but it didn't stick with me. But I warhammer to me is the exact kind of like cheesy crap that like Todd McFarlan draws. It's like skeletons with it's like the aesthetic of Warhammer forty K is awesome. It's like space wizards and fucking skeletons. It's like dark destiny or spawn. So aesthetically it's really cool. The gameplay wise is basically like left for dead, but the thing that hooks me in very much like destiny. It's got like a lot of like MO MM O MM ASLY multiple MMORPG type mechanics, lots of stuff to grind. You're getting XP . So I like left for dead, but the progression is just oh, you played the game and had fun, whatever. Here, every level has a skill tree. Every sorry, every weapon has a skill tree. Every class, you're leveling up talents like World War Craft. So if you do a mission, oh my god gear drops you get new loot. So it has all the dopamine addictions that I like. The gameplay itself is really fun . There's a lot of levels. I feel like a lot of times I'll play these kind of like horde shooters. There's like five stages and that's it. Right. Yeah. So that's the thing is they've been updating this game for years. My friend, this game has cross play. My friend saw I was playing jumped on Steam. He hadn't played in years and he logged on and was like, what the hell is all this new shit? Like they added like there is gear score now, which I know Jeremy we talked about a few months ago , but they've been patching this and I think it's one of those things almost like Star Wars battlefront too where like this game came out and I don't know what the reception was at the time years later there's a dedicated fan base now again just like Star Wars battlefront two , yeah, the one that exploded last year is like now that it's free to play on both game pass and PlayStation and it's cross play . This game is like surging in popularity again. And I played it like maybe like eight to ten hours. I'm addicted to it. I want to like beat there's an achievement for getting one class level thirty and achievement for getting two classes level thirty. So I'm going to keep going. It is so cool there's an I think the reason they also made it free to play this month on PlayStationus P isl they're launching a new class this month? So they're still updating it. But yeah, I always try left for deadlikes. Like back for Blood was okay. I didn't like the card system. This is like been the first one of these in a while where I'm like, oh, this is so good. The shooting feels super fun. Yeah, shooting in those games always felt like it's so good powerful and punchy. And these days like with the physics , again, like you're oh, one thing that's sick, it's a very melee focused game. When you slice like these like zombies open, maggots spill out of them. So it's such a like it's such a nasty game , but you know, it's it's dark and brooding, but that kind of disgusting , it looks beautiful if that makes sense. Like it's so nasty but it's incredible. Like it's just, it's really, really fun. Again, there's like characters that are one to one for like left for dead. Like there will be a character that pins you down if you're if you get too far behind or too far ahead of your friends, whatever, you can find loot during the thing that will level up your weapons, all the stuff. It just has all the mechanics that click. So this is finally like , oh that kind of like addicting MMO type game I'm playing right now. But yeah, this came out of nowhere. It's been people have been joining it for years, but now this month it's surging in popularity and I really like it. It's by Fat Shark, which they're based in Sweden also . I think they all they did Vermontide as well. They don't that this, this is their little corner of video games. Yeah, it's it's really good. I'm shocked. So it's yeah, I'm going to keep playing it. It's I can't believe how good. I downloaded just thinking like oh it's just the dumb game to grind let me see how it is and it was like oh this is this is I really like this game. Hell yeah nice work provided to you by the one this is the problem'.s It too many games coming out. Also there's all the old games we never played that then get spat back up by some of these , you know , membership platforms . It's pretty wild . Yeah, today go Warhammer Dark Tide. What a weird collection of games we had this week. What an absolute the week after summer games fest and everything is and I guess it's also the fact that Next Fest is on at the moment and we're holding most of our ards close to our chest right now for that, but yeah, there we go. We had a Fucks Quest two, CatQuest three , Yesport six, four hammer Dark Tide. Forty nine . Forty K ap, zero, seven, first like creature kitchen . Yeah, you just find numbers in here is what it is Yeah, legend of California, alpha three, all that st uff. Frank, we got some emails here it looks like . Yeah, as always, you can send us emails podcasts at no clip. Video are on our Patreon discord channel in the podcast chat channel. Our first comes from Matthew asking about missing since January or slash immemorium. After hearing you talk about Pet Scop and the weird blending of video games reality, I was wondering if ANV played immemorium. It was apparently called Missing Since January outside of Europe. The CD ROM itself was supposed to be a piece of evidence and the developers had created a bunch of intricate real websites that you needed to find to solve the mystery. It even emailed you as characters from the game as you got close to certain points of the story. Oh boy. As far as I know it's unplayable now as the websites are down and hard to find and the email service doesn't work anymore . Man, that's some good. That's that's some good stuff. You couldn't do that now because somebody would come to your house in Murdy or something. You know what I mean? You'd get the wrong bag playing that g ame and pizza get you or something . That's so cool. I do remember the box of this, but I don't I never played it. Did you guys I've never this it's what are you call what's that I love bees thing? What do you call those things again? ARG? ARG ES are. It's like an AI Love Bees was a halo ARG . Oh , yeah. Yeah, ARGs. It seems quite ARGE Yeah, no , I've heard of this. I don't know anything about it other than that it's a ARG is , but I like when games sort of like reach off of the canvas. It's one of the reasons that I really like oh god why inscription I thought did seem like sort of a you know sort of a lesser way you weren't getting emails from inscription there was a Oh my god I'm not going to be able to think of the name. Let me see if I can find it while you guys keep No worries frog en that Chelsea played a little bit was fucking terrifying in this regard. Oh really you can find it. Yeah. Yeah, even the Meligar Solid flip the flip the case stuff, you know, there's there's been interesting versions of that, but yeah, I can see how the problematic nature of having this stuff , you know, not be particularly future proofed. They did make a sequel to In Memorium entitled In Memorium two, known as evidence, The Last Ritual in America, and In Memorium Le Denier Rituale in France Apparently had very similar stuff . The internet was used both from real and fake websites and specifically created websites . In addition to these, the French version of the game only within France offers for a one time fee to send an SMS message to the player directly to their mobile phones, as well as the ability to call any of the characters that have and have real phone conversations with them . Now wild? Imagine just like sitting on a phone. I worked in a call center. Imagine having to be a French murderer , you know, instead of just an AOL sales and billing representative. That sounds like my dream job. Fucking Larp on the phone? Yeah, that sounds awesome. How's your French accent? That's fucking terror mal I am the giller . I mean I dragged her to the guillotine . Yeah, I put your head in the middle to cut it open like a watermelon. Have you picked cut those tracks? Have you seen the watermelons? That was that was their head . That'd be the best job. It's just like, and also the only person listening is the one person who calls you and they only get one performance out of you. You know what I mean? So it's not true. You're not like an actor where, you know, there's no fucking playbill and you're not getting a review in the times. What if it accidentally went to like a sex hotline? Like it was somebody who was like moonlighting, like doing both and they had to like check the color on the on the phone to see which was which and they accidentally went off sex y with you. Or even worse, you called up the sex hotline and suddenly there was a French murder trying to kill you . Yeah. He was like, wow, this is kinky, but in a new, exciting way, I didn't know about it. Tell me more. Better not awaken anything in me. Guillotine you say. Maybe I do like that Yeah , don't that's all we know about Immemorium. It's just a bunch of made up stories that sex hotlines. But thanks for the email. We got another email, Frank. Yeah, our next is from David asking about games for certain times of day or night. Hello no clippers. Did you know that just as some people are morning people, some games are morning games? Do you have any go to games for different times of day or games you find especially evocative of a particular time. It could be as simple as a memory or habit. For example, Left for Dead is an early afternoon game in my mind, because I always played it on days I was homesick from school or something more intangible. Thanks for entertaining this twelve forty AM quest ion . I don't know if I've ever subscribed to this personally. If you guys have like games you only play at night or only play in the morning I can intellectually sort of understand it conceptually. It's not that complicated, but I've never experienced that myself, I don't think. One of the earliest games I emulated as a kid was a Robotrek for the Super Nintendo , which is which is described as a slapst ick JRPG in some places where you build robots and they fight . And I remember playing it on a when I stayed home sick from school. So to me that's like a morning game and then I ate a bunch of chicken noodle soup and threw up all of the chicken noodle soup. And so to me, Robotrack is like, I feel terrible in the morning . Oh yeah, sense memory. I think about Robotrack makes me feel ill. Really? Yeah, no, it's like genuinely makes me feel like queasy to think about this game and it makes me feel like I'm like tired and nauseous. Those two neurons are just fucking hugging each other. That's it. Yeah. You kind of like that one. Wow. I this is also a little bit with the World Cup on at the moment. The because it's on in America , the it's like the sunlight is the same as USA ninety four. Like not all the games because some games are indoors, but like a lot of the games it just looks like the same place. Like I don't know how else to explain it. Like it looks like USA ninety four footage , which is, you know, considering cameras are very different and all that stuff, but it's just something about the American sunlight in the summer or whatever it is . And it brought up to me one sense memory I have with that when it comes to time, which is like sensible soccer to me was a very Saturday afternoon in the summer game. Like we had just done all the yard work. You know, my dad was had us cutting grass and collecting hedge trimmings and doing this and the other and then we'd get an ice cream at the end and then once your work for the day was done you could relax and we weren't allowed to play video games on the weekends. We weren't allowed to turn on the amiga until you know, during the week. So yeah, Saturday , like the smell of cut grass , like a hot day sitting down playing sensible soccer. That's definitely definitely a memory for me. Like a daytime thing.. Frank Yeah, sorry Jim. I was just going to say freedom fighters the ION Trans early IO game . It was a rented and beaded in one weekend from Blockbuster game . So to me it, was like go out and ride your bike on like , you know, a Saturday morning and then come back to Keith's house and play Freemfighters all night because we had to beat it before it was due back. Awesome. Thanks, Keith . Good man. Frank, any fans? Yeah, I mean, like wow was my after high school, like my high school afternoon game. I'd come home, take a nap and then my friends and I would play Wow for like eight hours. And then when all my friends would go to sleep at midnight or one, then I would do my homework. So yeah, wow was my after yeah. And then like during college I would like during summer I would come home from school like class and then I would play like street fighter online with a friend. She was she was like a writer still is but like she would take a writing break and we would just play Street Fighter for like an hour and just talk about our days. Like that was like such an incredible moment. And then yeah, and like I mean nowadays like the game in place always kind of swaps but right now my kind of like morning game is Borehammer Dark Tide because I'll on days where I don't have anything pertinent to like get out and do, when I wake up I'm always miserable. That's why sometimes in the podcast my brain is not on. But like I'll wake up, I'll play a miss likeion of Warhammer. And then as I'm like waking up, I'm like, Oh, I got to do this, I gotta do this, I finish my twenty minute mission, and then I'll go do my day. So Warhammer is my wake up brain activating game. And then I've been ending my streams by playing pinball effects , which sometimes I'll play like an hour of pinball, but I've been playing pinball effects almost every night and it's like perfect because it scratches that pinball itch if you're not physically going out and playing pinball. So there used to be the license for the World Cup nineteen ninety four game on there, but they lost the license. So it's no longer playable. It's a typical FIFA, yeah. Tore it out of there, probably . That's nice. I think we got one more email in us . Our next is from Justin. Is there a series or genre you've wanted to get into but we're unable to connect to despite your best efforts? Final fantasy and finding games continue to elude me, but I think sometimes it's just finding the right title to pull you in. Yeah, Final Fantasy for me. I've tried a bunch of times. I'm sorry, just can't do it. Yeah, aesthetically there's nothing there for me and I just don't care about the stories or any or the gameplay or anything. It's just I've tried. I've tried. I've tried, I've played a lot of them. I was reading in re birth, there is dog soccer. You do have to play. There's a mini game where you're playing soccer and there's kicking a dog around? No, so you're you're you're two teams of dogs like you're playing as Red nine or Reds whatever the fuck the dog's name dog thing. Yeah. And so there's there's four goals on the on the field. It's crazy. So it lost me. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. It's almost like it's so there's that, but that's it. No, no, sorry, I didn't I wan learnan more. I'm just I'm what else happens? That's the only soccer thing in Family. Oh, so I don't know. It's like it's like a mini game or like league, but the soccer jason. Snowboarding in Final Fantasy V. What's named Arcade place again? It's golden a golden golden Yeah, saucer. Golden saucer yeah it's got a casino. It's got a casino. You probably bet on UFC fights there. Yeah. They have commercials for the golden saucer UFC event. Yeah, Chakoba racing and we'll fill them full of roidyals. D you see that? Sorry, let's go. Did you see that? What was that competition? They were saying they were going to do like a was it a I think it was it was either fighting or was it a marathon? I forget . They had like the like the steroids games. Do you remember this thing? Like oh yeah. Yeah, so they did that. Did you see they did that? And the guy who won was the guy who wasn't on steroids? No way, really. Yeah, he like he like basically entered clean just to prove that this is also so stupid and then he beat them clean. Yeah. I saw a headline a few weeks ago. I don't know what event it was or if it was just the enhanced games that's it. The enhanced game What the fucking eemuphistic name for it . That's awesome. That's the most like clean way that you could dress up this fucking dirty ass event . Oh yeah, no the juicer Olympics . This isn't like the fucking juice games . Exactly. , the enhanced games. Yeah, apparently some guy I forget I need to I need to look it up again . But yeah, he crushed them all. And that was his mission basically was to like enter and not be on steroids and featured. What's the like so is this it says some Australian business man like a billionaire founded the enhanced games. Sounds about right? Yeah, it does because it's the most dystopian shit imaginable. Yeah . Is he from the bullet farm? Is it like is the idea just that it'd be fun to watch like a bunch of the idea I'm trying not to use the word freaks because I don't want to recognize people just because the idea is that government regulation is holding us back from our true human potential. And if we just had a safe space to shoot up as much as we want like bodybuilding or whatever, you know what I mean ? But athletic performance, you know, you know, maybe , you know, maybe those Barry Bonds and who's that cyclist guy again, the American Lance Armstrong . Maybe these guys weren't, you know, they were they were just they were just on the precipice of a better world and maybe we should embrace that world. This is like fucking this is, like a like a lesser Davis game or like a William Gibson novel. Except instead of steroids, it's like, okay, you can use you can have robotic calves when you run fucking rays . Yeah, well, that's what they need to do in the UFC single player mode is get like trans mit. Yeah, transhumanism. Let's just get like let's you know, let's go DSX on it. Let's get like real weird about, you know , about the Reuters versus the Not. I mean, you know, not that like any of these people aren't, you know , sneaking in under the gun and doing stuff. There should be like a cutting weight minigame where it's just like you crying in a sauna wrapped in plastic, trying to press press X for four hours to see if you can make wait for the fight. You have to find lighter alloys for your augmentations. Oh that',s good. I like that. Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. That would be they should call it the cup of Theseus and the only rule is that you still have to have a human brain, but like you can replace it every other noise anybody. Any pars . Any part y parts? But to replace the brain, maybe a human eye. So you could just build like a fucking metal gear that was never a human and it could fight. No, no, there has to be part. There has to be one pars. Okay, it doesn't have to be any part. So it could just be a human finger on a fucking metal gear and it could participate. Yeah, but if someone like snaps the finger off, then you're just fine. So you have to you have to hide the you have to have like a secret finger inside of its chest. Yeah , and that's and that's what people are trying to get. It's like the snitch of you have to find the fucking for massive damage. You have to find the weak point. You have to find the weak point. So you know, a lot of people keep the balls, keep testicles Your coach is like fucking rowling you obviously like somewhere in that robot there's a human penis and you have to fucking fight destroy it and destroy it. Find and destroy the human penis comes up like as an objective in the corner Dana White comes at you before the fight. Okay , you know, he's HGH fucking peanut fucking head swelling whatever word he says and he's like, you gotta find the human penis and you gotta kill it, man. I like this idea a lot. I was skeptical at first, but now I'm on board. Yeah, what would we call it? Is there a UFC could we take the UFC acronym or italicism and like ultimate ultimate fucking choice . I think you would call it I think you would call it ultimate fighting because at that point it would be more ultimate than ultimate fighting. That's true. Enhanced ultimate. Yeah. The Enhanced Fighting Club . We could Oh, you know what we could do? We could do it like a take on pride and call it shame you know, that'd be pretty good. Yeah. Yeah . Was that that movie that Frank was telling me to watch? There's what's his name? The movie, Japanese Christians, isn't it? I was thinking what's shame there's shame with Fosbender Shame Your Eyes. Yeah, Michael Faspender . That was Shame, sorry, whispers . I forget what it's called . Sleepless in Seattle, who knows? How about we have one more question I think? Oh, I didn't answer the question. We didn't answer the question. Well, we talked well , I just went on a rant about fucking transhumanism. Sorry. Sorry guys . Sorry . I don't like competitive multiplayer games, and I don't like strategy games. I've never played civilization and I hate legal legends, like anything like that. I just, I don't like competitive games. That's why again, warhammer Dark Tide is PVE. Like Overwatch, I've had I've spent many hours of overwatch just playing with friends. I just don't like , I don't know, like counter strike is cool. But something about like, even hero sho Iot doners't like. I don't like what you look like using their ultimates, that's like lame. I don't know. I don't like that. That's fair . Yeah. Because they're more like Mobas. I mean, hero shooters are not mobas, but they remind me more of Mobas than they do of counter strike, honestly. For me, it's fighting games. I just everyone I hung out who was into hung out with who was into fighter game fighting games was really good at them . So it was just there was no entry point for me. It was just like getting fucking dunked on. So yeah, I'm really enjoy it. Clayfighter sixty three in a third though was pretty good at , you know, like fucking the little green slime guy . I'll allow it. That was a Mills Lane reference, which is not from Clay Fighter, but from Celebrity Dead Match. But Tamor when I lived in London, Tamor Saint come over and we play games and he's a big street fighter head and his big fif and we were just we completely missed each other. You know what I mean? Like he was so good a street fighter and he'd never played FIFA. So we just couldn't, it was just impossible to play these games against each other. He tried to teach me a bunch and all this stuff and it just, oh man, just wouldn't cl.ick I like the less sweaty the fighting game, the more I like it. If it's a fighting game that people take very seriously, it's not for you. Yeah. So mortal combat feels good. Yeah, mortal combat is like a happy medium, where it's like, you can take it seriously , but it's so inherently goofy . But yeah, like Mace the Dark Ages, that's a that's a played more of that game than any human on earth. Mace called Dark Age. Mace the Dark Age, yeah, for the Oh my god look at this. Reveal the power of mace. That's yeah, shouldn't it say the mace? Mace makes it sound like you've got a fucking can of spray in your pocket. I don't know, but it's got Lord Damos and he's just like a big red guy and I don't know. He might be is this like a tabletop RBG? I don't know if his characters are like from something. Yeah, or they just try to build this midway doing a third like a three D fighter before mortal combat. But the one cool thing is you can play as a chicken named PoJo . That's true . You've also Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great game . Frankly, you should fuckin' to like a let's play of Mace the Mega Mace the Dark Age, please Mace imbued with me of energy that Meccobot of Energy is a practice of magic involving communication with the dead by summoning their spirits as apparitions or visions for the purpose of divination . But that's necro necropodic energy links to necromancy. Yeah, but it doesn't bring people back it doesn't bring human like flesh back. It's more about using apparitions for the purpose of divination . So it's he's using it as a magic source may,be rather, than converting zombies into fucking walking dead bodies and the zombies. Necroptosis is a programmed form of necrosis. I feel like this is above my pay grade . Careful . You're gonna end up in fucking Bohemian Grove by the end of this . The funny thing is if you Google it on the side thing, it's like a Wikipedia for like a scientific like necroptosis, but the AI response is like like, it looks you're referring to necroptosis from Mace the Dark Age. No fucking way. Yeah, I swear . Oh my god. I'll take a screenshot. We can throw it in somewhere. Wow, this is that's great. This is in the anthropolog y of religion section of Wikipedia . Part of a series on magic . Fuck man, this stuff is so cool . Yeah, necromancy is fucking, there's some scary people throughout history who just didn't yeah, if you didn't know, if you didn't know what the fuck was going on, you were like, I don't know. Let's put leaches on them. Also, if you were like a legitimate scientific practitioner and you were just like digging up bodies to be like, I wonder what I wonder what's in this thing. You know what I mean? They really think you were an acromancing. That's what Davinci did. He had bones in it. He was just fucking experimenting with everything. Yeah . And we love that guy. We love that guy. And he was probably jerking himself off with like dead bodies.. He wasn't, no He was like an apprentice boy that he taught science with, so yeah. The apprentice boy was doing the enhanced da Vinci . The rules ruleless version of science. He wasn't juicing, all right guys? He was fucking naddy. Man, weird stuff, weird stuff. All right, one more question. Brennan's got an interesting one here. Brennan, question about gamedev. Hey, y'all. I don't the right people. Jeremy, maybe. I don't know. Hey, I don't know if you've talked about this with studios or just had some thoughts about it, but game studios are spending half a billion plus on major games that are taking five to seven years to complete with teams up to five hundred large. During these years, there's intense crunch and also a lot of was ted time. Ten to fifteen year old classics like Skyro are made with around one hundred people for about one hundred million adjusted in three years. So by that math, why aren't studios basically just doing a super pre production on one to three games where whole lower res games with finished gameplay story etc gets made than taking the best of those finished projects and just remastering them in high res and high fidelity would be similar costs but more room for experimentation and less risk. I'll do you one better, Brennan, don't even fucking remaster them. Just make low poly games at a triple A scale. Take a triple A team and split that five hundred people into fucking ten teams of fifty, or better yet, twenty thirty smaller teams and just make like a fucking an army of team silence and unleash them on the world and let them make weird fucking shit. And then when I think the reason they don't do this is because they assume that there's like an army of fucking gamers out there age eighteen to forty five who will be like, this doesn't look like fucking gear I was gonna say gears of war. I mean God of war. But like I think they think people there will be so much backlash to the lowering of fidelity, but like fuck those people just make the games . Yeah, I think there's a reason why like big studios don't do that. I mean, number one , like people in big studios are super specialized. So like you're not gonna have fifty teams of those people, you know what I mean? Because you're going to have somebody who's made fucking I don't know rocks for six years or something that's a huge Did you see the I don't know if you heard this part of the podcast last week? Oh yeah, Dead . I thought that was a really from someone way more qualified than us to talk about big time. Yeah. And you tell on the problem with specialization. Yeah, yeah, big time. Yeah, he's he's this is sort of like a like an issue that studios are running like it 's like it's it's sort of a known problem with a lot of lot of studios trying to hire , you know, it's like that I don want't to say a game in particular, but like, for instance, I'm just going to use this as an example. I'm not talking about this. Like the legend of California, for instance , they're attempting to do the whole let's make a game with fewer people, right? Arc creators, I think, is in a similar situation. Let's try and, you know, that team was smaller than one hundred people when they launched that game. You know what I mean? Like and then and for those studios , it's hard to hire from places like I don't know Infinity Ward or maybe Naughty Dog in some cases or whatever because they need people who have they probably don't need people who have the experience doing lots of things because most people are smart enough to figure it out. You know what I mean? After a while. But there is this like weird thing of we're trying to get people who can do wear lots of hats. And for the past fifteen years, we've been creating people who can only only who not can only do one thing, but unfortunately for them on their CV have them only doing one thing. I'm sure those people are as smart if not smarter than the previous generation. If you gave them six fucking months, they'd figure out how to do something. But like because of the way game dive big, big budget game dive is, yeah, they're they're somewhat stuck that way, you know? Yeah, that the transition from what exists to what we're talking about requires period of incubation for a lot of these artists where like could you take a guy who's been making fucking rocks for ten years and allow him to blossom into like a generalist artist who does like characters and props and stuff like that . Yeah probably give that guy like fucking six months and some development period. But yeah again I mean I often think back like fuck Walt Disney but I will give him props for this uring. the D production of Bambi, there's a really good behind the scenes documentary that came out where Walt Disney was talking about how the purpose of Disney as an animation studio was not just to produce works great works of animation, but to act as an incubator for artists . as A act place where people could go who were talented animators and not only have the opportunity to work on a thing, but be given the opportunity to grow as artists and to push the medium forward. And I don't think really like games doesn't really have an equivalent like that unless you think like being the fucking quicksel rocks gan guy is the equivalent of being, you know, a great animator, and I personally don't think it's equivalent. Well, a lot of autores that we have are people who peaked twenty years ago. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that could be a commercial problem as much as it could be a problem with the way studios are set up now as well. Yeah. And there's there's just also not like a, you know, capitalist arg ument for what we're talking about here either. You know what I mean? Because like unfortunately that is that is the artistic, what was it you guys said a couple of weeks ago? Like just give me a billion dollars enough I can like fund all this cool art. Like I would be I would do the exact same thing. I'm from a country that fucking does that. You know what I mean? Like we don't have that much art arts funding, but like have most of the cool shit I did as a kid in my hometown where it was funded through public money like probably made me a more artistic person and maybe that can be reflected in some sort of capitalist return on investment later down the road, but also just for the good of doing it and for people's happiness and stuff like that. My point on this, I'll just say is a lot of what Bran Brennan is talking about, a lot of studios are doing. They just, well maybe not the , you know, the games that don't work that come out of pre production, you never hear of or they get put into silos and maybe we'll come back to this later kind of thing. But like, you know, for instance, we did a series with Secret Tape on the Arcrader stuff. Like that's a great example of they started with Arc Creators couldn't get it working. Then they had this other team that was working on the finals. They have other projects that have been mentioned that have come out of there that people know about that haven't seen the light of day since or whatever . Like this is something that new studios do . Specifically Embark were set up to try and make big budget games with small with significantly smaller team sizes than you see in places like Activision. And a lot of that is hiring specialist people from the local economy and being operating maybe in it. I mean, Sweden's expensive, but like it's probably not so cal in terms of how much it costs people to employ massive teams. You know, double fine you mentioned earlier like that,'s in our team that has a pipeline for doing weird creative shit and then figuring out which one has the best commercial argument going for it . So I think the place where you don't say this is in sequels where like you, know act,ivation not going to fuck and reinvent call of duty is the point. You know what I mean? They're not that's not what their raison detre is, right? But I feel like there are sort of like use cases for reinventing call of duty because when you look at Call of Duty where it is right now, call of Duty right now, if you want to find like a parallel at another successful franchise that had its ups and downs, I'd say Call of Duty right now is like resident evil six, which is like, you know, some people have fondness for sick, but it's kind of a pile of shit. Someone's blowing her a giraffe on the cover on the lower exactly. And they need like a Reseneval seven, which like a Reseneval seven, I have a lot of respect for it. It's not one of my favorite resenvable games, but I respect that it tried something radically different . It kind of like is the only reason Reseneval is where it is now as successful beloved franchise again that has like the prestige it used to in many ways. And I think call of duty right now is like it's fucking, you know, it's like mountain de ode red. Like it's not it's just like a product that people consume because they're familiar with the brand right now. Yeah, which and you look, play devil's advocate, the fucking shareholders of Activision don't give a shit. I mean, like why now? How long can you keep that fucking drift going? You know what I mean? Like ten years longer than I thought , like, I can't believe how long it's gone on. Like I feel the same way about Madden, I feel the same way to a certain extent about FIFA where these games are so too big to fail and so risk averse that they have basically swallowed up any creativity from that genre. And I think the capitalist argument for innovating , to say nothing of the obvious artistic one that I completely agree with you on, I think part of the reason we have so few younger players playing these games is because they are the exact same fucking games their parents were playing when they were seven. Like yeah, what's this is , you know, capitalism is beautifully short term in terms of its thinking, right? Like ignorantly so I think this is a problem. This stagnation that we've sort of folded so many of these big budget genres into is, I think the chickens are coming home to roost. And I think when you look at like people are saying like games aren't selling as much as they were before, it's not because the games are worser, but like there are good games that are doing interesting things that aren't selling because there are fewer fucking gamers because the big tentpole games like Madden and FIFA and Call of Duty , and maybe even games that are like seem like they're trying to do a good job, like World of Warcraft. These are the same fucking games that were big twenty years ago. So like that's not cool. So if you're like growing up and like music's the same now as what it was when your fucking mom and dad were listening to rock music in the seventies. You imagine that? Like would many of us have given a fuck about music if it was still I don't know Aerosmith Gems or Yeah Aerosmith and No you know what I mean? Yeah. So I don't know yeah so I agree. I think like unfortunately the argument against it is probably longer tailed than most involved in investments ever think of. It does feel a lot like the games industry right now is like the spread of games available are like aerosmith or like a local, you know, like harsh noise wall yeah, I don't know. There's sort of like a middle position that like, you know, fucking when you look back I went through a bunch of my old game shit and I was looking back at like Warcraft two and like old magazines and like Diablo two, not just like the games but the packaging and like the way they were messaging and stuff. Like Old Blizzard had so much sauce and it was a really small team that made a lot of these games. And I think that like there's sort of a middle position, which is what we're getting at here, where it's not one person in a bedroom or five people in like a workers co op space . It's like team silent size, like twenty to thirty people making these games that are able to punch above their weight. Super John. Yeah, Supergiant's great example. Like Haiti's one and two are omega successes, like on a global scale, millions and millions of sales . Like have excessed thirty people, maybe thirty five people something like that? Yeah, they're probably yeah, I don't know how many they have in terms of like contractors now. I know they've scaled up slightly, but like not quite much at all. I mean, especially compared to something like these fucking , you know, gigafucking corporate five hundred people teams . And yeah, I mean , we've talked about it a million times, so I'll just sum it up in one sentence, but like extreme high fidelity is part of this problem and that's part of the thing that feeds into the specialization problem is when you have like every rock looks, I mean, like for example, when the trailer for Crossfire came out from that snow moon, the rocks look amazing, but like the art direction doesn't resonate with me in that game. I think that game looks like visually amazing in terms of fid elity, but in terms of our direction, I would prefer something like, you know, even like people talked about Ocarina of Time, the original aesthetics of it because of the remake and stuff and they're like, that game looks like shit. I think that game looks great because it doesn't matter that the like tree pixel is like one giant pixel that's biolinear filters that you can't tell. It's like the art direction is there. The cohesion of like color theory, the aesthetic of characters, the design of characters, the way that they all sort of like harmonize and sing together in concert I think is more important than any level of fidelity. And fidelity is a very expensive thing to accomplish that requires a high level of specialization. Yeah, it's been interesting to see how like the fidelity thing is a problem that teams have been trying to solve. Like for the longest time it was outsourcing to Malaysia and then and not talking about it and now you know now it's AI to a certain extent is something that they're looking at for like can we , you know, Proc Gen has done a lot of that too. Like a lot of the big games that came out over the past ten years or so used a lot of procedural generation algorithms to make their worlds big three D ones or just small two D ones, you know, with metroidvanias and stuff like that or not Metro Vani weus call. it What are games like Sp unkian stuff? We call them Rog s platform Rogs, thank you guys Rog ue. Yeah. Games would like, you know, where levels get rerolled. Yeah, it's interesting. In terms of the crossfire stuff, that to me looked very loomin' and what's what's the epic fucking stuff? A bunch of companies use this. What Nate Perkipal did on his game Oh fuck I forgot the substance painter or the Quixel scans they brought out a trailer years ago unreal it was unreal five wasn't it? It was aluminum. It was the lighting part and then the other part the ground creation stuff, the like Oh nanite? Nanite. Thank you. Yeah, it looks very nanite where it's like this is a, you know, sort of you're you're only capped by certain amount of memory or whatever you can sort of do orders a magnitude bigger geometry than you could before. And yeah, some of these technologies are kind of trying to solve that problem, but yeah it's I think the biggest problem right now is the market. I think we're in a weird spot with the market. And I think smaller games and smaller studios can weather that because their overheads aren't quite as bad, the ROI is not quite as tricky. And I think yeah, I think we're we're in a weird weird sort of there are fewer and fewer big games that can get enough attention to survive , you know, to pay back their development costs and make money. And I think what you have to a certain extent is the Coellge Duties and the Maddens and things like that, just trying to be Coca Cola. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's a good point. And I also think that the bigger and the bigger an industry gets, the more the people that rise to the top are people who play it safe . Yeah. And so I think in just an economies of scale, you have like this oh fucking giant mega industry , I think that the people who are running the ship are going to be people who, you know, the shareholders are like, we don't want a guy who's going to make twenty team silence . But yeah, I do wonder though, just in kind of closing, I do wonder if like, I think Silent Hill too is a game that looks so unbelievably gorgeous because of its art direction and because of the passion that went into it and all these things . I do wonder if like a big studio released a game of that fidelity, not exactly like that, but just like a game that was closer to Silent Hill two than the Silent Hill two remake yeah and just was like, listen, you know, you're the consumer and we know you like games of a certain fidelity. This is like an artistic work . Yeah, how would it be received? Or like if they made like a black and white marvel movie like what the book would people, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I like to think that consumers would be sort of like normal fucking consumers would be kind of skeptical at first, but not outright reject it for aesthetic reasons. Yeah, it's hard because I think what happened what you run into is like doing something artistic for artistic sake as well is not necessarily a, you know, a worthwhile endeavor, but I do feel like when you do like marketing, you know, research into things that are different , obviously it's going to tell you this is less profitable than doing the safe thing . But what often happens if somebody does something different , not just for different sake. If they do something different and it's successful at doing that, then you make yourself a market. Like Discolysium didn't blow up because there was this huge CRPG communists that really wanted a video game. Like it created an audience and pulled people into that because it was doing something that was so different and unique that people were willing to vouch for it. And yeah, that's that's a very tricky thing to put on a spreadsheet, I think, you know It's a hard thing to make an argument for too in a financial way because like you said, it's like all of the market research in the world will point towards the safest thing. I mean, I've I've fucking as like contract gigs, I've edited market research videos for my research firms . And the way that people the types of people who participate in these things, the way that they talk about these products, it is like it is a self selected group of consumers whose consumer behavior is geared specifically towards a very conservative approach to culture . And so I think that this yeah, this idea it's kind of like the fucking I don't want to get into too deep into politics, but it is kind of like the mythical median voter thing where it's like yeah, we need to we need to move closer to like the party on the other side because like we need to pull some of their voters across the aisle and it's like you're like imagining this type of person who's like hm, I don't know should I vote this guy or this guy? Let's see what the issues are. And it's like I think most people just have like a set of opinions that align with one thing or another thing . And I think there's never been a moment in human history where culture is more malleable and and also that you can access more people with your message. So to me there's never been a least risk averse time to make something different because I think like one of the things across media that we're noticing is there's so much stuff being made and so much of it is so fucking safe that if anyone does anything interesting, you know, stuff that would have been blasse fifteen years ago in Hollywood or , you know, in game design or whatever, you know, if you do it now, people are like, whoa, because we're because we 've everything's become so , you know , samey, you know what I mean? Like especially in triple A games, like it's it's the it's I think people are sc reaming out for games that are different in some way, interesting in some way. And yeah , it boggles my mind that like at that same time these, I really do think it is because some of these big studios are just it's all about market share and it's all about just being number one and that's all that matters. You know, we have enough mindshare, but I don't know. People are still playing Minecraft twenty years. People are still playing World Warcraft, people are still playing Called Dude. It's fucking crazy. Like it's really crazy, but, you know , yeah. I think it'll come from, I think it'll be like the when the studio system was too big to fail in film and it was like three studios and their movies started getting diminishing returns, and they were like, holy shit, movies aren't gonna exist in twenty years because the economy of it is just not going to scale up. It's just like breaking down under its own weight . You know, you can't make a ben her six times a year and fuck it. You know what I mean? Can't kill that many lions or we'll run out I think that you're going to hopefully I mean, I, feel like we're s whatort of like now experiencing in the last like ten, fifteen, twenty years or whatever is an emergence of like , you know, India 's and I don't use Autore to mean like a guy leading the charge whoever has to like a visionary. I just mean like small team s small solo individuals or small teams that are doing radically new things because they can afford to . It's just that like and I mean that's what you had with Scorsese and George Lucas and like the sort of like new indiot ofours that era was the thing that sort of gave new life to cinema. I mean, you're still kind of living in the reverberation from that. A nineties game dive early nineties game dive to a certain extent as well absolutely.. Weird I just think life is cost of living is so fucking expensive now and we don't have like scaffolding to support. You know, a lot of your favorite musical artists were people who were, you know, whatever, not like section eight housing, but like , you f knowood, like stamps and like government subsidized housing and stuff. Do you know who all the fucking musical artists are now? Kids of rich people. Oh yeah, no, babies. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. The same fucking reasoning 'cause they have a I mean, they have also got access , you know, to the market and the influence just by virtue of their parents' position , but also because they could take a summer off and learn how to fucking play guitar. You know what I mean? Like yeah, yeah, it's yeah, the myth that like struggle makes good art has some level of truth in it because I think you can process hardship into good art, but I also think the opposite side of the coin is that having like peace in your life and space to breathe and not working sixty hours a week and coming home and being exhausted is like also a necessary ingredient for making good art. Having the space to explore and not just be like, all right, can I make a fucking what kind of co op like game can I make that million a people will buy this weekend? Yeah . I'd call it the enhanced games co op experience. Just get those people who make we need new topics for indie game developers, dude. We need the enhanced the enhanced games are the games that the fucking they need to juice the fucking indie game developers. Imagine a fucking brain age game, but you could like take supplements that are advertised on like the Rogan Experience. You know what I mean? You could take alpha brain and then go wander over to Dr. Kawashima. Was that his name? What was his name? Was he a real guy or did they made a speak in us again? Is that a Frank, I feel like you would know this. Do I want to know this ? I don't know if I want to know this . I think he's a real guy. Oh wait, inspired by the work of Japanese neuroscientist Ruta, Kawashiba. Yes , get real guy , real guy . Yeah, from China like that Maybe Japan Well, maybe speaking I guess was two people because the actual the voice and the, I think was a model was the was the was the model, I guess. Anyway, look at for our Meva Speaking documentary in the future. Thank you all for your questions . Podcast, no clipped off video . Send them in. We might answer them. We might stay on topic. This week on NotElip Gonna get that Star Wars Galaxies documentary up. Jeremy and I'm back. He's about time. Jazzed about that. All the early access patrons will love it. Over on Clip Deer, we'll have some Steam Next Fest recommendations for you . A couple of other things Patreon sure are going to record later this month or sorry this week as well. Then I'm back from Europa and yeah, lots of other stuff in the pipeline getting edited through at the moment . I forgot what I've announced, so I'm not going to say it right now. But check out the Patreon show this week and we'll probably show off some extra bits and bobs, some extra footage . If I can if I have time at all this World Cup guys, am I right ? Am I right ? Yeah . We love soccer I love it. The beautiful game. I've watched every game almost. France Senegal's on right now. I got to go check out the second half. That's a formulator, by the way. I just wanted that wasn't me being like, oh, fucking sports ball. I just I'm not into it, but it's cool. It's pretty cool. It's fun. My favorite thing about the World Cup is always just shouting for the underdogs. You know, Capo Verde , a country of five hundred thousand people, I believe , managed to draw with the European champion Spain. That was pretty good . What was even better was Curissau, a country I'd never heard of before they lost seven one to Germany , but as they should because they have a population of one hundred fifty thousand people or something like that , but they did score a goal against Germany to tie the game at one stage and I swear to God the ent,ire like footballing world went fucking ballistic. We're just so happy for them. This tiny ass like smaller than most major cities this country 's like blowing up the death star. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But then unfortunately there were six other death stars waiting for us. It's a Star Destroyer fleet waiting behind this for your six planets. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. Didn't work out. Alderon did not fare well in the World Cup. No it's yeah, it's it's good fun. I'm enjoying it. Keeping me bright during these edit days . All right, we'll leave it there for a podcast. Thanks so much for listening . Did I forget anything? House keeping? I haven't been on two weeks, so sometimes I forget how to do stuff. Should I take my pants off? Is that what you do at the end? We all take it around. Is that what we do? Do you competition? Secret penis inside a robot? Secret penis inside a robot. There you go folks. Good thing we don't name these podcasts because that's what it would be. Take care of your secret robot penis and we'll see you next week. Bye