Xbox Mode and PC Console Hybridization

When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant You keep production lines moving and quality on track because there is no room for slowdowns L Ranger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts, and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place, so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done Call one eight hundred Ganger, click ranger. com or just stop by Ranger for the ones who get it done Hey everybody, Hi. How are you doing? It is twenty twenty six The year of the tiger. No, I don't what is we have an animal for the year They Prob do. I mean, it's May. They probably figured that out a while ago. I don't know The year of the year of the pastrami sandwich is upon us. We need new things for years, I think The animals have had their day in the sun too long And it is time for other fanciful objects to to get their own years, you know, kind of kind of patterned after them tell the Zodiac that I said Lalf off I mean, I figure what, you know, what's the what's the what do we want to do? you know, we'll start with like cherries and then maybe like strawberries. someome kind of lemon thing like a pretzel. One of the ships from Galaxian, you know, just like stuff that like matters that we can name years about. I'm Jeff Kirirstman. Welcome to the program Hi. It's been another week in video games, of course, may nineteenth, a big day of the year for a lot of reasons. A lot of great reasons Um nameamely this year, may nineteenth of the first Tuesday after the release of Arcade Archives, mister D for the Nintendo Switch and Switch two as well as the PlayStation. the and the Xboxes It's true, mr. Dew is finally here after years and years of the Hmster cororporation re releasing old video games for An amount of money that one might call too much And then they went ahead and came up with an a slightly updated version of the Arcade arrchives framework for modern consoles and decided We're going to start calling in Arcade Archives two and charge even more money for those. So for ten dollars You can get yourself a copy of Arcade arrchives to Mr. Doo That's a mere forty plays of mister D. That's a mere forty credits of Mr. D I know that there are people in this chat right now that have certainly played more than forty credits of mister Dew U and you know, if you want The true mrter Dew experperience This actually, I mean, you know, of the things they could add to arcade archives too, I suppose, Adding support for variable refresh rates is not nothing Come. But it is kind of a silly thing to hold back and charge more money for. There's like a new, I think they add a a time attack mode. the hamster releases are fairly generic inso farar as They just try to come up with a handful of modes that would apply to any most video game. Like here's a caravan mode, likeike how which is, you know, a term you know, that was used for specific shooters back in the day But it's like, hey, how many points can you score in five minutes U or or like a time like almost like a speedrun mode where they're like, how fast can you get to level ten? I'm sorry, scene ten because we are talking, of course, about mister D The nineteen eighty two classic from Universal, You playay as a Cown and you've got a power ball And you dig around in the dirt to collect cherries that are in the dirt. while the monsters try to get you Sometimes the monsters can transform into monsters that can then dig through the dirt There are also apples in the dirt and you can drop the apples on top of the monsters and crush them And's it's a great game. It's got great music. It's a it's it's a heck of a it's a heck of a video game. I know I've told the story before. But I I didn't get to see a lot of mister Dew as a kid. you know, I suspect it was probably on an episode of Starcade which is where I, you know, would see a lot of arcade games before I had maybe seen the machines for myself But there was a grocery store near my grandmother's place. I in my grandparents place And she would she did her shopping there and if I was if I was there, I would have to go shopping with her And the the Roger Willcoo shopping market in Roner Park had a Mr. D machine. and I had convinced her to , you know, let me let me play it and uh Well the rest is history. it's a heck of a game. mister Du's castle would follow it up. The mister D franchise sort of in a weird, I don't know, kind of hitting the skids a little bit. like I don't Like there are new games that come out that have the mrter D name on them, but they're all like big physical dumb machines about shooting balls and out of cannons and and whatever else and that's sort of like kind of lost its way whichich I suppose, you know, most franchises just kind of vanish completely so maybe there's something Um kind of interesting about the idea that the Mr. Do name still gets used with some on some occasions, but the Mr. D character vanished out of those games. It's a really it's a really weird It's really weird turn of events. I don't know. Sometimes you suspect that perhaps the owners of the Mr. D nameame intellectual property, donon't give it the respect that it perhaps deserves. Um Anyway, they, you know, and now I have all of the PlayStation five trophies and Xbox achievements for Mr. D It's the sort of life that I'm leading And it's nice, It's clean. It feels good. But all the trophies and all these hamster releases are always super generic. It's like play the time attack mode and get to, you know, get get twenty five thousand points. you know like it's it's all very boiler plate rubber stamped across all of their games. And so it's it's incredibly easy to get all of the trophies or achievements in just about any of the Amster arcade archives releases. They're still going with that. I mean, there are a lot of arcade games. It's One wishes that there was a better way for arcade games to be rereleased And and monetized in a way that feels appropriate for The value of a lot of these games Of course, Microsoft had to Game room. Back on the Xbox three hundred and sixty and the PC and of course, Windows phone where they were selling you could buy An individual game for three dollars Or you could buy both versions of it if you wanted both the PC and the Xbox and the phone like like all the versions of it. I believe that was five And um You know, that price felt closer to Okay It still felt a little weird for some games because some of the games they were rereleasing were these Atari twenty six hundred games that you're just like, yeah, this is like Play this twice They did have they tried to have a framework in place where you could kind of like quarter to play the game Um, but that's that that didn't really didn't really make a lot of sense either so So that thing went away. the problem with game room, it turns out. from, you know, talking to folks that were working on it, you know, it was being developed out of Australia. and U and talking to people at Microsoft about why it kind of failed, you know, the story has always been I that there were just some companies that didn't think it was they didn't want to get out of bed for three dollars a game You know, there was not enough money for them. And and Microsoft wanted to remain adamant that like no, every game on the service costs the same amount of money. If we get into charging premiums, then This whole thing gets fucking fucked up fast, right Um It was like they were trying to do what Apple did for music. iTunes they did not have Cout get away with this Um And so there were a lot of games like I remember hearing that like they had No Go games up and running in Game Rom But they just couldn't get the business side of it doneone becausecause no one wanted to accept a mere three dollars for a copy of their game And so that's like the piece of history that I always maintain When we get to these hamster releases now all these years later And these were originally seven dollars. And I think, you know, for you know, u For the PS four for the older versions of those games, I believe they are still seven dollars, but it is nine dollars ninety nine cents to buy these PlayStation five and modern Xbox and like Switch two versions of these games and ten dollars for a classic arcade game Turns it from Oh, I'm just gonna buy all of these because I just I like old video games. And it turns it into something that is incredibly selective. So this is the first one of these hamster releases I've bought since The release of the Switch two, which is where they released Was it the arcade version of Ridge Racer onto Switch two And that's kind of the other piece of the Arcade Archives two puzzle is they've started advancing into more polygonal games, which are more complicated to emulate and all this other stuff. So there's more work involved and all of that. so like they they justify some of that stuff that way because I do believe they charge fifteen for a small handful of those games Um I just wish that there was a good way for people to get access to these games legally Obviously, if you want to play all of these games, you know, people have been playing the numerous different versions of Mr. Dew. and, you know, and this this release of Mr. Dew they just put out does contain three different ROM sets Like it does have the kind of bug fixed kind of new newest is what they call it which is a very silly thing. They call it newest, new and oldest. Oldest is like a prototype where it's not even a clown It's this weird snowman with a pitchfork and the music is different and the bonus letters behave differently. Like it's it's clearly a game that where they're like, oh, there's something here But they didn't quite have it down and then and then when when mrter Dew finally came out in its final form You're like, okay, you know, I see, I see what we're going for here. But they have those three different versions on there where those three different versions have been accessible to anyone with a download with any sort of know how about downloading files on the internet for over twenty years Over thirty years When did mister Dew make its way into Maame? I knew that. I actually had I looked that up at one point and knew the answer to that question. but But I don't have the actual answer. But it is sometime in the nineties Mr. Dew became playable inside of Mame Um And so a lot of these games have been widely available for As I said u decades Um It's a heck of a game You know, it comes up more often than a lot of other old games around here for I still don't know the reasons why. I still like mister Dew just kind of like comes into the conversation as as often as he does, but U But this is this is the life I suppose we've chosen. And it's great to see these games back out there because Universal the rights holder, which is not Universal the movie company They mainly make gambling things clip in the chat says it's version zero point two the second ever version of Maimame. So yeah. Like the very firstvers version of Mame, I want to say play like eleven games and then they they set out to grow that number pretty quickly U I was pretty on board with MaM or before it was MaM it was called multi pack, I believe. because it was just like playing a bunch of different Pacman rom sets and then it kind of grew it kind of grew out of that. And so yeah, that's that's that's at least thirty years of mister D on your PC But it's cool to see this back out there and universal doesn't really do anything do too much in the world of video games anymore. Some of these IPs get mentioned out, but they mainly do gambling stuff There is a like a slot machine. that has Mr. D on it And then that slot machine got released digitally in a collection of slot mes of digitized slot machines for like the PlayStation one or PlayStation two or something, which is Perhaps the last console release of Mr. Dew until Right now, I guess Has there been any well, maybe that's not yeah. No, I would have been That may that may be that may be true Um Yeah, there's stuff like Antstream. I don't know if you've heard of AntSream. You would be forgiven for not having heard of AntSream. Um, but it's a it's a service it's a subscription service that lets you play old games But all of it operates through the power of the cloud And it's not You know, I don't know if you know this, but a lot of classic arcade games were not meant with not were not designed with any sort of tolerance for frame delay or anything of that nature. And so I find Antstream to be like interesting, but ultimately not what I'm looking for when it comes to replaying those games, And, uh Yeah it's it's a it's just a questionable service and because it's just because of the nature of the service, like what they're offering out they're not trying to hide it, I don't think. But they also Anstream also powers there there was the The Xbox thing that came out Retro cllassics, it's called. And it's just like a free download if you're a game P subscriber. It's on PC, I believe. it's also on Xbox And it's it's powered by AntSream, but it is just the games that Microsoft owns. So it's like the activision stuff they picked up for the twenty six hundred So like hero is in there. Um, and a handful of other things that that that Microsoft already owns and controls along with a handful of other games, but it's not the f the full end stream service But also you don't have to pay an additional subscription fee to mess with it. So Um Yeah, I don't know. That stuffs like a nice idea, but the cloud is not going to solve Why would you want to play these games with like a ping? these games have been emulated so widely. that running them locally is not in most cases, even if you want to de port this stuff to a modern console Like a lot of that work has already been done. So the idea of like it's just like don't know I am not always the most u Ecologically minded person in the world. I try to turn the lights off when I lead to leave a room, that sort of thing Um, so I, you know, So I don't always get as up in arms about this stuff as you can. However The idea of using cloud infrastructure to run the fucking twenty six hundred version of fucking Pitfall seems like a real set a tree on fire and laugh about it kind of moment. I don't know. this just something about that that is just like this is gross. There's so many more efficient ways And they are also like better in quality along the way Uh you're just like, dude, what are you doing? It's it's really it's really kind of a silly thing, but u Nonetheless, mister Dew is finally out there in the world spreading his message of Well, whatever that message is, he is certainly spreading it. And so watch out for that. He's available on all platforms All console platforms anyway and, uh Yeah. now we just need to import a copy of Punky Circus and then we'll really be O to the races. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back. We'll talk about cars After this , you know how it can go sometometimes you spend the entire day. getting everyone else's stuff taken care of. You know, you get to the end of the day It's like okay, let's make sure that All these kids are fed and everything's taken care of on that front and get everybody off to bed and everything handled and all the way down down the line And then everything is quiet and suddenly you're like, man I'm starving Also, I'm exhausted It's really easy to just, you know, kind of pick up some Crash You know, just crack open a bag of chips or something like that. But you don't need to do that with factor You can get a nutritious meal Without all the planning or grocery runs or even cooking Factor as meals built around your goals Whether that's like weight loss or just like overall nutrition If you're looking to get more protein or if you're doing like a GLP one thing, they can support that as well Even have a Muscle Pro collection if you're doing workout recovery or something, but hey, sometimes you just need something to eat. becausecause you have not eaten You know what I mean? 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Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responssees set upp required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus Cars They're in video games now Ports are rising six is, uh is is is available now. There's a video up on YouTube. If you want to see the game in action, I wrote a full review of it that you can also read over at Jeff. zone Um So I probably won't spend a ton of time on it here because if you, you know, if you more there there's a lot of it out there. Um They made another Fortza Horizon game, which if you're not aware of Fza Horizon is kind of the fun side of the Fza coin Also the only remaining side of the Fortza coin for now because Fortza Motorsport seems to have been internally back Bernard after that last entry And that was the more serious kind of more of a that the game would be more of a competitor with something like a Grand Turismo In some ways, Fortz Horizon is an arcade style racing game that, you know, still drives like a simulator in a lot of ways U It is a very well made game. This is the sixth one. They have been making them like this Um for years. and this one is set in Japan That was met with a lot of excitement cause people had been asking like, oh man, they should do one of these in Japan. It'd be so cool you know, just to drive around Japan and do all these races and o, there could be more drifting and you could do Tge and you could do this and you could do that. And U and they finally did it. They finally brought the franchise to Japan. And I feel like it's a It's a very solid video game They made another Fza Horizon game The driving is still good. It looks very nice. The cars look great. characters looked Bad U and in the characters in some ways, I think looks look worse than they did last time around In fourth Hizon five, your characters spoke. and in this one, they don't This's just some weird, you know, some weird stuff around that, but like ultimately, the cars look fantastic The world looks very nice It doesn't really I feel like the Japan thing is a super missed opportunity Some of those are inherent to them making a video game, right? I mean, think about it It's it's been a problem for Decades in driving games, in driving games that are trying to be, whether it's like open world or something that exists outside of a race Um This is something that people have said about Grand Theft auto games in the past. This is people, you know, like any kind of game that involves like a fair amount of driving in a real world environment, there's never enough traffic They never feel like densely packed cities And that's because you're trying to have fun in them and drive around and drive at high speeds, you know? Like if you had realistic traffic in most of these games It would not be fun But on top of that You know, you end up in this scenario where like And they're not doing a great job of representing Japan U the roads are incredibly wide. U There are no pedestrians ever crossing the street again, which when you are viewing this through the lens of we're making a video game, off course there are no pedestrians And That's not the game they're trying to make. They're not making Crmageddon over here Um, But like you they have moments where they they're trying to do the tourist thing And they do this very top level like Here's Shibuya. There's this intersection that we're driving through right now, thousands of people cross it every day And you're like, that's interesting except there are no humans here at all. You know. And if they are, they're like locked behind gates and they're just standing there doing nothing and you can't it's like you can break down walls and knock down Japan has the weakest trees of just about any forortza game. You can crush those fucking things. But these gates that have pedestrians behind them, absolutely not. No, sir, you cannot. Um Ibidy Bibard asks, do you race the bullet train, son? you race the bullet train in the intro of the game? They show it to you for a few seconds and you're driving alongside it and you're like, oh yeah. And then it goes away and you do your thing Um like the Tgeay races are just kind of one v one races down a mountain. It's cool that stuff is in there. but like for something that could have been like it's a game that needs a soul. And I you could and the realization I had playing forz Horizon six is that that's a criticism. You could lay at the feet of just about any one of these horizon games because they take them to different locations, but the story and the trapping and the framing is all the same It is the Fortza Horizon Festival. Ces to your town. fucks it up immensely Like a bunch of British dudes show up and set up like seven radio stations and they're the exact same seven radio stations no matter where in the world you are They're like, wa, we need toold drum and bass. And then they turn it on. They turn on the drum and bass station. Um And then they just kind of like everything is confined within the context of this festival, which is just like this generic kind of like you assume that it's kind of an EDM festival, but you never really see a stage or any performances. It's just like, okay, there's racing and then there's other stuff and you see in the distance where you can't drive to that there are people going on fairground rides and doing shit and you're like, oh, I don't know this seems like it would be fun if you wanted to watch Weird car races and also fucking I don't know get really hot I don't know what, you know Oh, um But like it just it consumes all of the local culture and processes it in some way that spits it out the other end in the most like surface level empty way possible Last time around they went to Mexico. And I think they did a slightly better job at contextualizing Mexican car culture And just Mexican culture in a certain sense with these big adventure things you would do and you drive these locations and like oh, there's a temple here and look at all this stuff and we're going and we're going to put down the antenna for the drum and bass radio station right here. you literally create new radio stations at some of these things, which is Baby fucked up, but u But like it had more of a Um I don't know, it just it felt like it had slightly more local flavor A. Horizon in Japan They go like, oh, there's a new radio station and it plays Japanese music But it's like they threw all these genres together in a way that doesn't make sense. The selection is pretty fucking bad You've got a couple of exceptions where like the roock station has like like there's a there's a baby metal song on one of those or two baby metal songs maybe They've kind of spread a little bit of Japanese stuff across the other stations, But like the Gcha City radio is just like Here's a bunch of Japanese music and it's not the it's not even like popular or modern in some cases is like there's some classics, but not even the classics you would want. Like it's that feeling of like, man, there's so much more you could do Um There's so much more you could do. You could have put a Eurobeat station in there to kind of capitalize on you know, initial D or some of that like like there's like referential stuff you could do across that game U the thing with the music though is is like licensing music in Japan sucks dealing with the organization that handles all of that, which is called JazzRack Um You know, like like Game developers have tried to do better Japanese music in their games for years and years and years. and you know, it's something that is always met with like completely unreasonable like oh, are you going to go, you know, yeah getting all the good Euro beat. Yeah, you're going go to AvX tracks and get what they want arere they going to be terrible about it and charge you too much money? and Like there's there's a lot of unreasonable stuff around music licensing for Japanese artists And and so like there's I Assume I can only assume That is part of why though probably not the only reason that the Japanese music in that game is awful Um, or the selection is bad and there's just not enough of it. but I don't know, like culturally the game Cultally Culturally the game feels hollow. They do these things where you're like you're on a little day trip driving around and you're like, oh, a day trip that's time to take in some of the sites. And then it's just like The lady on the radio who's on the radio for all of your events and all this other stuff is just like leading the thing and she's like You may notice that someone on the trip is in a a classic Honda civic The Civic was originally created in nineteen seventy one and they have like three sentences about the origins of the Civic or whatever And then that's that And it just feels very thrown together and again, again, extremely surface level. when you when I think people When people said, boy man, we'd really like to see Forza said in Japan I think they want more than this. becausecause this game could be set anywhere. It doesn't matter. They've had all these cars, mostost of these cars in previous for the games, it's like you can only drive in eighty eighty six in this forza, you know, like they they've they've done right by a lot of Japanese manufacturers and Japanese vehicles for a number of games, right? And so you know, so it's not like that's like a brand new thing or something that they went into extxtreme depth on with the selection of cars. Um, because they've they've kind of been there And, uh Yeah, I don't know. likeike it's it's by the standards of like, you know, the racing is good. The open world stuff is good. They they they made it so you can fast travel around the world without spending any money? You used to have to like waste your in game credits to travel around? And and then they put like a little collectible in there that would reduce the cost of fast travel They've reworked that. So there is no longer that and you can just fast travel to anywhere you want to go for zero credits and just get fucking on with it. And that's maybe the smartest change they've made Um It's it's a Forta Rizon game and the things that are good about that are still very good about that And the things that are kind of soulless and maybe a little bad about that I think are exacerbated by and Sl that is missing from this game taking advantage of its location a little bit more than they did So if you're looking for like a good open world driving game to just smash around in and like it looks great. It runs well on just about anything that'll run it at least my experience The PC version looks great. The Xbox series X version Looks very good as well. You can choose between thirty or sixty. I ran that at sixty and did notice like, oh, there's no r trac, you know, Like it still looks really good on Xbox U, it ran pretty well on a steam deck, though there you're getting like I think You're getting thirty frames a second And on a Rg Xbox Ally X It'll run at sixty on medium settings. I believe that's what the defaults are, you can still mess with it if you want Um And uh and it runs quite well there. The only experience I had the only bad experience I had with running that game is trying to run it on my Bazite machine where it just locks up And it even though it runs on the steam deck you throw it onto this fucking makeshift nightmare factory And you feed it in videoog graphics card and it still has, you know, something that it thinks is Steam OS and And all of that and it that's that's simply it simply does not run there at all right now with the at launch, it would run for like twenty seconds and then lock up in game And now when I when I launch it, they put out a patch on the steam version. And last time I launched it, it didn't even get in game. Um. Some people have found you like some people have had some success running it It seems like it depends on your setup. I don't know. likeike it it's obviously like not an officially supported scenario to begin with. So I'm not surprised that something is funky But I bet if you had an AMD card, you would probably better experience with running that version of the game in someome of those weird scenarios. I was looking at the Proton DB. you can go find people's reports about trying to run the game on various devices like that. and there are people like running like cashi OS and stuff with with AMD cards that are getting in game Weird frame times, a little bit of stutter, some stuff like that, but they're at least like getting in games stably And and I am not even doing that there, but that's I feel like that's that's going to change someday like the expectations for like these games need to run on these Linux machines. likeike I feel like that's that's We will eventually get to that point But we're just not there yet. peopleople I don't think it's fair to hold that against a video game per se, like the Steam deck stuff, if it's Steam deeck verified and then it doesn't run on a Steam deeck. then that's a problem, right? But like these these insane scenarios are still are still insane and I'm going to give it another forty eight hours and they'll probably just start working magically. who knows. I rebased to the stable Instead of the nightly because the nightly had fallen way behind stable, which I hate it when people do it.s just up keepep your nightly up to date anyway U Fortz Horizon six is a really solid open world driving game in a world that doesn't get nearly enough of those However Um It feels like an incredibly missed opportunity like they they this game could have been so much more Uh and it makes me think that like this is that is what they need to do with Horizon. I think that stuff matters Am And I think that they should probably figure out a way to change up the overall presentation of the Horizon festival. like the in world stuff is completely played out Um, and and they are losing All of the local feel, all of the potential local flavor just gets siphoned out of it at the expense of You know the same seven radio stations and the same DJs and just like you're goingo to Japan and listening to all these British dudes talk on the radio. and you're just like, ye, I don't know It just kind of sucks. Or you're going to Mexico and listening to all these British dudes on the radio. and and all of that. So yeah, I think that that's u That's stuff they could do a lot better at If they if they were to focus on it, it just it feels like it's just clearly not a focus Um because they whether they think the Horizon Festival carries the Or the people don't care about that stuff enough to for them to bother? I don't know. Like the I would be curious what the data says on that But at the same time it's six games in. it feels like that this is the change they need to make. Three games in, I felt that they needed to dramatically change the nature of the showcase events which are kind of the big marquee moments that the game builds towards a handful of times over the course of the campaign You fill of a meter and unlock by doing races, you unlock the next showcase and you do this and u in the first handful of Fortz Oizon games Almost all of those showcase events felt like the same thing. It was just like, we came up with a dumb thing for you to race against in this one it's a train. Now you're racing against a fucking airplane What are you gonna to do now? Stupid. It's an airplane You're like, oh, Well, I'm going to win the race at the last moment because you've scripted this in such a way that that makes it look dramatic at the end so that a plane and a car are kind of flying again, you know And I'm going to win by about a second and a half because that's how you build all these showcase events And over the course of the first three games They drove that into the ground too the point where I think I got to like four thir Rise in three and I was like enough. this is I'm done with this franchise. You have You have fucking driven the unique stuff about this into the ground. And so when you get to Fort' herizon four, they start to change it up And the showcase events became there's a larger amount of variety there And they've maintained that. There is still the element of I and this game literally has you are They frame it as you are racing against a plane, but like the planes are just circling overhead and shooting fireworks So it's like it's not even you know, um, It doesn't even really feel likere you're racing against planes in this one Uh but they do, you know, they do some fun stuff and they change it up a little bit with these what they call Horizon Rush events. And those are u more like obstacle coury kind of things where you're just kind of driving, you know,' a little more tight turns and stuff, but Some of the showcase events are these Rush events and those are fine Um, So that's out I believe that's out widely now. the the expensive version of the game was available to everyone who partook in the expensive version of the game last week, but I wantant to say today is the day for U ye, this is yeah, todayod is the day for people on a game pass and some of the other, you know, if you want to play the game and not spend a zillion dollars on it, you can You can do so. One more note here on that, just in case you're curious be Steam version of the game will pull in your whole save U if you if you were like let's say, for example, you were playing it on an Xbox with game passass. And you're like, I want to play this on PC U the previous games Owards horizon five would not pull your save in across across storefronts This one does. So you can you can maintain your progress across console and steam if you if you so desire presumably That will also be the case when the game comes to Playsttation five Um they're doing this on PC, I assume that will be the case, but that remains to be seen U I also played a couple of porno video games for the Nintendo in the ongoing quest to rank every Bitten Nintendo game Released in North America, which happens here every Friday We are down to I believe, sixteen games left to rank before that is finished and Over the weekend, I got the two adult games, I suppose out of the way This is hot slots and Pekaboo poker And that video, there is a censored version of that video up on YouTube and if you wna see the whole thing You can find there's a link to the uncensored version of the video in the YouTube video description U These are the two games that were only released here in adult form There was a third there was also Bubble Bath babes. That game was released in a in a, you know, kind of cut form here as well. so we ranked that one a while ago. The history of adult video games, I think is really interesting because it's like Especially when we go back. I mean, these games came out in the early nineties and they kind of come out of Hong Kong And there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of adult games that that kind of come out of this particular group. like they would go on to make some games for the For the PC engine and some other platforms as well But when we get back into, I think, you know, prior to this, prior to the nineties even and think about the existence of adult video games. you know, you get into some really interesting territory because video games themselves were not always seen as the you know, like a great like moral like, you know, vice or something. There was a time there when video games were thought of as like You know, like pinball machines, like oh, this is kind of downwind of that and people thought of pinball machines as being gambling adjacent and And so people would get this kind of idea of arcades as being these very seedy places and whatever. And so You know, video games weren't always the most mainstream thing Um, even even when The Atari twenty six hundred was at its peak And we started getting more and more of the kind of video game culture going mainstream, Pacman fever and such. Like there was still this wider element of just like, ah, this whole thing just is just kind of funky and I don't know, whole thing seems Um Anyone's just making anything Uh And so you go back to the twenty six hundred and you go back to you know, the early days of like text adventures, like adult themed text adventures It's fun to see the ads of this stuff the ads that would run in tiny print in the back of a magazine or You know, like when you go and find like beatem and eatem And you see them being advertised or like a custer's revenge for the Atari twenty six hundred. you know, when you see this stuff And and you see some of these games being kind of u Kid it a little bit. It's It's a very interesting looking thing, you know, like is it is an element of video game culture that I think doesn't really get shown or talked about all that often. And I find this stuff kind of fascinating. I don't know. like this is, you know This is kind of part of that culture and You know, for as much as people like to say still to this day that video games are for kids, You know, think about how that view was taken in the eighties and especially in the nineties, you know, with video game violence and how that was viewed You know, if these games had been marketed a little bit more directly like if Joe Lieberman had gotten his hands on a copy of Pekaboo poker You know, who knows how much further Some of these idiot lawmakers would have gone to try to like villainize video games even further Hot slots is a slot machine that when you cross certain winning thresholds, you get to see static images, well mostly static images. of naked drawings of ladies Tikaboo poker is the same thing Same concept. when you hit certain thresholds for winning in the poker game, you see static images of Over. of ladies they're not They're not digitized photographs there, you know, there are drawings and and they are not good That video is on YouTube. if you if you want to catch that And if you want to catch the uncensored version, it's on archive. org. There's a link to it. Um There's a link to it on Both on the Patreon and on the video description on YouTube if you want to If you want to download the mezadine file, if you want to download a nine gig video file of me playing Porno and ES games for two hours You're in luck, this is your week Um But we're very close to being done with the NS, the NES library There are sixteen games remaining and so that's been Really crazy. I don't know. like there's something I feel like I should and I'm thinking about this more and more Like what is there to say to sum this up at the end of it? And I wonder when I'm done if I will have any kind of specific thoughts about the quality or the quantity or just something to say about the library for the NES So far, I think that a lot of the work kind of speaks for itself speaks for itself in terms of ranking those games and playing those and, uh and all of that, but it's u It's felt like a very worthwhile endeavor and I'm glad that people have kind of come along on the ride for me on this because that was sort of my That was sort of my fear on kind of embarking on this is that, you know, people would not be into it and I would be saddling myself with years of a thing that people wouldn't really want to see. and all of this, but but people have been digging it and that's been good. Um, and it's been been a lot of fun and very eye opening as well. for me It's been nice to see some of these games Especially the stuff that came out later in the nineties after I had long abandoned eight bit gaming And uh Yeah. So that's, you know, there there's been over one hundred and forty episodes of that. So that's what is that? That's just about through that's that's Around three ish years Um of this crazy Um, but yes, the The road ahead is is already kind of laid out. I kind of know where it's going from here. so we'll have more to talk about with that. relatively near future. I don't know. like this is it's like this stuff's coming up and then also the the You know, summer Gamefest stuff is about to pop off as well in a few weeks. And so I don't know if this will end before that starts. O if there will be like a break in the middle of it for summer Game Fest and then and then come back and finish it or what have you. but but we'll see where it all sort of We'll see where it all sorts of sort of falls in place It's hard to plan for that stuff because you never really know how long an individual game is going to take. C Some games you think might take hours are going to take like barely any time. and some games you think will will be five you know, ten minutes are suddenly like an hour and a half or something. it's very interesting a process to go through and kind of plan for, especially now that there are not that many games left Let's take one more ad break here. We'll come back and we will get into the news Getting a handle on your finances Sometimes it can be a little tricky. That's why it's nice to have rocket money on your side. Rocket money personal finance app that will take all of your different accounts present them to you in one nice and easy dashboard. It'll categorize your spending. And let's you get a look at what's going on. It's nice. 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Check it out This episode is brought to you by Fox One Watch all one hundred and four matches of the FIFA World Cup live in four K for just nineteenllars ninety nine cents a month, with three days free Build your own multi view, choose up to three streams, and follow players spotlights. Stay on top of every moment with live stats, highlights, and instant replays. The FIFA World Cup, streaming live on Fox One, offers a subject to change seefox. com for complete terms and conditions Bloomberg has confirmed earlier reporting, stating that Herman Holst The head of PlayStation Studios gave a town haall and let everyone at the company know that their single player games would no longer be coming to PC. This comes from Jason Schreer of Bloomberg And this stuff guy reported gosh. Back in March, I want to say is when the the word was kind of got out This was the direction they were going in Um I had heard from a couple of different people inside the company saying like, yeah, this is this this seems to be the case And there's something weird about it. like there's yeah, but But yes, this is This is now The law of the land It has been laid out to the company in case in case you were waiting and wondering for, you know, Ghost of Yote to to make its way to the PC or something like that. that is it is not going to happen. They're leaving the door open for U Multiplayer first games Um You know, something like a marathon, for example, because multiplayer games obviously feed off of the largest possible fan base, the largest possible addressable audience imaginable. And so it makes sense that those games would continue to come to multiple platforms. I wonder if if somewhere down the line though What that does to how those games are perceived internally by Sony if they become like secondcond class citizens are like, oh, well, that's coming to, you know, PC or whatever But there'll be some games that they publish Sony publishes that they don't necessarily control the full rights to or something like a You know, something like Stellarblade, which it sounds like Stellar Blade two is going to be self published by the developer anyway. So, you know, that's that's not likely to be Um a factor there. I think it's a bummer for people who played some of these games on PC that now will not get something like Soros on PC which I think is Um a bummer. I don't know. like that game I think I played way more returnnal on PC than I did on PlayStation That's where I really connected with the game for whatever reason Um, And, uh And yeah, I think I don't know. like this is this is something that makes sense for them when we consider that they are working their way up to the turn of a generation Um, And and you think about the resources that Sony has available to them, which is they're not infinite resources at the end of the day Um that they've got to really focus on making sure that their console business is solid that these games are coming to Playsttation six and still coming to Playsttation five. And so You know, you wonder if like the studios that you think of as being associated with getting these games on PC Um, you know will willill some of those teams end up being repurposed to make sure that these PS six games come to PS five or something along those lines. it's hard to say, but I I feel with this move that the PlayStation is done, like this is something that makes sense for them right now. And I think it's very easy for them to do this as a part of like, you know, regime change to a certain extent. you know, this is like, okay, Jim Ryan's out and we're looking at the numbers and what do we really care about I think it's very easy for them to sit there and go, we care about selling consoles because then when people go by Grand Theft Auto on this console, we get a cut of this. And when people go by all of these third party games, like it makes more sense for us to focus on growing that install base because then we make money on all the third party sales as well. and whatever. you know, remember that the initial goal of putting PlayStation games on PC was not just to sell more games, which is what you would think it would be Um It was to try to expose people to the PlayStation ecosystem and the PlayStation family of franchises and then say Oh Maybe you should buy a playaysttation because the next one of these isn't going to come out for another six months on PCs. And if you want to play it right now, you should get a like it was this weird backdoor way to get people ono PSN and get people thinking about buying playlaysttations time when they said that out loud, when they publicly said that that was the goal of bringing these games to PC I remember thinking that that was posossibly Misguided in a way that you go like, that's how do you how would you come to that conclusion that people would do that? That's not going to happen at all It's a misunderstanding of the PC right. likeike it's just like it's a grave misunderstanding. And something of an overplaying of one's hand U to say that you are hoping that this will get people excited about buying a Playsttation. Um And so now you know, they've done it for a while and they have the data and they tried it and there's new people in charge and all of that. And so I think it's very easy for them to go like, yeah, fuckking yeah,, we're not going to do that anymore Um I think for the games that have these ballooning budgets, you know, cutting off some significant chunk of audience is like a dangerous game to play Um But if Sony thinks that they can just like afford it and whatever, then I don't have access to their books so So who knows? Common sense wise, I look at it and go like, I would think you would want to make all the money you can possibly make And if you don't want to put those games out on PC day one, then I guess that makes sense Bringing them out somewhere down the line gives you kind of a new bump and excitement around the game. It helps you kind of continue to make money on these games by selling them to new people And potentially you get excitement, you know, you get people talking about these games in a way that then leads to something of a bump in interest in the Playsttation versions of those games, you know, six months after their release. My only guess is that they didn't really work out that way Um, the the sales of PlayStation games on PC We have heard Multiple things on that front. There's been talk at times where you go like oh, actually the, you know and so I think it comes down to a game by game sort of situation where it's like, oh, yeah, hey Um, There's really There's really no reason to make this an exclusive or whatever. like, you know, there's There's just, hey, we should be selling these games everywhere instead of anyway Where does this leave them? you know, like some of those games sold, some of those games didn't And so they're not missing that much. like some of the reporting around around the way some of those Playsttation games sold on PC was like, yeah, maybe this was I'm sure they made some money on it, but it was not some dramatic shift in like, oh, man, that we really need to, you know consider the PC to do this because Binging in so much money and whatever And u You would especially think that something like Wolverine, where a chunk of that money has to go to Marvel slash Disney that they would want to find ways to bring in as much money as possible on that You would also think the license holder that Marvel would also be like, cool with that if not pushing for it The same way MLB pushed to make the show a multi platform franchise U But yeah, ultimately, like these games did not move a huge number of units seemingly And yeah, it's a shame. That was it was neat It was convenient. It was a nice place to play those games. U and it was it was always nice to have more games that supported the dual Sense haptic feedback stuff on on PC Um But ultimately, yeah, if those games aren't aren't serving any of the goals that they had in mind, whether that goal was let's sell some games or that goal was let's sell some playaystations you can see why they would back away from this I But I guess I wouldn't be shocked if like, you know, let's say a handful of years down the line here, we get back to a point where like, Hey, they they're good at making PlayStation six games. The tools are in place. They know what they're doing Like the machine is rolling along It wouldn't be shocking to see them go like, actually Maybe we are going to put some of these out on PC again Um But you know, it's, I don't know, that's obviously like hard hard to say. and it depends on how the rest of the market kind of does going forward, I guess too. Interestingly, I don this is This seems dumb to me for a handful of reasons, dumb on every end U As part of like the Xbox, lookook at us we're doing something Hey, look busy everybody process that they seem to be going through. They have rolled out a new U player feedback site called Xbox Player Voice which looks like kind of a u, you know Like it's like a feedback hub kind of thing where you can submit like, hey, I think you should do this. And then other users can come in and comment on that Vote it Um And this is something that you've seen with like open source software, like but it also looks a lot like Reddit if you're not familiar with the various kind of yeah user voice style feedback that a lot of software developers use, it looks a lot more like that than it does Reddit. sameame difference Um, They rolled this out so that you the player could talk directly to Xbox and give them your ideas that they have certainly never had before Um And so right now the number let's go down the list of like, you know, this is sorted by the most up votes Currently the number one thing It just says exclusives Carlos Hernandez wrote Xbox was built off of great game exclusives. You cannot sell any consoles without a reason to buy the console compared to your competition or even sending your ten bowl games over to your competitor. Bring them back, please And that somehow has neearly nine thousand up votes. This is a real This is really dumb for a lot of reasons Because none of the people up voting this except for the employees that are in here doing this know anything about the fucking finances of any of this. And so it's someone coming in here and basically typing in like You should do this business thing that affects me absolutely zero if these games are sold here or not sold here, it impacts me, Carlos Hernandez, none We bring them back, please. It's just fucking curs. And so like on some level, it's probably smart of Microsoft to create this off to the side so that these people can scream into this void that Microsoft can look at every so often and go like Yeah, real actionable stuff guys, nice and move forward And so it is insanely dumb this whole thing exists to begin with and also the the the Pop suggestions are also fucking st. Okay It's or it's stuff that's like, obvious. likeike like it's like, hey, you should do more of this. And it's like eventually you just get feedback that says you should do more of everything. The number two thing backwards compatible wouldould really love for Xbox to start focusing on backwards compatible games again. Not the worst idea in the world, except that they've done it for the previous generation of consoles like the Xbox one is backwards compatible. presumably When we get to another Xbox, it will continue to be backwards compatible. And so what you're really asking for, I suppose, is more original Xbox and Xbox three hundred and sixty games which kind of hit the limit again on games like they've said this numerous times. that when it comes to backwards compatibility, like There's not that many more games that they could feasibly do without doing a bunch of weird business arrangements and stuff that like can't happen because of music licensing or can't happen because, you know for a variety of reasons And so the potential to expand that list is actually like really small And yet it is the number two most upvoted thing here from people who' like I it's like there's Okay. I finally like four posts four posts of feedback in, there's a list of Um, someone finally posted a list of games and some of these like this this would be viable. like, you know, yeah, it'd be n like hey, It would be great if every single game was backwards compatible, right I mean, that's the standard That that should be the the the standard that they're going for And then you chip away at that with reality. L reality fucks all that up, right? D has posted a list here. Sabatur That'd be cool that developer doesn't exist anymore. You're asking EA to drag that out and do it. I don't know Wet has licensed music in some cases also is not a good game. Uh, and uh Soough you know, quality should not be the standard, like bad games should be backwards compatible too. Um I think what had some some more. I mean Bethesda is owned by them that that may should maybe happen. condemned one I don't know if Sega owns the rights to condemned one anymore. I think the rights to the IP have since reverted to the Now defunct developer. Um, so I don't know if from 's his name Chason, u Yeah, I don't know I don't know where the rights to condemned sit at this exact time Um, But is it is not with SeGa and it is not with WB Jason H, right? Yes, Jasonall Jason Hall at one point did have the rights to the condemned franchise And I don't know if he does again or what the story is there. But Spidererman Edge of timeim. That's a license game. you're just never it's never going to happen. Afra a samurai, not going to happen. Blur probablyroably has licensed music. The developer doesn't exist anymore Wanted weapons of fate. That's a licensed game based on the hit film And Mason says condemned onene is already on backwards compatibleome compatibility. Maybe they did the work already then. Ninja Blade, sure, I guess Kane and Lynch dead men If you want to make middling video games backwards compatible, I think that's actually not a bad idea And guitar hero three, which like it's never, you know and people posting to this and fans and all this other stuff out. these people should not have to sit there and like think about the reality of it They should aim for this pie in the sky stuff of like do all this stuff I think the end result is just like like nothing Very little about this feedback hub seems like it will ever be actionable. It's just something you can look at and go, what do the fans have to say? And they' say like the same shit they always say Like we didn't need to create a site to know this. You realize that, right Like, yeah, but it looks like we're listening And that's that is my problem with Microsoft over the last month or so. is that it feels like a lot of like shuffling paper and look at us, we're listening. and look, we're doing things. things are happening over here. Like taking a vote on Twitter to decide if the name of the company, if if the name of the brand should be all caps or not is like a very fucking like low rent Elon Musk kind of move that just makes them look like they have zero ideas. B It's a bad look bad look. The number three thing, make online multiplayer free to access. Like yes, see? Yeahah I would I would up vote that one Online multiplayer availability for all games across all generations of Xbox should be free and all the features of game passass into one subscription for nine dollars ninety nineents like Xbox gold back in the day Yeah. Exactly. You should only charge You should only charge nine doars ninety nineents a month and all the online should be free. I can't argue with that Lxt boox divisions like balance sheet. might Ar have an argument with that? Um And then there's just stuff like there are two thousand two hundred up votes for Please makeake the dashboard HDR. So my TV will stop freaking out when I use Quick resume to switch games or navigate the dashboard for a few minutes That's like That's good actionable feedback Like yeah Your TV shouldn't have to resnink. You should minimize HTMI resyncing as much as possible across that stuff and sure. sure That's a good one. That's the first one I saw that's like, o, that seems like something that they could do that would be like I'm, you know not Not incredibly difficult to do does not involve a bunch of weird business that is near impossible to do And it' something you could look at and they could do that and they could say we're listening Now the dashboards available in HDR. We're listening. and then people would go This Xbox is making a lot of moves lately L But the whole thing just seems so fucking fake to me It just seems so like hey, we got to we got to look like we're doing something over here because it's going to be a bit before we have real console news to talk about. Um And it's not like we have like a ton of games I don't know, like Forces just came out, but Whatever, man. Meanwhile, on the Sony side of things They are raaising prices. PlayStation plus subscriptions In some regions and only for new customers. So if you are they're creating a grandfathered in sort of scenario here with PlayStation pllus where if your subscription were to lapse and you needed to resubscribe you would then have to pay the Higher price As of may twentieth, meaning tomorrow Let's see, here's what they posted Twitter. Starting may twenteth PlayStation pllus prices for new customers will increase in select regions Due to ongoing market conditions, prices will start at ten ninety nine US nine ninety nine euros and seven ninety nine in British pound mononeyies for one month subscriptions. Three month subscriptions will be twenty seven, ninety nine in USDs in euros and twenty one ninety nine in British pounds Um Price change does not apply to current subscribers, except in Turkey and India unless the existing subscription changes or lapses. So changes means If you go and change the tier that you're at So if you were like me on the highest tier of PlayStation pllus and woke up one morning and said, what the fuck am I doing and wanted to go down to a lower tier U you would still u you would still pay the the higher price. Um And the the free multiplayer force is out for this one as well. someomeone by the name of Ben. responded to this and says Flaming market conditions is insane. It should be free to play online games without paywalls in twenty twenty six Ben You and me. sort of agree We sort of agree on that one Online multiplayer should be free What does I guess like the other thing I would And then the second reply to this is someone has done an AI image of Asha Sharma Jesus Christ These people still exist This just has to be like Twitter engagement bait type My Lord and Savior Asha would never do this dumb shit. Gay station is at rock bottom That's just that's that whole account is AI. That whole account is AI N that's not a human that's not a human person that said that. It can't be in this day and age. Anyway. Um Imagine Imagine trying to have some kind of console war horse shit. twenty twenty six. How fucking sad do you have to be Like just fucking end it at that point Just take care the go man Just go out back and old ye yeller yourself, man. it's fucking over. Um So this is they've only posted this is the only post they've made about this and it doesn't necessarily get into the higher tiers and it doesn't really say if the higher tiers are going to get more expensive. It's really just the the kind of essential tier, but they say prices will start at which makes you wonder if they are going to raise them across the board. I'm going to check the PlayStation blog to see if they've expanded on this concept at all, but it doesn't look like they have That's even crazier that they just throw this out as like a Twitter post and just go like, No, no. Um That is the thing, you know, like that is the thing I am waiting and watching for When Microsoft stops fucking around with all this like meaningless stuff and starts like actually making real news about the things that they intend to do That is that is the biggest thing I amm curious about. I've said it before, but it is what they will do around u their' subscription stuff and online video games Um, because if they are going to sell a thing that's a PC, And they're going to say if you want to play on Xbox Live, you need to pay us this amount of money to play online Also our device boots steam. So maybe just do that instead. like it's creating a strange scenario And it makes you wonder like and, you know, and I got some emails around this of people saying like I bet that the Xbox is not going to be nearly as open as people think it's going to be and they're going to reneg on like they're going to go back on all of the steam stuff. like it's going to still be a relatively closed environment and they're not going to actually do the thing that you think they're going to do which I say anything's possible they will they will make those They will wait to make those decisions until the last minute if if they need to All they've really said is that they are making a device that is the power of Windows combined with the power of Xbox or whatever. and the inference on that has been off the charts Of course to the point where you say like where Epic says, oh, yeah, we're going to be on the Xbox, of course in a way that makes it seem like they have had conversations. with Microsoft around this stuff and they're not just like pulling from the public information and saying like, Oh yeah, yeah, we're going to be an Xbox like Um don't know. I don't know what to of all of that. I think it's a very interesting Like that's me like like the hous and wise about what the Xbox will do, I think is is is kind of one of the most interesting things going right now in terms of like information that we don't have yet because I think that's the sort of thing that is a tipping point that then you start to look at PlaySation. and go, well, now what are you guys going to do Now that they've made this change, are you going to stay the course on charging the way you charge or You know, because like this sort of stuff changed around Fortnite and free to play games. Um And it initially wasn't that way. Like like those games were originally kind of behind the same paywall. And then eventually, I don't know if Epic lobbied them for it or whatever the story was there, but eventually kind of they said, like, oh, free to play games should be you should be able to play those games for free anyway Um without having to pay for Xbox Live gold. and so free to play games suddenly started existing outside of that framework. I would think it would just, you know, like at some point it comes down to do you Are you using PlayStations network services for anything meaningful or expensive. Or are you using Xbox network? you know, like like are you using those services in a meaningful way And I no longer consider pure like matchmaking and social features to be qualify as like a meaningful use, right? Are your servers being hosted on PlayStation's infrastructure and spinning up and spinning down as a result of people's matchmaking or whatever Or are you running your own servers I feel like most companies run their own servers. That was always the thing that, you know When when the three hundred and sixty was was getting out there and Xbox Live was so deeply integrated into the system and all of that part of the pitch of why you would pay for Xbox liive gold was, well, we're running all these servers We're doing all this stuff Like developers don't need to do this because we do it And at the time, EA was like Actually we're gonna run our own because we want to be able to shut them off So that you have to buy the new Madden We don't want to have these games able to work infinitely I guess that was the idea, right? is they would be able to spin these servers up as you were matchmaking or whatever. The reality is not quite. seeamless, obviously, but Um But the idea was that, you know, Microsoft would be hosting all of that stuff. And so You know, you would be paying for Xbox Live gold to work with that. And yes. and then and then in the end, most of those games, many of those games were peer to peer hosted anyway. And so you were really just using Xbox Live as a fancy expensive matchmaking service paying them for the white paper they wrote about Optim match or whatever And, uh I don't know, I feel like even as ingrained as that has become in modern console gaming, I think it's As these platforms continue to converge and as these consoles just look more and more like Walled the Garden PCs I think that charging for online multiplayer just looks worse and worse as time goes on And maybe it's something that people just don't really think about. and they go, well well that's the cost of me owning alaysttation and And maybe a lot of people that are out there in these ecosystems just never really think about it Um But like I think it's really crazy U I think it's a really it's it's a real kind of like as time has gone on it's become like a this really feels like it's lost its way This really feels like something that is like now at least they could pitch it in a way that made it sound like it was good for the consumer And they had a really good case there early on Because when the Xbox three hundred and sixty network services and all of the stuff that they had done compared that to the early days of PSN on the PS three. and what online gaming looked like on the PlayStation three and how much of a fucking shit show it was. And you're like, well, I need to create an account for this and You know, especially kind of late PS two and are like I'm making my own email and login for individual games. likeike PSN was fucking terrible. The performance at times seemed worse. And it was not a great competitor to the early days of Xbox Live on three hundred and sixty. And so that in a lot of ways was a great advertisement for Xbox Live gold. Be you could point at PS three s Network services layer and go like, Look at that shit Do you want that or do you want premium experience for your premium, you know, it was it was a much easier sell Obviously, then PSN came a long way Over the course of that generation and then, you know, they they started charging forward on the PS four. And it was a lot better there too U And it became a different a different sort of situation It's ancient history at this point, man. and it feels like these models need to be thrown out like on the consumer side, we shouldn't be standing for this stuff You know what I mean Because I'm sure Microsoft would love to continue charging you for online access to video games. I'm sure that they would love to start, you know, continue having every single person pay them a regular routine fee to play games on their system, right? Of course they would But again, As these consoles become more and more PC like in nature And as the costs of them fucking skyrocket At some point, what the fuck are you paying for You know We'll see where all that goes. I bet where all that goes is not going to be You're not going to look it and go like, wow, they fixed it. Wow, this is great. I'm perfectly happy. They're going to go. Oh, we think we can get away with this And they're going to try to get away with it too much money for them to throw out can't imagine it would go well But also I think people are so used to paying for that. And um And a lot of people have not ever owned a PC or considered the idea of what if you didn't have to pay for that stuff? What if you didn't have to pay a monthly fee just to play games online Like I think a lot of people just don't consider that Also from the world of Xbox, we've got leaked images of a couple of controllers here This appears to have leaked out of a Brazilian site called Technoblog And these two controllers appear to be a third elite controller and a controller that is maybe more casual in nature built for like cloud streaming or Um you know, something that is a little bit smaller. Perhaps more Donothy Um the streaming controller as I think everyone seems to be calling it. is more kind of rectangular, like some smaller kind of nubs on it off the bottom. But it seems like closer to a rectangle. eight Bito makes a controller that is a rectangular Xbox controller. This looks at least a little bit similar to that, but with more of the kind of standard Xbox months around the D pad and and what have you? It does not look like a very comfortable controller but it also looks like something that they would try to sell to someone who doesn't know any better Because if you have a smart television and you want to play video games in the cloud, you might think I need to buy a controller. And this will be a controller that will work for that In both cases, they seem to have a button that would be potentially for sncing The ellite controller seems to be more focused on this a little bit, but there's as part of the images, Um and some of this stuff is supported by a leaked deck out of Microsoft from months and months and months ago But if you may remember, it was talking about updated controllers, it was also talking about like updated Xbox hardware you know, like, hey, here's Xbox sereries X with no disk drive, which they eventually, you know, and some of that other stuff. But it's a the idea is something that they did with the stadia controllers It is a controller that can directly connect to Wi Fi. And the idea here being If you have if you're trying to play games in the cloud And you're taking your controller and your're Bluetooth connecting it to your TV And then your TV is doing all the internet stuff That's kind of another bounce to your controller And so if the controller can directly connect to WiFi, and go directly out to the internet and control that session separately from your screen That is in theory A faster and lower latency connection And so they seem to be building that into these next generation Xbox controllers. There's also two little rotary dials at the bottom of the Xbox controller that are are put in a place where it doesn't necessarily seem like they would be inputs for video games It seems more like, oh, is this going to be like a, you know, audio Is it a volume control for if I have headphones plugged into this thing or or some kind of, you know, u a controller thing like that. The rest of the elite controller looks I don't know, like a slightly slicker Xbox controller, I suppose Um not really much else A Not really much else other than, you know, hey, they're the controllers. So these are controllers that I guess went in for some kind of certification And that that seems to be where the leak came out of The implication here via Technobog is that the controller will come with a rechargeable battery in it same as the play and charge kit they sell right now, you know, you can just throw that in the back of any Xbox controller. It works great U as well as trigger stops switches on the back to, you know, kind of turn the triggers, turn the analog triggers into more kind of normal seemaming buttons. Of course, the previous elite controllers have had that as well. buttons on the back, paddles, that sort of stuff. The things you would expect an elite style controller to have. A I'm curious if they do something else around stick tension or you know, like tension rings or whatever. Eight Bit Do just announced a new ultimate three controller with that is licensed for Xbox And it looks very similar to the controller they have out now, the controllers they have out now the ultimate two among them But it looks like the ultimate three will have a stick tension ring on it so if you want a tighter analog stick, you can turn the tension rings. C certainly not the first controller to have that, but U But yeah, that's looking like it's coming out end of August the Amazon Ds are accurate and that'll be a hundred bucks And it looks like a decent controller, I don't know. Um These these Xbox controllers don't necessarily look like next generation controllers if we are Fightting up against the, you know, the potential launch of a new generation, like it would be weird for them to ship these controllers and then do something meaningfully different with their controllers for the next console or for the next device, whatever we want to call it these days. U And so'm I'm left with the feeling that we're not going to see some dramatic difference on next generation Xbox controllers at least externally they could be doing gyros They could be doing more in the way of impact triggers or various kind of haptic feedback stuff. There's certainly more they could be doing on that front And I hope that they do Um And uh and yeah I would be I would be curious to see but it's it's hard to envision a scenario where they are that these controllers are leaking, but then these aren't the controllers that are going, you know ship alongside the next console or whatever. I don't know Um It's But yeah, I don't know. we'll see. Controllers are continuing to be weird there's a G, I can't I can't think of the name of it at the moment here. U Bai Tong Pengu Baitong Pengu. this is this is a controller that people seem to be taking pre orers for for a relatively near term future. This is, you know, there's a ton of there's a ton of insane controller brands out of China and a lot of these brands have gotten a lot better U over time This thing is maybe a little on the expensive side, but the pengu meant to be a modular game controller. They showed this off a number of months ago and now it's just kind of finally getting ready to ship Um, but it has kind of little buttons on it that you can use to pop out the different modules, both the analog sticks, the D pad and the face buttons And You can put any mix of those things back into the controller So if you somehow wantanted to have a controller with four analog sticks on the front of it. You can do that or all buttons or, you know, two analog sticks on the left and buttons on the right or like like any disgusting configuration you could come up with U, You can buy the modules. There are multiple DPad modules depending on what you're looking for there too. so It's ridiculous. They want like a if you want like all of the different modules to plug into it and you know, a wire a charging dock and all this other stuff. They want about two hundred bucks for it at the the one site that I've seen it for sale on so far, but even that's just a pre order. And then Ali Express has some of these things listed on their site, but they wanted like three hundred dollars for those Um Fuzzy Assassin as says no six button module, but What if you take out the right analog stick and put in another button module there because then you have buttons on the face A slight separation between the two clusters of four, but it's still buttons on the face It seems like a nightmare. I don't know how these different things would map in different likeike software like like on on the hardware on the system side of things, how does it know what you're dealing with? like all of that stuff seems like it would just potentially be completely fucked or not the thing you want. U, because it would just like duplicate inputs across whatever it ends up doing. I don't know. but There's something potentially very interesting about. This hellish controller. that's the that's the Baitong B E I T O NG Pangu P A N G U Look it up. I think it's actually like a really nice looking controller. I I really want to see one This sites that I'm looking at says that they are shipping in May and I don't know, you know, it is May right now I want to I want to feel one of these. I want to insert all the different SICO modules into it and see what the hell it does But you know, it's the sort of thing where if you want just the controller, it's one hundred and twenty, but like that's not the point. You need all of the modules too. And so, you know, the price of it seems to jump up a bit if you need all of the if you want to have four analog sticks in a controller price I suppose I don't really know what to make of it. It's it's fucking crazy. u I don't know, that's at least something innovative in controllers. evenven if it's largely duplicating you know, by default, it's largely duplicating the standard inputs of, you know, our current controllers and and whatever else. I don't I don't know, you know, I don't expect this generation to be one of like interestnteresting innovation on the controller front, at least not in terms of just the types of inputs Again, maybe it's more rumble And and whatever else, but like I don't really see anyone doing anything too crazy with it this time around. And if it doesn't happen at the first party level, you know, like all these third party controllers are all just going to kind of be like, well, we still have to kind of duplicate the inputs of the official thing and it doesn't matter what else we do becausecause games are just going to be looking for those sorts of inputs anyway. Um see here Nintendo is coming back to phones They have announced a new mobile game called P Pkon Nico And it is a piece of software that is going to turn photos into mini games, I guess I should say micro games. The idea being that you will take some pictures and then it will be like, oh, now I need to move the mouth on this picture to in order to eat this food. likeike the games look like pest Warrioware concepts Um with like the presentation of Warioware, like music wise and a lot of this other stuff. And that seems kind of interesting. It's it's going to be free. It'll be out may twenty eighth. However It will come with a limited selection of free micro games. You have to buy the games. They're going to sell them in volumes They have two volumes announced with one for six bucks and one for eight And uh Yeah It it's it's kind of a mobile Wriorware game that is all touch and all based around your photos Um And so it very much looks like something that intelligence systems probably touched at some point. but yeah, they did they did, in fact say that And uh, I don't know. It doesn't look awesome, but also, you know, it looks interesting enough that I very much want to try it. It looks very much like something that I would probably have a little bit of fun with and I bet the kids would be into except that would require me to let the kids handle my phone while it's unlocked And that never goes well. So I don't know about that My daughter is trying to put pressure on me around pad or some kind of tablet or some kind of phone or something like that And I keep saying to myself inside my head. You are six. stop stop asking me for a phone That's crazy. This is crazy And she insists that everyone else at school has one and she is the only one who doesn't And I hate how well that works on me I hate I hate how that makes me feel. because I don't want her to be left behind U but also she does not need A phone She does not need a tablet. She does not need any kind of access to the internet fettered or unfettered Um, And I don't know I this is yeah, I don't know. She's going to really push on this and u She's she's she's it really seems like she's going to ramp that up as time goes on and I don't want her to have one. pereriod And she said, all they what and I asked her. I said, you know, what what do the kids at your school do with their do with their phones or their tablets or whatever they got? They go, they play games and stop and go, look You have access two Every video game and they are Better games than the junk that those kids are playing on their stupid tablets. I let you G Your peanut butter covered hands All over a Nintendo Switch two on a regular basis Do not need And of course, she doesn't understand that at all. She's like, she's wants to she's like, they're playing gam, I want to play the games. I'm like you have you have the real video games Y real video games. You don't need this. Play Infinity Nicki on the Playsttation My son played some Mr. D Um and had a little trouble wrapping his mind around it And he handed me the controller. I just wanted to watch me play mister D And I was like, Well, this is all right This is kind of cool Maybe you wish I was better at mr. D, but I am no I'm not a professional mis. Dist. I am not I am not a mister D. pro. Unfortunately, How could I be You know? I'm not Eesports ready for Mr. D. Um That's the that is the weird the the weird The weird argument of Her wanting to get one of these so she can play games on it when I when I literally have and this isn't me saying like you why would you want to play one of those? We got Mal slug X right here. Like no, like she's got to switch to with All the current stuff on it. She's, you know, they they there they get access to a PlayStation five. with a quite a lot of games on it. Um And u It's very there's something very frustrating about all of this and it's like It's a hard argument to win because you know, I think she just wants to faceetime with her friends and stuff like that and thinks that she'll be able to do all of that, which I think if I got her one then the argument just gets kicked down the road a little bit And it becomes now you have a tablet, but I'm certainly not letting you have like free rein access to any kind of network whatsoever on that thing. likeike that's crazy. Like I'm not even I would I will not even let them install a YouTube app Um You know, so its it's it's a it's a It's a hard thing to navigate because it like it's it's a hard thing to navigate without feeling very hypocritical because again, like we, you know, there's This house is fucking covered in technology. It's just not specifically the technology that they want And we had enough of a bad experience with the kids having access to YouTube on the TV's that we had to take it off because they kept watching all these Eastern European girls who are getting spoiled with gigantic toys in their weird Dubai mansions. And and then getting sad that the bounce house that we got for their birthday party was not as big as it's just like M these fucking people So So it was just it was leading to bad attitudes around the house And so we had to we had to get YouTube out And it's been a lot better since then Um And so the idea of getting her a tablet and being like you like all of that sort of stuff, like, you know, obviously, you can restrict what apps get installed and that you can lock down an iPad pretty well these days, but like I don't I don't even want to do that You know, I think there's just a better option. like, you know, like I don't want her to I want her to have access to technology and know how shit works and she uses a computer at school sometimes and and all of that. And so it's this hard balance of like, man, how do I How do I make sure that she is like smart about this stuff and is aware of all of it without also letting her have access to the fucking Trment that is the goddamn internet, you know? And so yes, yes, get her on Linux. All right, Yes, here you go Here's Arch Go ahead and install it and then immediately go to school and start talking about how much better you are than all the other kids What Distros are they using? Th fucking losers. Th those idiot kids, those dumbasses I also, you know, like there's a part of parenting stuff that's like, I I had wide access to a lot of really bad shit at a very young age for a variety of reasons. You know, the internet was not a thing then. betweenween calling BBSs and HBO on the TV and, you know adult magazines in hidden inside of hires U there was just a lot of, you know There was just a lot of stuff you know, and I don't I know that I would be able to work my way past any sort of restriction placed. like given enough time with a lockeddown iPad, I would be able to figure out how to make that do what I wanted it to do. That's what kids are there That's what, you know And, uh, And I don't think that part of it's necessarily a bad thing. Youre like, Ohh well, okay, if you're smart enough to fuckking, you know, hack the fucking network and do this and do that, then Maybe we need to have a talk about whatever el you know, It know I don't know. I don't know what the I don't know what the answer is. It's with kids and technology, except that she is too young to have any of that stuff right now D we'll see Anyway Petoniicko is coming out later this month and it looks like Wario Wear what with photos Um Consider this your this is over. I think this already happened. at least it definitely happened on steam If you are going to frantically look around for it, maybe it is available on some other platforms. but Lego two K drive has been delisted from digital storefronts today This is as videoogameschronicle d. com notes three years to the day of its initial release You may remember Lego two K drive as the open world Lego driving game that two K made that was not very good It had some neat ideas in it, but then the racing part of it was not the open world part of it was not great and the racing part of it was not great and you're like, ye there's something here, but none of it comes together in a way that is is actually pleasing to play They're going to keep the multiplayer servers up for it for another year. Those will be up until may thirty first, twenty twenty seven Um, But yes, the game has been taken off of digital shelves Um I mean, I guess you could probably find a physical copy of it if you really found yourself desperate to play Lego two K drive. I can't imagine a scenario where Wh that's a thing, but the PlayStation five version of it is on Amazon right now for do nineteen dollars which is notot a terrible amount. Other versions of it are more expensive Th those prices will only go up. So act now before the collectors get I don't know. Yeah, this is silly u Three years is not a long time Um And also kind of a weird amount of time for a driving game. you assume Well, I guess like I wonder if I wonder what license expired here Um You know, I'm sure there's probably licensed music inside of that game somewhere and it's Lego. So I don't think they're real cars. it's Lego vehicles. I don't think it's Lego recreations of licensed real cars Um, but I can't remember for sure I wonder if it's a case because like remember, like you know there was that announcement a while ago kind of like before this game came along. So about three and a half years ago that Warner was going to not have the exclusive rights to Lego games anymore. And they're like, oh, there's going to be some other stuff out there And there was talk that maybe two K was going to do like a Lego soccer game or something. weren't they? There was some other two K sports thing that I thought was going to be some kind of Lego thing that was rumored Um, And then Lego two K drive materialized And I wonder if this is just like two K decided not to pursue the The Lego license. at all And so maybe this is the straight up LegO license expiring on top of that I don't I don't know. Either way U Today as of as of today, that game is no longer for sale is already been pulled down from steam could go look on Xbox Live or the Playsttation network or the swwitch e shop if you so desire Um probablyroably okay without it U And that's it for the news I't Lego Batman is out as of as of the very start of this podcast, the Expensive version of that game was released I have not had time to mess with it just yet It u It seems like it's the game that they were setting it up to be, you know, from a lot of the trailers and a lot of the kind of pre release coverage like it it seemed like it was like, hey, this is like yes, this is a Lego game, but also we're making it U we're going to make it good There was a round of stories yesterday saying like, hey, man, Rocksteady is is credited as a co developer on this probably why it feels like a good Batman game Um And so that's That's very cool. You know, the trailers for that stuff looked really good in terms of In terms of conveying, hey, this is not just going to be the same fucking brain dead combat that every other Lego game has. Hey, we're actually putting in work here to to make this happen in in in what looks like a real way. I'm happy to hear that it seems like it largely paid off Um And so I am very interested to finally get some time with that. I just haven't had any time to dig into any part of that But uh, But yes, that is that is available now and and that is the Again, that is the expensive version of the game. The normal priced version is out in three days. And so if you don't want to spend ninety dollars on it right now The cheap version of the game is only seventy, goddamn it None of that None of that sounds like a deal None of that says like well, I should waitited for the seventy dollars version. Like at some point it just I'm just saying seventy dollars and ninety dollars are both numbers that seem too high for video games in ways that are not differentere. So I, you know, I don't know. obbviously, you know, if you're the sort of person who wants to wait for a sale, I'm sure that game will be available for less than that. in the months to come Um, What do you even get here, sorry, I'm trying to like get a sense of like what the hell the expensive version of the game comes with. Deluxe edition comes with legacy collection over thirty launch day items and cross three themed packs The Arkham tririlogy pack, the Batman Beyond pack and the party music pack. Each themed pack includes seven suits, one for each playable character, one batmobile, and a set of five Batcaave customization props It will also include the Mhem collection which is not out until September That is a new story mission and mayhem mode along with a villain themed sinister pack All of the capitalized proper nouns in this are amazing This sinister pack includes seven suits, one for each of the original playable characters, one Batmobile, and one Batcaave prop set It looks like you will play as the Joker and Harley Quinn in the Mhem collection. Anyway, this this looks cool. I don't know. The Lego games. Um have have always like the the The samey nature of the gameplay on a lot of the Lego stuff has always left me cold. U and I'm not enough of a fan of most of the properties that they've made into Lego Th things care about their like quippy comedic takes on the original franchises I go You retold the events of Star Wars, but with jokes Wonderful Um But this looks like something that you could definitely like sink your teeth into a bit more. So so that's Pretty exciting. Of course, the Yoshi game is out this week as well. It looks like that's reviewing well s just sickening. I don't know, like it'd be nice to have a good Yoshi game for a change We don't really get any of those. We've never really gotten any of those So, u There's a first time for everything We'll see how it goes Let's get into emails. Podcast at Gard. bike is the email address that you can send your emails to And I will in theory see them Um Let's see here. I had one and then it disappeared. o. Nicholas writes in asking about games made for game guides. I recently jumped back into Breath of the Wild after not playing it for three years I decided I wanted to wrap it up and clean up the shrines I missed before, much like the first Zelda game My brother and I got his kids, Majora's mask, I am finding myself increasingly looking at guides to get stuff done in a timely manner Are these games and others intentionally designed so you have to use outside help to get stuff done I don't know how I could have found all the shrines. Even using the in game tools without taking without it taking way too long without a guide Not really So there was an era where like strategy guides sales and official guides Like that was pretty good business. like the the guide business, the guide market was u was actually like pretty lucrative. Um The interternet eventually kind of ate that up And uh and a lot of that stuff went away. And so there weren't really there are probably a couple of instances over the years that you could look at and say, actually they were really hoping to sell more official guides. and so they did this specific thing and I think some of that is wrapped up in localized versions of games in a lot of cases. like, hey,'re we're going to localize this game and then also make it this one thing weird hard But I can't think of any real dedicated examples of that other than Working designs put out guides for their games because that seems like something that they would have done U mayaybe they didn't U the the hint here, the clue here is to not do that I don't know. Like a lot of these games are not designed for you to just like go hundred percent them, you know? Especially with the Corox seeds and stuff, you don't need to go get six hundred Corox seeds. You just don't need to do that. You could just go do something else. I don't know. L I think if you really, really like a game, The idea and this is especially something that I think makes sense for Nintendo. Am The idea is that you're only going to see all of that stuff if you like the game enough to want to really like live in that world long enough to do it, right? and They put tools in the game, the shhrine findinders and stuff like that to let you find that stuff But as you say, it's something that, you know, even with the in game tools will take too long for you without a guide So my advice to you individually is just don't fucking do that because you know, they're making this game for people that are like sickes to a degree that you cannot touch, sir So my advice is don't do that Achievements kind of short circuited this mentality for me for a lot of things because you had these moments of like, well, I would never in a million years get all two hundred of these bonus boards in Fortza Horizon six, but they did put an achievement in here for it. and Well, you can fast travel for free now, so it actually is a lot easier for me to warp around the world and just hit all these things and maybe I should do that. You know, there's there's definitely like stuff like that that I om I've really thought about I've really thought about doing And then I usually I'm like cured of it because I'm like, oh, I don't I don't need to I don't need to actually do this Um That said, you know, I did And I have I have nothing to show for it also But as I said at the top of the show, we did that video playing hot slots. Pekaboo poker for the NES and both of those have retro achievements. and over the course of playing hot slots I got the majority of the retro achievements except for two that seem like they would be very easy to get U And so I put in about a half hour of playing that terrible slot machine game get those last two achievements and then didn't get them. Because I kept losing at the slot machine Be it's a fucking slot machine gusting. I was sitting here last night with a TV show on just like idly swirling the joystick to try to get these achievements, notot even looking at the screen. And then I' looking over and Im like, I'm broke again. Like what happened? Like it just no. Iin't got it Nick from Philadelphia right in to say You've said before how you eventually realized that the PlayStation was going to be the real deal. But when did you know the Saturn wouldn't be it Was it that shitty looking version of Daytona, USA? Was it even earlier than that Kona looked fine I don't know. like like it's maybe hard to go back to Daytona now in some ways because yeah, I mean, it doesn't look awesome, but like, For its era, that version of Daytona USA was prettytty okay Um But as far as realizing that the Saturn was not going to be Um a hit It was um before the Playsttation was out. it was it was the it was the E three where Saturn was being shown publicly and was a, you know, like out or something. And then like there was one booth off to the side for a joystick manufacturer and they had a playaystation at their booth. To Sindon. And you saw Toshinden and you saw how it looked compared to the polygonal games that we're launching with the Saturn Um And it was like a different fucking world. You're like, oh And then you see, you know, like not long after that, you see Ridge Racer and it's very clearly apparent that the Saturn games are just not on the same level Now you take that and you combine it with The Troubles that SeagGa had been having with the release of the thirty two X And the way the Sega CD went later in his life, and you know, it's like Sega was kind of limping by the time the Saturn came out and you're like, this is too much too soon. What the fuck is going on? And so there's like stuff about the Saturn already that like on its own merits, you were like, this seems weird. This doesn't feel right U And then they just like launched it at a handful of retailers in the US like very little fanfare And no one knew it was out and no one cared And then between looking at the way the Playsttation games looked and seeing what they had priced the Playsttation out in the US Like you just like it wass just like, man, the Saturn is just fucking done, dude Um Yeah, it was it was before the launch of the Playsttation. was it was already easy to tell that the Saturn was not Just something about it was not going in the right direction. Um And and yeah. so it was it was pretty apparent early on And then once they both got out and got rolling, you started seeing The same game on both platforms And you would see sometimes the Saturn games the way they looked compared to their PlayStation counterparts and And what have you? And you go like, yeah This isn't you know, like like Tomb Rider on the Saturn or whatever.ike, you know, there's just like stuff there that you're like, how this is This looks all fucked up Um Rain from South Carolina writes in and said, I notice when you discuss racing games, you always refer to them as driving games. When I think of a driving game, I think of something like Euro Truck simimulator or maybe even early GTA and driver games However, if we're talking games like Fortza, Gnderizemote, Ned for Speed or Ridge Racer Those are racing games I imagine there's a perfectly valid reason for you to always use the term driving game over racing game, but when I hear you say it, it reminds me of when people say hip hop instead of rap or mobile phone instead of cell phone and it drives me a little nuts. Well, I mean, the hip hop instead of rap is actually like a really good. Uum. Racing games are a subset of driving games The same way rap is a subset of hip hop It's actually like a pretty direct 'ss it's pretty directly comparable in that. But u, So Driving games you make the distinction of driving game versus racing game. because you're driving cars whereereas Sonic R. is a racing game. or u Uh what what what was the name of that IDOS game? fucking it was going they were going to call it freaking fast or freaky fast. And then they moved away from that name. It was on the original Xbox. It was the on foot racing game that sucked. Much like Sonaar sucks, But there are plenty of racing games that don't involve driving U Mad dash racing. Yes, that is what that game was called when they shipped it. I can never remember for whatever reason, I can never remember the actual shipping name of that fucking game Either way They are driving games because you drive vehicles in them Like Sonic R is not a driving game. You know, Mad dash racing is not a driving game, but it is a racing game And so they're two very different things or they can be. And so that that is why You are also wrong when you say that hip hop and rap mean the same thing because they don't U Alex from Asheville, North Carolinaites and says if the rumors about the next call of duty are true and it's another modern warfare game, how do you think they're going to handle the campaign withith everything that's happening in the world right now Do you think they'll just put blinders on and pretend that nothing is happening like Battlefield hardardline Modern warfare is typically the call of duty I enjoy playing the most, but with how fuck the world is right now, I don't think I'm in the mood to play a game that glorifies the US. or UK military Maybe I've just been too tuned into the news lately. Yeah, I mean It's a good point. I don't think that they will do anything to change it. I don't I don't know. you know, maybe there's some changes they made based on, you know, if they if they are writing a story that gets a little too close to real conflicts or real events or something like that and there is potentially stuff that they would twist or bend around it, but But yeah, I don't know. it's certainly not the It's certain not the first time that they will have had a game that is you know, loosely flirting with reality Um by mistake Ah Yeah. I don't know. Like if you're if you're if you're absolutely sick of that stuff It's probably going to be more of that stuff you know, I mean, evenven if they are just whole cloth inventing countries and factions and All of that other stuff now that they that they tend to do when they don't want to get specific about the Middle East specifically U You know, it's still obviously like very close to that shit. But yeah, you're right.'s not, it's maybe not a great time for for that sort of stuff Um, Someone wrote in about Jazz Rack because mentioned I mentioned Jazz Rack earlier in the show as the Japanese What is it? pererformance rights organization Its you know, I mentioned it when I reviewed Fortza Horizon six. as, a, you know, obviously like part of the reason why some of the music selections in that game may not be what you think they should be. Am Anyway, this person wrote in, we'll leave him anonymous This says I used to work at another PRO And one of my early jobs was answering policy questions from publishers. The questions were usually like, where are our royalties for use of music in Y country. In cases where the users uses are international PROs, again, performance rights organizations, they collect the royalties for the ways songs get used and then they distribute the money from there. is sort of how that works PRO's have a bunch of agreements where they collect royalties for one another's composers and publishers, pass them around and distribute them Tracking these down when there are problems often required emailing other PROs to find out what was going on Some like BMI or ACap am cos, which I have not heard of were' friendly and you could have a good chat with their their international reps about what was going on Jazz Rack reps often just replied with links to multi page policy documents that were dense and hard to understand, even to the many people we had that were well familiar with the policies of BROs all over the world, they were hard to deal with I once had to deal with a problem relating to the use of music in Japanese TV advertisements Even as someone who is now a corporate middle manager, many years later, it's an anecdote I still use when I'm asking job interviews to describe a challenging situation I had to deal with Jazzback not easy to deal with. There's a lot of that's that's kind of, there's it's a lot better now. I think, you know Well, not specifically with Jazzraack. I can't really speak to it, but like U Japan used to just be used to just really just want to run things its own way and was very cool to the idea of doing international business the way that international business was largely being done There was very much like a, you know, like, hey, we're not going to meet you halfway on this. like you need to come and, you know, hand the business card and do this and we're going to do things our way Like they were they were very specific in video games as well, you know, there was just a lot of stuff that Um Culturally, they were very particular about. And A lot of that stuff has changed. It's always like heartening to me in a weird way. Even though this is maybe not the perfect example of this, but when I see Um Longt time Japanese developers, some of these guys who have gotten out of places like Capcom or Konami or whatever Guys that you would think would be like lifeifers at these companies because of just the way Japanese business is done. But when some of these folks get out and start their own new studios all these years later decades into their career It warms my heart You know, because it feels like, oh, yeah You're like you're pulling away from A lot of Japanese corporate culture and you're starting over and doing a new thing and like you're just, you know, you're trying to make stuff happen Um And that's nice. Like bit summit is happening. You know, they like pretty soon here the Japanese independent gaming iga the Japanese Iependent Gaming Association, I think it is. They put that on. but it's an annual event and like independent Japanese developers showing things and you know, hearing that like, oh, this long time Coji Kondo did music for seventeen bits game, know like all the different stuff that is happening over there now, the cross pollination that seemed like impossible N not that long ago always feels good to hear about because you're like, okay, yeah, it just seems like Maybe some people are breaking loose of some of those old ways. But yeah Japanese business is a weird thing Still is, I'm sure. I'm not as exposed to it as I used to be which is nice Um Let's see here. from Gilroy The garlic capital of the world 's true. You can't drive the freeway Tue Gilrooy without gone what the fuck Oh, why does this fucking smell like Oh, right, we're in Gilroy. writes in to ask to say something about an idea for Pject Helix. You should submit this to the Xbox user feedback zone Oh, this is I was talking about this earlier. Long story short, I don't think Project Helix will have a full on version of Windows I vaguely remember Valve saying something to the effect of they couldn't sell steam machines too cheaply, or people would buy the hardware for stuff unrelated to gaming like crypto or AI Microsoft is in a similar situation in that if they leave it too open, they will have to sell it above retail on the chance they won't make it up on the back end So I think in order to be competitive price wise, they'll use a locked down version of Windows with full access to the Microsoft store This way they can give users some freedom while ultimately remaining in control over what software can be run on the console. Maybe the influx of new users to the Microsoft ecosystem would be enough to justify a break even price point. Barring licensing and depending on the current state of the game preservation and backwardsk compatibility team, it would be pretty cool if they could make the entire back catalog of Xbox games from the original all the way up through Project Helix available for purchase through the store or maybe offer a curated selection and game pass for both PC and console with the caveat being that any game requiring the NPU can only be played on proroject Helix or PCs that have one equipped U they have a locked down version of Windows eleven called Windows eleven S. The S is for fucking suck because it is a version of Windows that you are supposed to not be able to install apps normally and you can only use the Windows store. So Sure, maybe I think that there's no benefit to that Like like the only reason like the you would only want a version of you only want a console that would have full ass windows on it if you can install games on it Because it's a game machine If they try to sell this and say, yeah, it's got Windows on it and now you can install An of the wonderful apps that are in the Windows store and you can use it to listen to Apple music because there's an Apple music app in the Windows store. Like that a lot of that stuff already transfers to the existing Xbox storefront. Like there are apps that are in both the Windows store and the Xbox store that are basically the same thing And so they're not too far off from doing the thing you're already talking about And so I look at it as a real all or nothing thing, but I get your point that like, yeah, if they if they do sell these things and they're open Um And and You know, they're just PC's, then people can buy them to do PCS, PC stuff with them for sure But also it's not going to be an inexpensive console. Like I don't I don't, you know, you're talking about these break even price points and stuff. likeike I don't think there's a chance in hell that they sell this at a break even price point. I think they will sell these consoles in order to try to profit off them Regardless of if they have windows in them or not becausecause that's just the way things are these days. Everything is so much more expensive. No one is going to go out there and lose money on a console again. E Microsoft they could stand to benefit from you know, increased market share or something like that, you know, they they could goose the prices in a way to try to gain that market share, but I think they do that in a meaningful way would cost them so much money that like Microsoft would have to be really willing to fucking get there Like they have to be willing to undercut competitors by such a degree to like buy that market share They would have to take a fucking bath on it And I just don't I don't think anyone's in a position to do that at this point. Like it just the world has changed. Um And so yeah, just I don't see that really being a possible scenario here A I think they will sell it for something that approximates the value of the parts inside. They get by on You know, like it doesn't have to be as small in form factor as a laptop. It doesn't need to have a screen the way the laptop does. So you know, like comparing Pricing on a console to a pricing on a laptop ends up being a little bit different U and not immediately not not fully comparable, but it's probably not farar off in the grand scheme Um, but no one's going to sell their consoles at a loss. Look at, look at how, you know, how many times the prices have been raised this generation No one's going to be willing to do this It's funny becausecause you see people like go after these price, you know, like like people complaining about the price hikes And saying like, man, it's like they don't even want to sell consoles. likeike what are they even doing and doing? It's like, yeah, well, yeah Like no one has infinite fucking money to do this anymore. You know Like Sony's not out there, like Sony's an established brand. likeike they're not, you know, if they were launching something brand new, you go like, oh, well we have to sell it at a loss because we have to grow market share because we're new on the block and this and that But like even that You have to have so much fucking money set aside to cover those losses, just to be ready to fuck and take all those losses And then you'd have to sit there and go like, okay, when do we break even on a box How many games does someone have to buy What does the attach rate have to be for us to break even on a console. If we're going to start selling these losses, it's just not It's just not feasible anymore And so like its I see the complaints some people go like, oh, these consoles are way too expensive and who's going to buy them?' like the answer isah, don' and don't dude I don't know what to tell you? Like if you don't want one bad enough to pay that price for it, don't get it. Because the world is fucked in a lot of ways around all of this stuff Now that doesn't mean that you know, like I'm not sayitting like all poor Sony being hit with these tariffs and this and that. like the whole situation fucking sucks The whole situation is fucking bad You know, someone asks like, why is Microsoft investing in a streaming controller This is why. because they're It's not because they're envisioning a world where like suddenly everyone goes, Oh, stadia fucking rips actually We should have supported that when it was here and now we're getting on the Xbox band wagon. It's people going I really want to play video games But I can't fucking afford that thing can't afford to pay a monthly subscription to Xbox Cloud streaming And I can play it on my TV somehow Like that becomes the use case for streaming services if prices stay this stupid for this long It's not a good scenario U But yeah,, you know, no one, no one's going into this and saying like, yeah, we've got a We've got to sell these at a loss and whatever. Like that model dead for generations now. L we're well past that So I don't I would not expect Microsoft to do that. evenven as much as you think like, oh, you know, Microsoft would stand to benefit If they could just eat the costs on this thing up frront for the first year or so Um and sell them at a loss because they're getting people into the subscription ecosystem They are builduing more market share than their competitors if they do it right And so that gives them leverage for the rest of that entire generation that then they can then benefit from. Like there are business cases to be made around that I'm just guessing that like if you really play that out and run the numbers None of that actually lines up in a way that's favorable Like, yeah, you could give away consoles and fucking have infinite market share and fucking all this other stuff. But like eventually And then what You know? It's just especially Especially with the amount of money Microsoft is blowing on fuckking AI horse shit And, you know, when that stuff doesn't pay off, then what? you know, like there's a lot of concern, I think around Microsoft in general, I don't know. But again, that's this is not me staring at the numbers and saying, well, this is a problem, this is a problem. It's just like None of this seems great. U Joe from Staint Louis writes in. This is so I guess this is something Sony is going to be testing Joe Ryson says with PlayStation getting ready to add live player accounts for games to the home screen, I've seen a lot of people express viscerally negative reactions to not just to this feature. but also to the idea of active player counts being publicly available information in any capacity whatsoever While I can understand the concerns some may have about slapping this number on the screen right before you launch a multiplayer game I found it curious that people seem to have strong opinions about whether or not gamers can be trusted with this information at all. Outside of the PlayStation example, this seems like fairly harmless knowledge to have unless you happen to be the kind of person who likes to get into pointless arguments with strangers on social media Sites like Steam Charts going away would not stop random Bzos from arguing online. If it's not active player counts, then there will be some other silly reason for people to flame each other about like how many copies a particular game sold For how many active subscriptions in the MMO had at any given time, you know the classics How do you feel about these sorts of metrics being public knowledge Does their availability matter at all Or do they cause more problems than they're worth? I've yet to hear a compelling argument against this as they always seem to boil down to misguided behavioral policing Um Yeah, yeah, actually, u EDS X Wing says, I think Sony sees people endlessly talking about steam charts all the time on socials and they want in on the conversation. I actually think that's exactly right Um So The problem is that people misinterpret these numbers. You have people that only have this number, right And the Steam DB numbers are on top of that, not super accurate U as we've heard multiple times from exXValve people the numbers that get reported from Steam about active players And notot real time They're not and they are updated less frequently for lower player count games. And so the lower a player count gets, the less often it's sampled and so the less useful it is. so The idea that Valve so the reason why Valve put that in there to begin with was supposedly specifically for The only valid reason I think those numbers should be out there is If you want to play a multiplayer game, it is helpful to know if there are other people playing it And if you want to buy a multiplayer only game, it might be helpful to know. if other people are playing it problem becomes one of context because You as the player donon't know where in the world those players are how evenly distributed the demand is for multiplayer sessions in any given game and how long it might take for matchmaking to resolve You want to be able to download a game and play a game, you want to hit the button and get in a match and play That's the actual information you want. It doesn't necessarily need to be a number It needs to be Hey, Is this something that that people are doing and also the unfortunate part is like for games with multiplayer modes Surfacing one number about active users doesn't tell you anything about if people are actually playing the multiplayer or not, they could be sitting at the fucking main menu Playing a campaign They can be playing a mode that you're not interested in playing. There was something nice that Call of Duty did in two thousand seven eight. And they took this away becausecause I think the numbers did not look favorable to them over time But they used to tell you how many players were active in a given playlist And so you went when you went and said, I want to play team Dath match It would say There are this many matches of TDM going right now with this many players in them. It was like, you know, X slash Y. in game And so you would know like, oh this and Halo did something similar with this as well, but like you knew immediately Oh, like There are not a lot of players in this specific playlist, and so I might have to wait a while to find a match or I might never find one Maybe I'll go play a different mode instead U And that was nice That was nice information to have in some situations Especially when they were splitting the user base around DLC maps and like all this other shit was fucked up in a way that like Sometimes you needed that info. Be it was even for us a game as popular as callall of Duty, you would still have little, you know, you'd get so many menus in that you'd find some game mode that zero people were playing And it's nice to know that Be you hit the button and sit there and go, Where are the people U And so that stuff was useful U And I think that numbers like that can be useful But like also a lot of those numbers have been used by people to start a bunch of fucking really misguided discourse because you have a lot of people who don't fucking know How many like and it's going to be different for every game, right How many players does a game need in order to be healthy. And by healthy, I mean I launch it, I push a button and I am in game in a reasonable time frrame I'm not sitting at a matchmaking menu for five minutes or whatever How many players is that And the answer is We don't know But that's not stopping people from going and having these arguments, right? If it's a fighting game That number could be twelve people. If it's the right twelve people looking for the right matches at the right time. You'll rotate through multiple people and have multiple matches and you know the matchmaking times might not be long The needs are not severe for a one v one kind of game But if you're matchmaking for a one hundred player battle Royale And the game doesn't have bots or anything like that to fill in the spaces That's a wildly different requirement And so People get really hung up on the steam charts that the SteamDB active player count stuff even though it's not that useful information, even though it is not always the most accurate information because people will glom on to bad data in situations rather than go with no data. And so you have a lot of people out there that don't know any better. that are trying to you know, and a lot of them are trying to make some weird point in some fucking aimless argument on top of that. And so, you know, they they're kind of not having not always having good faith arguments to fuck and begin with Um You're having people try to skew these numbers one way or the other other and take it to mean something that it might not mean Because again, every game is going to be different, every active player base is going to look a little different. The regionality of a game is going to look different. Like there's just a bunch of fucking weird shit around that can't just take a concurrent player count and try to apply it to This game's a failure. this game's this. L all of it depends on if you hit the button and the matches don't come, that's a problem players going, I should get a refund on this game I just bought because no one's playing it. And so if you can signal that to a player before they launch the game, or before they buy the game. I think that is handy information. It just needs the appropriate context And you know, Sony displaying raw numbers like this is how many people play this game this week or I forget what their exact of the data is going to be U what they're actually surfacing. Um, I don't think that's useful to players in any meaningful way If you want to have a popularity chart and be able to have some kind of dick waving contest about like Hey guess what guys? Fortnite was number one again. Yay Like you can do that You know, like they can build that list and I, you know, they kind of do build that list like If you're tracking engagement They are kinda post those numbers every god damn week U And so I don't know. like it becomes this this unfortunate situation where you have a lot of people that think that they're fucking analysts who are just assholes Uh and and they just want to get into like dumb arguments online and and they don't Not only do they not have it, but they refuse to open their eyes to the context or to the fact that they are missing All of the context that makes those numbers relevant in one way or the other. because the information to process that number is not public information And so all you can really do is play by feel and go like, oh, this matchmaking seems too long for me M might be too long for you, not long enough for somebody else. you know like everyone's going to have a different take on that too. So Concurrenntce are pointless and they're completely worthless in single player games, like who gives a shit And you know, the answer is like, I kind of give a shit because it's sometimes it's nice to see a popularity chart.ike what are the top ten games this week? What the fuck are people playing I that's Kind of interesting It's less interesting these days on consoles because it's the same fucking ten games all the time Like the the like engagement charts, the concurrent charts, whatever you want to look at. like when when Matt Piscatella over on Blue Sky posts the charts. of here's what the top ten games are sameame fucking games in the top five like it like PlayStation and Xbox are just like reworked different versions of the same five games. where like Xbox has Minecraft higher on the list because of game pass or wh you know, like Um don need a bunch of people. I don't need a bunch of dudes in suits telling me that Fortnite is still popular. I know that. alsoso it's depressing that it hasn't been toppled If you're out there trying to make a multiplayer game, I bet you look at those fucking concurrent user charts that get put out and just go fuck And it sucks It fucking sucks to just look at that list every week and go, yeep, yeah, here's fucking NBA two K and GTA and Fortnight and Call of Duty and yeah Minecraft or Roblox depending on which platform you're looking at and it's just like It feels fucking bad. for New games for the success of new games for the for the chances for new games to be able to crack into that list and really break out And so like that's a problem you know, like people have all these dumb arguments about like, you know, like Marathon, I guess is a recent example, right? People tried and tried to parse out like his marathon a failure. I don't know. Yes, no wh Sure, man, you're fucking splitting hairs. The big problem is that the fucking top five never fucking change And they have it for years Just the number on NBA two K ticks up a notch at some point And the callall of Duty changes out for the next one It's fucking it's not good. For the video game business for this shit to be this way You know Um And so like having some petty argument about like, this game I thought was too colorful is a failure. This is like I you you're a loser. I don't know what to even fucking tell you Y like fucking grow up The fuck is wrong with you Um, it's just sad Um becausecause I think that there's something interesting about some of that data and some of those numbers. It's just that largely we don't have We don't have access to tell the full story You know, I used to get all the numbers every month. I used to get back when they were NPD I would get the spreadsheet every month and it was something like could not use it in any kind of writing the numbers specifically. And if you wanted to talk about it generally could But the numbers, the actual data was proprietary information of NPD and they would not you you couldn't if I were just post that spreadsheet and go here you go U someone would be real mad about it Um But it was cool because I had access to the spreadsheet that would tell me like, oh, they sold one retail copy of this like thirteen year old game. Like here are the games every month that only that only one copy was sold of and there are these ancient games Um and so you could you could see all that stuff and it was fucking fascinating. And this was before digital games was really a factor too. So it was really Um You know, it was mostly complete data Um, And and it was fascinating to be able to look at that stuff and kind of just see You know, what was what was actually selling? in a given month Um And there was a lot of change. You know, you had perennial games that would stay on the list for a number of months, but even the biggest games would fall off that list months after their release You didn't have a GTA that sat on that list forever. You didn't have a minecraft that was just going to be on that list for seven years straight or whatever. and it's like, You know, it's fucking cool like like Minecraft is a fucking great thing, man You know, they're still updating it. There's still, you know, it is still a viable and relevant video game, right? I don't I don't necessarily mean to like throw shade at these individual games for being popular It's more that like their entrenched status on those lists and the percentage of players out there that are out there buying consoles just so they can fucking play Minecraft on them or whatever it is is a fucking bummer as someone who has been following this business for a very long time. As someone who likes to see new things come along and take off and take over, you know, when they do You know, that's always been something of a rarity, but now it's It's a damn near impossibility U And so you know, that's very frustrating to see these these like just incredibly entrenched games dominate that list all the time A Be I think we would, you know, I think players would just be better and happier in a general sense if they just like fucked around and played a wider variety of games top of everything else, right Like none of these games need to be your life. You know, You don't need to be like, I'm just playing this game, but it's a lot of kids, you know, it's a lot of the younger audience is the one You know, they're the ones playing Roblox because the part of Roblox where it's a game is secondary to the part of Roblox where it's a social platform where you're talking to your friends and fucking around, right Like the part where it's rooblox doesnn't matter as much Same with Minecraft, same with Fortnite to a certain extent. You know, it's just the things that they do And in the case of something like Roblox or Fortnite, those games are free So it's the free thing that you can just do and hang out with your friends online It's that's's that's frustrating for different reasons, I think, But but its it's it is at least sensible You could understand why things are the way they are when you think that stuff through Eespecially because since those games are free to play, you don't have to pay for Xbox Live Gld or PlayStation Network or any of that other stuff to get online and play that shit feels its just like that stuff just kind of feels bad overall Even as someone who likes some of those games, for sure, like there's just aspect of that. They're just like, yeah, this This seems like it shouldn't be this way especially for men, I I don't want to become someone who is talking about roblox all the time I find myself like the longer I look at rooblox The more I want to write like some bigger, longer thing This time it is specifically about Game design trends in Roblox because you start to see the games steal ideas from game to game to game. because I talked about this a little bit last week, but But it's that idea of like, okay, this game is doing this. and since everyone is optimizing for engagement They all make the same choices around like, oh, I figured out a way to get people to spend ten minutes in this game and do this. and figure all of this stuff out And once you see the way that those games are built or the way that systems in those games get rebuilt in ways that seem aimed at building engagement. by adding a bunch of meaningless tasks to the game to try to keep you in game long enough to monetize And you see those games learning it from other games and going, oh, I've pivoted my system to be exactly like this game system. because that seems like a good way to farm engagement out of players. It's really It's it's it's like it is just mind blowing and fascinating to me to see that stuff in action and to see the way the games have changed week to week U to mirror systems that are available in other games. Like it it's really it's fucking Bananas, dude Let's see here Why after twenty five years, I feel like Microsoft and Xbox don't know games like Sony and Nintendo do. This is from Jose in Puerto Rico In the last ten years, Sony has put out a game where you hunt mech dinosaurs in a post apocalyptic setting Grounded, beautiful and story heavy samurai games, a weird Kojima game, an ODST game in Helldivers. Spider Man game and a solid reboot of a beloved franchise in God of War, just to name a few Don't get me wrong, Microsoft has had some solid hits. Force of Risen is better than ever Hi Fi Rush was great India is amazing and I don't care when anyone says, Halo Infinite is good. But even then, they still act like they're trying to figure this gaming thing out. At this point, you would call them industry veterans, right They've been in the industry longer than Sony was at the time the PS four came out Being an American company have an effect on this or is it a lack of vision? I'd love to hear your thoughts I think this is more about your perception of those games and those franchises. but What you're saying what I think you're saying here, Jose is that you think that Sony's franchises are more memorable and varied Then what Microsoft has had to offer Um that ran into a problem where their franchises got old. and they were not doing a good enough job at replacing them with things that felt like big massive mainstream things. They've had like success stories on a different level bike Sea of Thieves or grounded You know, grounded to is out. u But like I think whereas Sony has kind of changed from what they used to be twenty years ago into this more kind of, you know, wh whether what do you whatever you want to call it, the kind of prestige single player game, you know, like like whatever Whatever that is. I think that Microsoft built its Fation of games and concepts that I think in some cases have limited lifespans. And I think that some of that is like like the problem What do you think of when you think of Xbox Game stududios? When you think about first party Microsoft video games. it's I still think about Halo Gears Fortza U. as like the kind of like big in house stuff. And it's just like Those types of shooters Um, you know, and fable to an extent. they're obviously they're desperately trying to get a fucking fable game off the ground and have been for years and they they've gotten it there. They just need to get it out the door now. Um So like they're going release a gears of war this year. and I look at that and just think like, man, that feels so ancient You know, like like gears of war feels like a game for old people I should be more excited about gears of war than I am. and maybe I will be by the time it comes out, but like, like They have not always done right by halo. Obviously the quality of Halo has has been a little uneven. Um Sense Halo four I guess And the distance between the new Halo games felt like it stretched out a little bit there and they didn't have as many and you know, and and I think through through the p pandemic You had Microsoft delaying a lot of games. you had, you know, big holes in their release calendar as they started buying other studios to try to shore up the holes in their in their releases. they're like, I don't know Now now we gotethda Now we got activision. Now we got this, you know, like like they they've tried to fix it that way U They've got interesting littleler stuff though. I mean, little is a weird thing to talk about when we talk about like Sea of Thieves. I mean It's not Tiny U But you know, they also still own Doublefine. Like Double Fine is still putting out games. likeike they just put out Kilm. They it wasn't long before that. they put out Keper. L those are not massive success stories, but it's like cool little weird shit If anything, I would argue that PlayStation has done a bad job of maintaining cool little weird shit You know, that's been the part that they've been shutting down. U you could argue that that works out for them because they people just want to buy People just't want the new uncharted game H Anyway, Ah The thing with Xbox is that they just didn't continue to change it up They let the money makers, the cash cows from generations of old They those kind of turned sour and they didn't have good things to replace them with You know, And so we're still at a point now where what are we looking forward to this year on Xbox? Fortz that came out Halo and gears. They're remaking Halo One and they're making a new gears prequel I don't think that either of those things can thrive in the world of today. Halo still has a large fan base and there are people who will try it on the basis of it being a halo game Um But I think first person shooters are kind of in a weird space overall right now with, you know, like obviously callall of duty, you know, missing and smart callall of duty also a Microsoft fucking property now And so at some point, you look at that and go like, do you need halo in a world where you've got call of duty or vice versa. Could you afford to live in a world where those are your two competitive shooter series And that's what you alternate off of instead of like the modern warfare black opps thing What if it was Halo and then callall of duty The answer is that in the Halo years they would fucking take a bath you know, like it just wouldn't work out because Halo is not the driver that it could be or could have been U But I think that's the that's the issue with where Microsoft is at Software And if you look at the full slate of everything they own, everything that's under their purview, like dude, they put out doom the Dark Ages and that's a great fucking game. They put out Indie. That's a great fucking game. Indiana Jones fucking rips. You know U And so there are games that you might not immediately think of as a Microsoft game that were fucking awesome. Avowed is a cool fucking game Outer worlds too neat Uh, you know, and then you get into stuff like grounded and like there's stuff on their slate that like you look at and go like, yeah, this is all cool stuff It's not world beating down your door movie trailer big though. I would argue that Sony's stuff is not that size anymore either. evenven though presentationally they can present their prestige single player games as this kind of cinematic big deal None of those games are so large as to again, we're living in a post fucking, here's our your mountain Dew flavor era, right We're living in a post. Here's, you know, the fast food uh, you know, meal based on This video game. likeike it doesn't feel like any of the video games are big enough to deserve it anymore I think that's an industry wide problem. I don't think that's a Micsoft problem. you know and it's not necessarily like, oh, we got to get Big franchises don't feel big anymore because the big franchises became those five games I was talking about It became Fortnite fucking Minecraft Roblox, like that is the stuff that is eating everyone's lunch And so in a world where people just want some kind of free to play multiplayer thing that can act as a social space to play with their friends What role does gears of fucking war play in that None, dude. You tell him what twelve year olds going to be like, I really identify with fucking bd No one, dude, thoseose are games for old men and women to play. And so I don't know what you to do. I don't know what you do to get around that, right and and Sony to its credit, I think, has leaned into that because they just make single player stuff So you don't even have to deal with the shotgun rolling assholes. that you would playing gears of war Be you can just experience the sad dads story and be like, is this? So I guess she's immune to getting infected? And they want to cut her open. That seems bad. I should probably shoot all these people in the face with a shotgun People love that shit You know So maybe Sony has the right idea. Maybebe there's more accepting of where they're at Whereas Microsoft is going to keep trying to make these games with these multiplayer components that you know, I'm sure we'll be fine They will continue to do some kind of halo esports thing. They will try to, you know, I'm sure the people that are involved in that are At least somewhat happy that it exists But every time they say like, oh, well the halo World Cup finals or whatever coming up and that's why they're going to show a trailer for the new Halo and I' like Why Those people will play that game no matter what. like what do you, you know Shouldn't you be trying to get Halo out to the masses in a more realistic way instead of like, Well, these fucking first four percent of Halo players that really care about Halo esports We've got to cater to them or we're really fucked it's a bad place to be either way, right don't know I can only speculate, I suppose But if I had to look at the Xbox lineup and say what's wrong with it, I think that Maybe that's it Maybe maybe maybe I did hit upon it a little bit there PlayStation and Xbox are making O games for older players, which is fine because there are more older players every day. becausecause people are not aging out of gaming the way they used to The older audience has in theory, more disposable income to buy a fucking nine hundred dollars console so that they can play last of U us three on it That's the audience of people, you know, like like no one playing Roblox is like sitting there going like man, when uncharted five comes out can't fucking wait for it. Like dude, none of those people care about the franchise at all and they never will And so the kids aging into gaming through whatever weird door they're getting into it through are never going to be are rarely, I guess I should say rarely. You will have some people that find a strange side door, they watch the Last of Us television show and they go, I I would play one of those Good luck affording a playsttation to play it on time they get around to making another one. But uh And so I think they're both facing similar issues. I think that Sony has just embraced its position a little bit more and they don't bother to put multiplayer modes into those games anymore They don't go like, oh, last of us needs to have some kind of mode is a shame because that the multiplayer last of of stuff was really neat. But u You know, Sony has kind of embraced that stuff. and when you see Ghost of Yote, when they go to add multiplayer to it, they add four player co ops which is a very sensible thing for grown upps to get together on an occasional night. and we're going to play that we're going try this thing out instead of like continuing to chase after whatever the Gears multiplayer is and whatever. you know, Gears has had very successful and very awesome cooperative play for a long time as well. I think the co op in Halo has been nice too. that new halo is not even going to have competitive multiplayer, right Yeah, I don't know. I think that's a problem that they're both kind of facing is that, you know, like none of them are putting out games that are really in the zeitgeist Um for the kids who are playing games. You know, they're putting out games that are entering a zeitgeist through weird side doors because you will have people who u Watched the fallout television show and will want to play a new fallout game someday because of it where we'll buy fallout for whatever else or you will have the last of us style thing There is still a situation here where Sony should probably have a twisted metal game at some point because they keep making that show And by most accounts, that show is Quite good Nason says Microsoft did not capitalize on that fallout hype. but they were not in a position to, you know, like the the they were not You know, they were not in a position to have Bethesda Game stududios make a brand new fallout game because they were already in the midst of making Starfield You know, it just like time and they needed to make another Elder Scrolls game, you know, like so fallout is on the back burner of the back burner. You know, they will Make a new fallout someday And they tried to kind of funnel people into Fallout seventy six and go, lookook at this, It's fallout. did you like that TV show? Y does fall out. Um And, you know, some players are getting getting it that way, I suppose U They should have had Obsidian They should have allowed Obsidian to make a fallout game And they will issue some kind of remake of fallout here before too long., you know, like there's there's stuff But it's kind of like a little too little and a little too late, I think Depending. I mean, that can always turn around. if they do another season of the Fallout TV show and people fucking love it Then they're right there, baby, you know, maybe maybe the timing works out next season or whatever And so there's you kind of never know with that stuff. But like syncking that up is fucking hard You know, like syncking that up in a way that is like natural and is the best thing for both the games and the shows is really difficult to do And so I'm not like shocked or surprised that they didn't do a good job of having fallout games ready popularity of the fallout show Because the worst thing that could happen is they spend a bunch of time investing in fallout games, then the show finally debuts and it sucks shit and like, oh, great. now this IP has a bunch of stink on it Making a new game right now is the worst thing we could do So yeah, you know, I don't know. I think that it's beneficial to have new games. those time periods, like that's the best case scenario, right Um But instead they just kind of tried to push people into fallout seventy six could have had a new Vegas They could have very much had per fucking interesting fallout thing out in this general time frrame Um But it was not meant to be So I think that's a damn sh because it didn't need to be this way U Let's see. mayaybe we take one more here Uh let's see. N K writes in says if Xbox already has hardware connections and the Xbox mode is rolling out to Windows eleven. Couldn't Xbox take a run at offering a competing steam machine I feel like the people staying on consoles instead of moving over to PC are generally people who don't want to be bothered with the idea of upgrades and configuration. But if an Xbox is still a plug and play device for your TV And then they make their version of Steam bigig picture, handle enough in the background that people never need to see a desktop Who would care that it's just a windows box underneath? Isn't that kind of the magic of the steam deeck already That's literally what they're making. I mean The next Xbox console In theory Unless like it gets internally politicked into pieces. for some of the reasons we talked about earlier in the show, but like that is ostensibly what they are going to make and why they are doing some of this work to Windows U Xbox mode has rolled out to Windows eleven. It is u Not a big deal I guess is how I would define that. What it does is when you enable Xbox mode at launch, booting into Xbox mode, the same way a Rg ally X would Um Basically by default does not process any of your startup apps So I have, for example, fan control installed on this PC And it has all my custom fan curves for cooling the PC and doing all that sort of stuff When I turned on Xbox mode, fan control doesn't launch. Most of the stuff I have configured to launch at startup does not start up when you launch in Xbox mode They have added a second option in the startup app thing for like Hey. Also start this up in Xbox mode. So if you have software that needs to be running, conter support or whatever in order for your PC to work at all, you can still go in and configure that But that's still stuff you're launching that from a resource perspective. Fan control running in the background is not the thing that's robbing me of my frame rate, right? And so at the end of the day, like limiting the startup apps feels like a very kind of blunt approach to the the problem. of like hey, Steam OS is running these games better than Windows is. That's not good cururrent state of Xbox mode feels like a very first pass kind of Yeah, maybe we could do this.be like it just does not feel like something that's actually going to matter . But it is kind of a starting point, I suppose The problerom is is the last time they did it when they rolled it down the Rog Xbox Ally X, Xbox X That felt like kind of a starting point too And so It' just kind of continues to feel half baked. Xbox mode on a multi monitor display is really silly because it tries to run everything full screen And so if you do set fan control to launch just launches full screen on one of my side monitors. It's like, I don't want that either Like that's a bad It's a bad experience. This is ridiculous. Um So None of that feels like it's where it needs to be U But that seems to be the road they're on is to to make a conleized PC And I think that's going to be a very hard Road on the windows side Getting Windows eleven or whatever version of Windows behave the way they needed to behave sounds incredibly tricky to me We'll see Howm get going That is this week's show Um I'll be back tomorrow, We'll talk about some stuff and I don't know may we'll check out some of this Lego Batman Now that it's u you know, free and clearing out and all this other stuff But as for the podcast I will see you next Tuesday When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant You keep production lines moving and quality on track because there is no room for slowdowns With Granger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts, and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place, so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call one eight hundred ranger, click ranger. com or just stop by Ranger for the ones who get it done When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant You keep production lines moving and quality on track because there is no room for slowdowns With Granger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts, and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place, so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call one eight hundred Ganger, click ranger. com or just stop by Ranger. for the ones who get it done