Xbox Handhelds and Steam OS Future

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Start celebrating with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. Prices may vary by storage so you'll buy Home Depot. com S MASH for details Hey, what's happening everybody? Welcome to the program. It is june first , twenty twenty six and we are here . This is the Jeff Ger stman Show. I'm your host for this week's edition of the show . My name is Jeff Gerstman. Hello, how are you doing? How are things in your neck of the June ? You know , school a school getting out all over the place and it's that's a that's a Oh boy . It's gonna be an interesting summer around these parts . But yeah, that's been kind of the big thing that's been happening over here is one of my kids is already done with school for the year and and the other one is on her last week this week and a lot of this stuff is ill time. You know, like having summer game fast happen what seems to always be the be the same the same week as kids getting out of school and stuff is a bit annoying. There's also another thing that happens this is, now the second year that this has happened. I don't know if there 'cause I'm in Southern California , which is fine . And the weekend of the summer game fests like Go see Games days are the same days as there's in Pasadena , which is a bit of a drive, but there's not I think it's in Pasadena. There's there's some kind of retro game convention show thing that I always want to go check out and see if there's any stuff worth picking up or whatever , but it's always the same weekend as a summer game fest . And so there's a part of me that thinks like one of these years I'm just going to pack all my appointments onto one day and then take the other day and go drive out to Pasadena and and see , you know, whatever the heck the retro game thing is all about . I assume that you know, like buying old games is kind of a become even more foolish, I think as the years have gone on because you know, everyone has access to the internet, everyone , you know, like I think a lot of prices get marked up in a lot of the same ways and you know, not that it's about ripping people off for like, oh, I found a thing that should be worth way more that you're selling for less or whatever, but like there's typically like a bit of price variance that makes going out and looking for stuff attractive like it's supposed to be right at least a little bit, right ? But now I think you've just got a lot of people that are and good on them, you know, they know what they know what they've got. They know what it's worth , and , you know, they're they're doing they're doing their thing and you know, it kind of just is what it is . But it does take a little bit of the shine off of that stuff. But I still want to, you know, I don't know, I want to make it. I see, you know , people back east, it feels like there's always some kind of like long island retro show or Philadelphia retro experience, you know, whatever the fuck is going on. It seems like there's a bunch of stuff like that out there and here I don't know it doesn't just doesn't seem like there's that much when I was driving out to Las Vegas for dice dice I passed through , I don't know, bar stole. Like I went through a bunch of little towns and there was one that had a bunch of signs up for like a video game convention and I thought like o,h man I should, drive all back out here in a couple weeks when this thing is and check this thing out because I bet it's going to be so small that that'll just be fun in a weird way, but I did not make I did not make it back out Um , but yeah, that's , you know, that's that's basically the push and pull, right? Summer game fest coming up later this week, of course, today is the day of Sony's state of play and we'll see what that has to offer. They've already kind of pre announced that Wolverine will be shown in some capacity there I think it's a pretty safe bet that there will at least be some kind of ad , you know, some sort of advertisement for the new season of Marathon because they're also starting a week of like it's a week long demo where on any platform you can just go download it and play it. That starts today . And so that's going until the ninth, I think it is . And so they will almost certainly push that a little bit . But yeah, all masks, how about GTA? No, like, no. Like why that's not a no , like I mean sure, like, I guess sure, anything is possible, right? But as , you know , as we've said, I think a number of times here, like Rockstar doesn't need it, you know? Like it would be nice of Rockstar to put a big trailer and preorder like launch preorders or whatever in the middle of Sony's thing . Like I think that would be like an interesting thing for them to do that would be like a really interesting like partnership marketing deal kind of thing , but Rockstar doesn't need to they can just put a trailer out. It doesn't they don't need to be a part of some other show . And if they are part of some other show, you could make the argument that it kind of overpowers every other game getting announced . But you know and that that actually does something of a disservice to some of the other games announced, I suppose, because it dominates the conversation so much. But it's Rockstar doesn't need it. So I think it's highly unlikely that something like that show s up in this form . And I don't think that Rockstar if I were rockstar, I wouldn't have a trailer this week or maybe even this month, you know, unless unless you really need to put out something to get pre orders . The breathless coverage of anything that happens with GTA is not new . It's certainly every time a Grand Theft Auto game is coming up and getting ready to come out , there is always a certain amount of like no matter happens if Sam Hauser breathes Sam Hauser eats a too hot do gs, someone's gonna write a new story about it or something and it's kind of always been this way . But I think the way the world is now that Now that everything is shifted in such a nakedly engagement focused way, you know, short form video and all this other stuff , you get these like really breathless takes from people or like, you know, just this insane I saw some video and the video like was already out of date because it didn't happen, right? But I don't know if you remember. There was some like it was a couple of weeks back now , there was some report that said oh there's something in best buys system about GTA pre orders and it seems likely that they're going to open pre orders in a couple of days here or whatever, you know, and they had some day picked as part of the best buy thing . And it's like and that ended up being wrong or and who knows maybe it was a mistake on best buy's part, maybe the whole thing was made up. Like I didn't chase it down to see I don't care. I don't care . It just doesn't it just doesn't matter but like there were a ton of people making videos that had like, you know, short form video guy voice . Rockstar just announced the end and I think pre orders may be opening soon. According to Best Buy there's a red blah and it was just like, man, shut the fuck up. The hell and so like you have that element on top of all of this other stuff , right? Like all of the kind of existing breathless coverage that you get for a lot of these games with a lot of people who are dying to be like the person who brings this to you because they want to end up getting sucked up in some algorithm and whatever. And so like there's just a lot of like extra grim styles of video game coverage now that I think make the launch of a new GTA just a little bit more exhaust ing because there's this hyper extra level of people trying to turn nothing into something . And I've written I've written those news stories before. I've written The Turn Nothing Interesting. Here's a thing that could, you know, that could that gives you a reason to talk about grand theft auto or whatever and like that shit is , you know, like that is a time honored and time tested tradition but But man, there is just something so extra about the way it happens these days that it's just like God stop Mason asks skin GTA six even live up to the hype. It's probably, you know it in some ways I don't think it matters, right? Like what's the how high is the hype level getting? What do people I think, you know, the people that like GTA online , this will sound perhaps shitty . I think those people have really low standards in a lot of ways, you know, for the stuff they will put up with in a fucking online video game. So I think the nature of what GTA Online has become is To me it is like the phenomenon obviously is very exciting, but as like a piece of software itself and as a game itself who fucking cares, man. Like that stuff is so uninteresting compared to like , you know, like maybe this is like old man territory, right? But the interesting thing about Grand Theft Auto is story they have written, the mission design, like the single player experience , it's not like get online and hang out with your friends roblox but with more cursing, you know ? Like that shit it's just I like mean it,'s fine, whatever. Like it's an achievement. The thing they made is important and it has a crazy , you know, a crazy outsized presence in modern video games, right? But it's ny because like that's, I don't know Traditionally that like that is not the thing you come to a GTA for. And I think that's part of what makes GTA six so interesting and we've talked about it before, but it's this idea that like the online like there are a lot of people who only care about the online stuff and that's the part that like they haven't talked about at all . So there is a scenario where they blow that, right? There is is there some possibility where like GTA six online is bad . And it's probably not an architecture problem. It's probably not like oh it's technically bad or like it doesn't work right or whatever , but like there is there is certainly a world where people are like, dude, I have, you know, nine million yachts and building, you know, I have all this stuff in GTA online. Why would I leave that for this . And and yeah, I don't know. I like I would be a little worried about that, you know, they will they will certainly leap forward in terms of technology how could they not after all these years, right? And so there will be a higher tech world that will theoretically offer more capabilities than the one that exists today . Though that's not always I don't know, that's not always the case when you follow up a video game with new tech but you know, will that be something that players are interested in especially if the RP stuff isn't the same and you've got enough enough people that are have like sunk down into some weird GTA rabbit hole where they're not even playing baseline GTA, they're playing some other private server fucking, weird shit that Rockstar doesn't monetize. So it's exactly the sort of thing they want to stamp out in some weird way because they would rather you play on their online stuff and spend money on their servers . And so yeah, I don't know. There's there's the push and pull of that as well that, you know, could always could always get a little weird just, you know, in terms of just rock stars motivations versus player desires . And you know that's why they bought that RP focused company a while back is to try to get that stuff right because they realize that that is become a core part of that experience for a lot of players . But yeah, I don't know. There 's there is there is a world in which they try to keep too tight a hold on it for reasons of hey we want to make money on our online thing and that that leads to people rebelling and saying, well, I have so much more freedom on these GTA five RP servers that I'm , you know, like I don't I don't need like until you until you can do all of that in GTA six, why would I bother ? And those people will all still they the thing is is those people if they have a console will still probably buy the game anyway and it's stuff that Rockstar doesn't have to have right on day one because they're not launching on PC on day one . And so the idea of like it gives them some kind of grace period to go like, okay, here's the closed off console experience and then see how people receive it and decide how much more open they need to be on PC in order to kind of do what they what they need to do. Anyway, I'm sorry I'm sorry for talking a bunch about GTA all over again even, though there's nothing to really, you know , I did it to myself. I fucking did it to myself. Here we are talking about fucking Grand Theft Auto again . But any either way , pretty unlikely, I think that we will see it see it today or this week really today is the Sony State of Play and then Friday is Keley's thing thing , which should be some interesting third party stuff , but Microsoft has their thing on Sunday . And so between Sony and Xbox having events , you know, that's the those are the those are the events that suck up the availability of a lot of first party games for Keyley to show, you know, if you're kind of like trying to handicap summer game fest live stream and what is likely to be on it, you know , there's there's already these other big shows. And so just about anything Xbox has that's going to be a big deal will be on Sunday . Just about any big first party stuff that PlayStation has is going to be on today's show . And yeah Yeah , you know, we'll kind of see where it all kind of goes down from there. I mean, there's there's big third party stuff still out there. There are still a lot of publishers that have games to announce you know, we'll see if this ends up being the right time for some of the stuff. I saw I saw people trying to put together lists of like guesses or like this could be here. This could be here and I saw injustice three on one of those and my first thought was like, nah, that's probably I mean, you know, anything's possible, but I bet that's I bet that's as I've said before, I bet that's a game of words trailer, not a summer game fest trailer as far as PlayStation goes, like they don't have a ton of announced games. Steven Tatillo reported yesterday that , you know, all of the Sony first party sales, when you look at it over the last five years, it is just like down year over year with a slight bump for Ghost of Yote for the sales of that . And that's interesting, I guess. I don't know. When you look at like the last five years of Sony first party stuff, like there's there's certainly stuff out there . Excissors says Soros was a flop. I mean, is it, you know, like calling a game a flop I think is a really , you know , do you know what the budget on that game was? You know what their expectations were? Like Sorrows is not a game you look at and go this is going to be one of the top selling games of the year just like,urn Retal was not. So as far as like did that game do well or not do well, I don't really have, you know, like that game is probably not as expensive as a last of us or as whatever, you know . And so yeah, I don't I don't know that you're you're not expecting the same level of sales out of a out of a sorrowsoros as you are out of Wolverine, you know, Wolverine needs to make a lot more money than that game does for for sure . So yeah, I don't know. I don't know that I'd feel comfortable calling that game a flop. I feel like the people who wanted to play Sorros are playing it unless they wanted to play on PC , in which case the message is get bent, I think. I think that's the official the official word out of PlayStation is suck it up and spend the nine hundred fifty dollars on a professional on a professional playstation. I don't know. Bloodborne to sure, yeah, bloodborne to why not ? But if you say bloodborne to enough , eventually it has to happen, right? If you just keep saying it, someone will eventually go f right I'm going to say I mean, hey, anything's possible, right? Like I don't, you know, I don't I don't keep close track of who' s doing what all the time I think if you know, I think blood I think a bloodborne thing I think by the time it takes them to actually get it together to do a bloodborne thing if they really want to do it . It'll be a PlayStation six game by the time by the time. So I don't think I don't necessarily think that we will See something like that here Oh, that's right. There's also the rumors of the God of War spinoff showing up here. Sure, why not? Yeah, like I said, I think that there's stuff that they have to announce. I think that there are games if you look at their announced slate of releases, it seems a little sl im . I think that's that's where I'm at with PlayStation is when you look at the things that they have announced that are coming up, there's kind of not that much there right now . And so there's a certain amount of like refilling the pipeline that, you know, happens in an order, right? Games get green lit, games get developed, trailers get made, they get announced. And it feels like we're at a point here where we're perhaps it is time to announce a batch of games. People keep bringing up fair games. Yeah, sure man , maybe I don't know . Why not? I don't think that anything about fair games looked interesting and it's been a long time . So maybe that game resurfaces and looks like a different thing or whatever . There was some rumor going around that media molecule. I think it was it was a resume thing or a sorry, a yeah, like a job like a LinkedIn profile kind of deal where it looked like Media Molecule was maybe looking developing something that was some kind of open world something or other, you know, not really specific because obviously you don't get specific in your linkedIn profile . But there was some kind of talk about that . Yeah, I don't really I don't really know . I think that you know this is an interesting state of play or an interesting time for PlayStation because obviously they've had a decent leadership change or a significant leadership change, I guess is what I mean to say . And so , you know, as more and more time goes on, we'll start to get a feel for what they think PlayStation is now , right ? Like this would have been where I would have thought that the that Jason Blundell's game, the Dark Outlaw game would have been announced somewhere around here or later in the year , but that game in that studio have been shut down . So yeah, I don't know. Like that to me says that there's a, you know , as we talked about, there's some kind of direction shift that has happened at PlayStation to kind of course correct away from the kind of hey, we want to make all these live service whatevers . And so as they kind of move away from more and more of these online focused games, unless they look like absolute slam dunks . We'll see . We'll see. That's why this like the idea that fair games is showing up again and that there's like weird trademark stuff or whatever. Like the idea there's something about the idea that Fair Games is still in development and not like also suffering some of the same fate that is at least somewhat interesting. When you think about all the other studios that have been shut down, all the other projects that have been shut down , not just at PlayStation, but kind of across the business . If that thing is still up and running , there's got to be something about it , right? There's got to be something about that project that someone somewhere believes in or it's inexpensive to develop or it is, you know, it is it is not all of PlayStation's money, you know, like whatever, you know, there's there's other kind of financial reasons why something like that might occur, but or that, you know, they got some big tax break , I don't know. There's a few reasons . Nardap says they also believed in Concord. Look, you can't people need to stop bringing up Concord as like the example of like, oh these people Concord is a relatively unique situation and the release of Concord is part of what has changed a lot of things there . The idea that Concord was able to slip through , the idea that people were able to kind of do a little song and dance and say, everyone loves it. We did all this play testing and everyone loves it and that they just took that at face value instead of checking for themselves to see what the playtest feedback actually was . Like that is a huge yeah, like that game should not have happened . And and also that it did happen is the sort of thing that changes a lot of policies and a lot of other kind of things about the way PlayStation probably green lights and checks in and milestones and everything else about games . So it's not really a good example to bring up when we when we talk about this sort of stuff . Conquered, you know, well whatever. That's kind of it's kind of neither here nor there. But we'll know in a handful of hours here what PlayStation chooses to announce . And you know, and if they say anything about hardware, they just did put up a blog post. We'll get to some of that in the news about some upcoming products of theirs of a hardware variety and yeah, I don't know, we'll see if they make a passing mention of a new console or not , let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about how about video games . Air loss does not fix itself, and the earlier you act, the better. 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Eligible students get a year of Microsoft three hundred and sixty five Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows. com slash student offer. Law supplies last ends june thirtieth, terms at aka dot ms slash college pc. Video games, I don't know, man. I've been playing more zero seven first light and enjoying it . I don't know that I have much more to say about it that we, you know, that we didn't really talk about last week . I think it is a really well done thing, you know, in terms of just like grounding the bond story in something , you know, like in an in an origin story, like finding ways to kind of bring that stuff in a little bit and go like, hey, we want to retell this this story about he how he became how he earned the number as they call it and and I think that that is an interesting bond story to tell . I don't I don't think that like the guy playing Bond. I don't think that the performance is as as I would like. Like there's some aspects of it that feel a little off . But I like the slightly more action oriented take on hitman and the like the hitman DNA that is there is like the right they did a they're really smart man . Iowa Interactive did a really good job of holding on to the exact right parts of Hitman that make it that make you think, oh, they would be really good at making a bond game. Like they kept all of that stuff and shoved the rest out . And so it doesn't feel completely like hitman all over again. It's got its own style and feel to it while also having some of those smart elements that you look at and go like, oh, these are some of the things that made Hitman so much fun . And I think that's just fantastic , you know It's a nice looking game. I think oh, I think most of the performances are good . I like the early parts of the game, you know, the way it kind of feels more like a team , you know? Like there's there's parts of it it's funny like this would not work nearly this would not work nearly as well . But like the early parts of it where he's got kind of people in his ear and you know the other recruits where he's kind of with them a lot . Parts of that game feel like they could have been and should have been a burn notice game . Like if they had really leaned into you're a team of three people and you know and you're going to go do all of this stuff they could have super totally made a fucking burn notice game and that would have been awesome too . Maybe not as high profile as making a James Bond game . But every loading screen could say at the top of it When you're a spy dot dot dot and then give you a loading screen tool tip, it would fucking be it would be fucking perfect it would be fucking perfect. They should totally that should be sailed. Anyway , if they if they somehow want to make another one of these but can't secure the bond license , they should fucking make a burn notice game. Actually, they should probably make a mission impossible game. That would probably be the higher profile pick for spy team doing shit type of stuff . Yeah, exactly. And then Iowa Interactive makes a monk game . That's just the that's just the Freedom Fighters engine somehow. I don't know Monk has a posse in this one. It just works First Light is a really neat game . It's a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to this is maybe going to sound weird. I'm looking forward to finishing it so that I can feel better about spending time with the tactical simulator stuff because that seems like the stuff I actually want to do more of the more kind of detached like the story stuff is fine and fun and well done , but there's a part of me that's just like if you just cooked up a billion different scenarios for this and rolled them out hit man style, I think that would be pretty fucking cool . Mina the Hollower is out . Um , I I ended up playing some of this you know , there's a thing there's something real like they have slammed together so many different little pieces of other video games inside of Mina the Hollower that sometimes that feels weird where they're like, hey, we kind of want to make a gameboy color looking game. And so we and we gave you this jump that is very like Link's awakening with his boots style . It has that kind of Zelda like, you know, you can only point in four directions and so your attacks can only come out one of four ways . And so combat is very much like that old school kind of top down Zelda thing . And then it has fucking a vial system for healing that is kind of out of a soul's game . And similarly to that, you are collecting a currency as you go through the world that if you drop it, you have to do a fucking corpse run . And then it has these Zelda two adventure of link leveling up system. When you hit a certain level of bones, it comes up and says buy one of these three things or socket away for next time . And the way it puts all of those things is fun. I like a lot of those games too , but I am finding that game to be Um , I don't know, exhausting maybe. Like there's just a certain vibe to it that it's just like, alright, yeah . No , I played that game too . Yeah, no, I played that game too. Yeah, now I get it. No, it fits here. Like it's these aren't bad choices, the stuff that they've tried to combine. There's something about the amount of of and you know, the kind of top down Zelda style thing is probably the biggest, strongest pole compared to all the other stuff, which are kind of systems layered on top of that . They're making their own thing , but they're also trying to kind of have it both ways and have this kind of nostalgia trip in there as well . And the thing I've thought about most while playing Mina the Hollower is man Nintendo is really good at making games because Nintendo knows when to not layer on nine more fucking systems . You know ? Nintendo knows when to go like, yeah, this is good . This is this is good right here. Do we need to put more? No . Meaning the Hollower feels like the opposite of that or they're just like, we're just going to throw this on there and then this on there and this on there. And then the game is going to open up and you're going to be like, Ah, even more and you know, hey, we've got Castlevania style sub weapons in here. And I think the part where a lot of the different systems in the game are like fairly direct pulls from other games , recontextualized because not all of those games are top down Zelda style games, I guess. But I've like as it did it enough, I got to a point with it where I'm like, this is now actually kind of off putting . I am now like bummed out by Mina the Holler to a certain extent where it's just like God fucking another okay, yeah, sure sure, . They added a ton of modifiers to it that let you really customize the experience and to the point where you can make it so your sub weapons don't take any ammo and you know, like there's a big a big variety there. The other thing they do and this is a thing I think you can get away with if you're really good at it. If you're really good at making this stuff and they are almost there they don't tutorialize anything in the early parts of that game they expect you to figure out like okay, no, if you, if you hold down the jump button, you dig into the ground for a couple of seconds and there are things you need to go under and things you need to go over and the game is not good enough to do that. They needed a couple of little signposts here and there that I think would have made it easier for people to get into off the bat . But other than like a guy you talk to that says like, hey man here's take these vials and use your healing or whatever and like you know you can walk around and talk to people and they will you know, in some, cases give you hints. I think there's , you know, it doesn't need to be super hand holdy. It doesn't need to like full stop like we're going to give you a screen full of text to explain this system . And most of the time what they're going for kind of works except for cases where like because they're trying to make it look like a gameboy color game, there's just fidelity issues where like you you''rere like, I don't why is this a problem? What am I what problem am I running into here? Why am I what is the, you know, like the sometimes the background tiles or the floor tiles aren't always as clear as you need them to be? There's an area kind of, you know, in it's in the first like half hour, twenty minutes, whatever, where like they've got a big bridge above ground and so you're kind of you're forced to think about this space not only like at multiple heights and the height thing, I don't think looks great . There's stuff like you move faster when you're burrowed underground. And so when you pop out you're jump goes further. And so if you need to jump over two blocks, you need to do a diving jump out to cross these gaps. And instead of like telling you that, they just put you in an area where that is the only way to get past it and you either figure it out or you don't . And none of this stuff is impossible to figure out . The one thing I ran into actual trouble with is you get to a point where there's a locked door. It's kind of the first time you see a key icon . And there's a little hole in the ground that looks almost exactly like these save points to me where like you walk over a tile and it saved your progress except it's not lit up. And I was like, okay, well I guess I need the key. And so I left and had to wander around the entire open area of the game all over again trying to figure out like where the fuck is this key ? And it turns out that that tile that looked like it was a dead safe spot is actually something where you hit a have to hit a button to dive into it and then there's a room inside of that And it's signposted in any way like that is a clear case of like here's just a mechanical thing that you don't know you can do yet because the game has just started and the object in world does not look evocative enough to make you think, oh, that's a hole in the ground. I can dive through . And that is not good , just point blank . And I think that's something that if they were to think about patching that game in that direction or if they were looking at things that I think could be early stumbling blocks for people, that is probably something that they should, you know, they could do a little bit better with because the key was in there. And so you can't you can't progress until you until you figure out that that is a thing you can dive into. None of it's like end of the world stuff , you know, but like I think that it feels like that they really wanted to not have any text or any like any major tutorial text and I think that their mechanics are not quite good enough to get it done , I guess, is what I would say there. You know, it's it's mostly well made. It's, you know, it's an interesting achievement, all of that sort of stuff. I just, you know , like I don't necessarily enjoy the combat enough or any of the other stuff about it to really feel like I'm getting sucked into it . And so yeah, I don't know. It's neat that they did it there are aspects of it that I think could be a little bit friendlier. It's the sort of stuff that they put all these modifiers in the game about like what if there was no combat at all? And you're like, yeah, I guess I don't know . I guess you could do that. What if instead the combat was better and fuck, you know, what if what if you what if instead of solving that problem by saying if you don't like it, you can just remove a big chunk of the game? What if you made it good? I don't know. Like that's a bold but yeah, that's that's kind of where I'm at on it. I think it's it's cool , but there's just enough stuff along the way that I'm just kind of like having a very I'm having a very mediocre time with it . And so yeah, I don't know . That's I'm glad I checked it out at least but it's yeah, I don't know it's not really doing anything for me. Let's see. Why don't we Why don't we get into the news here? They have announced call of duty modern warfare four on the heels of telling you that there are new people running infinity ward that they went a andhead announced the game. They put out a reveal trailer . It seems like they will have another chunk of the game to show at the Xbox thing this weekend This game is set in Korea . They're they're doing a North Korea invades South Korea storyline kind of in conjunction or you know, it's set it's set in a variety of plac es, but it seems like they will be telling two different stories that will converge, which is a typical kind of modern warfare campaign sort of trope Where you will have the conflict happening in Korea. You will also have price and, you know, price is about, you know, he's disavowed he's, you know, whatever task force, whatever he's out there kind of doing his thing and all of that probably comes together in the last third of the game. And I don't know. I think it's interesting. It's it's as far as far as real world potential real world conflicts that you could that you could get into the Korea thing is something that is not necessarily been done to death in video games . There's certainly an abundance of fiction about that sort of thing And this will probably be fun in some weird way because you'll get a bunch of you'll get a bunch of , you know, announcements and whatever out of North Korea saying like all the propaganda machine are you know, they'll they'll get all mad about it. If they haven't already and yeah, I don't know. It's a it's a it's a different you know, like, that's that's an area for them to go in and people were saying, oh, how am I supposed to get excited for a call of duty game with the way the US is right now? And it's like, well, there you go . Price is not an American . No one in the squad like they they show who you're getting skins for when you when you buy the game and it's like Price it's what's her name from was it Valeria , from the the Mexican part of the last one Ghost and some other guy because Soap died in the last one. Yeah, so I don't know. I think that's that's kind of an interesting do you do you ever wonder? Okay , so they're bringing back DMZ mode for this year's game, which is a which was a light extraction game mode that they for the last modern warfare . Do you think how much of the Korea idea came out of them going like, but dude, they've got the real actual DMZ. It's the actual DMZ. We could do DMZ mode because they 're going to name the Probably like a lot of it, right? They went ahead, you know, like they they've got a new , you know, they're talking about some of the multiplayer stuff a little bit and you know, not really going super deep on any of it. They've got a new kind of map concept that they're using called kill block, which is a bunch of prefab segments that will change from round to round, making the map slightly different every time you run it, which I think could be cool. If they add a bunch of blocks to it every season , then I think that that kill block thing could be kind of cool . They'll also have a bunch of traditional maps and, you know, some bigger maps and whatever too. But the DMZ mode is returning . It will have a traditional campaign. There's there's a lot of the language on this is fucking like it's real, it's not quite apolog etic but it stops just short of like you, know what they're saying they are aware of how the current year's game has been received as well as modern warfare three . And so there's you see quotes from them like the modern warfare IV campaign is a return to form when they are saying things like yeah, it's not going to be some co op campaign . They are giving people a ten percent loyalty bonus for the expensive version of the game. So if you want to buy the vault edition of the game and you have played like any of the call of if you own or like if you have a game pass membership and have played depending on whatever platform , you know m,ix you're going for like the idea that they are offering any kind of discounts on a call of duty game at launch, I think tells you everything you need to know about where they're at because that is a game that they do not give discounts on that is a game that you get like it launches, you get a minor black Friday kind of sale and then five years from now it's still eighty bucks , you know , and so for them to be out there like this kind of hand wringing because they can't openly shit on the current game, obviously, because they didn't even make it. So it's even shittier if they did that. It is very interesting. They've also been like weirdly forward on social media . Like there are people who like when the trailer came out, someone wrote like, oh, this is all prerendered. We'll see what the game looks like. And they had to like quote tweeted and be like, this is all the engine Someone wrote and said like, oh, you're just gonna put a bunch of fucking embarrassing skins on it and they replied to say , We got the feedback. No BS This is all about staying true to modern warfare . No clowny skins for launch and seasons beyond So no clowny skins , which I think is fucking leaving money on the table because you could do a big K pop demon hunters pack. What the fuck ? It's right there . Um so they're saying that no clowny skins, which you know, who knows what that even really means, everyone's going to have a slightly different opinion of what is acceptable or not acceptable when it comes to gun blueprints and fucking talking gun screens and all you know like all of that stuff. Maybe they will maybe they will truly do away with it or maybe they'll just do what they always do , but all of the people, all of the guest characters will just be wearing tactical gear that fits within the universe. They are still doing the black cell thing, if you're not familiar . If you're not familiar with this particular fucking angle of the scam , they sell two different versions of their battle pass . And so you can get the regular version of the battle pass for some amount of money or if you pay extra , you can get the black cell version of the Battle Pass , which comes with extra rewards, which are usually in the form of like even gaudier looking skins . The Blackcell variant of it it'll be like oh okay here's a skin and a guy's wearing a fucking mask and then you see the black cell version of the mask and it's like on fucking fire and it has horns bro and it's fucking hell is sick bro and everything's on fire dude. They're golden they're fucking sick dude. And they all look like fucking shit and they have been doing the black cell thing for years now and they always look like embarrassed. Like in a game full of fucking questionable looking skins . I think the black cell variants when you think about it in terms of like, oh people think these are going to be cool . They're fucking not. They look terrible . And so I'm curious to see if they if this means they're going to dramatically change the motif for what a black cell skin is because that's kind of the thing is, you know , when you look at what they're selling and how they're selling it and it's not to say that this is the same game as last year. There's there's there's plenty of other stuff that when they when they start to talk about it more, I'm sure we'll get into that. And they have announced a little bit , but when you look at the stuff they're selling . It's operators, skins, gun blueprints. It's the exact same kind of monetization style that they've been doing for a long time . And I think that is the, you know, that is kind of the origin of why the skins get so stupid . Also that's not the problem with call of duty . The problem with call of duty isn't, oh man, they put rob ot in it or like oh I can't believe they put Bevis and But in all like I feel like if you're the sort of person who is so fucking offended by the idea of those skins going into the game because it's not serious enough that they made my gun game a silly joke . You're fucking broken. Your brain is broken. Like that's that's not like this is not a fucking this is not Arma, this is not a fucking mil sim that like fucking let go, man. It like there's what are you holding on to? It's fucking call of fucking duty man This is the game that put the fucking weed shit into the original modern warfare too Back when weed was still illegal . It has always been a certain amount. This is the game where they said when you shoot a guy and he's on a streak, money's gonna fly out of him for no reason. Even though you can't collect money, it's not, you know, like you're just gonna see a puff of dollars, you know, like that's that's the game they've been making , you know, just technology advanced in such degree that now they can put like a bad Dave Chappelle sk in in it. I think they've gone a little overboard. Sure , but to sit there and go like they need to be serious . I think games the game needs to have serious army dudes in it doing cool guy army shit , like that's pathetic . That's a pathetic stance to take about call of duty just ultimately it's just like, what the fuck is wrong with you so you know, like I don't know, like I am very interested in what they're doing based on the limited amount of things they have said about the rest of the game . And most of that is very slim. They have a new concept called apex attach ments, which seems like the sort of thing that, you know, I don't know if you'll get these by leveling up a gun normally or I mean certainly they will be part of gun blueprints because that's how they're acknowledging them here is if you buy the vault edition, you get a bunch of gun blueprints that have Apex attachments already on them . And so this is stuff like here's for an assault rifle , they have something called the Castov Arc . It's an experimental disruption barrel that emits a concentrated high intensity RF pulse capable of incapacitating infantry, crippling electronics, and destabilizing vehicles caught in its crosshairs . So like, you know, it sounds almost like a mini EMP kind of thing that attaches to your gun because that's real . But whatever. I think that's that's an interesting kind of that's an interesting place to put an attachment that I think if they make that something that unlocks as you level a gun up gives you more of even more of a reason, I think to level up your guns than just like you want the camo or whatever. They have an SMG here, the Apex attachment on that is when hitting a target special RFID ammunition transmits a signal back to a built in optic dis play on the gun, letting you track down the victim and finish the job. So if you paint a target, it will highlight it for you. That doesn't sound like it's in the hud. It sounds like it's maybe on the optic on the gun, perhaps , but we'll see how that work s . That's, you know, they've had perks that are somewhat similar to that, usually with grenade damage, like, oh if you do damage to someone with an explosive, it will paint them on the map for you for eight seconds, or you know, whatever it is . Yeah, one guns apex attachment. This they've got a bolt action rifle here . The attachment is a compact blade module mounted to the receiver housing up to three quick access throwing knives for close range low signature engagements, designed as a reliable fallback when stealth or conservation of fire matters most. So like an attachment on your gun that gives you three throwing knives for kind of up close, you know, kind of quick stealth kills is like that's a fascinating way to kind of bring some of those things into a loadout . They're also going to do loadouts. They're doing per loadout kill streaks. So if you want to have different kill streaks on a loadout, if you go, oh, I want to take these guns, but also have these kill streaks with it. You can do that now. They've traditionally been a separate thing so you can't change kill streaks in match , but they now they are allowing that . And that all sounds potentially interesting and we'll see . The game is coming to Switch two and it is not coming to previous gen oles . There's like there's a quote going around from them, you know, someone asked them about the Switch two version and it sounds like they kind of shrugged. They said, Yeah, it's been fine. So yeah, they're doing that. I'll be curious to see how that version looks . And yes, this is they will the PS four and Xbox one will not get the game this year. Also War Zone is going to be shut down on old consoles later this year. They will they will continue to update it, you know, they've got a wind down announced for it in terms of like, hey, you know, when when the game when when the , you know, the when season one of the new war zone starts, that's it for , you know, updates on gen versions of the game. So that's interesting. They're finally making good on their years old promise to bring the game to Switch two And that makes sense. They should do that . I mean, they said they were going to, and also they should do that So yeah, we'll have to see how that looks. And you know, it sounds like there is some kind of significant amount of re engineering happening under the hood of this stuff . We'll see how that pans out . You know, the like the trailer looks nice, but it's always kind of hard to get a pure sense for for that stuff until you see the whole game . But like that is the thing that infinity War did with the reboot of modern warfare in the first place was really, really step up on the tech side , and that helped to revitalize the franchise at a time when it needed it and so they kind of needed again . So we'll see we'll see how it how it ends up on that side of things. Of course the game will, you know, also not be available on game pass this year. They are charging . I got steam open over here . I think it's like it's pretty standard it's pretty standard prices Yeah, it's it's seventy bucks for the baseline version of the game and normally the vault edition would be a hundred dollars , but if you got that loyalty bonus , that makes it only ninety dollars . So yeah, you can you can take advantage of that if you are interested in picking up the game wherever they or they're selling it. They're also doing a pre order gets access to the open beta, but they haven't said when that is yet. So it's just kind of like asterisks kind of like yeah, yeah when ever this happens you'll get to play it and there you have it, you know, they'll show more of it. I think the thing the thing to look for based on what they've said so far, I think this kill block thing with the reconfiguring , you know, the map that reconfigures itself between rounds. I think that is something that's fascinating that as someone who always wants new maps , that is always kind of my always I am always looking for new maps in a video game in a shooter, especially having yes, having Snapmap bringing Snapmap back . I think is potentially very interesting. And I want to see what they do with DMZ. You know, the first time they tried it, I think it was an interesting concept . I think their early take on extraction , missed the mark, and they, you know, they stopped updating DMZ. They called it a beta and then eventually said, That's it for DMZ. Thanks . And so I didn't I'm surprised that they're bringing it back back . But again, if you've got a game set in Korea, it's too tantalizing to not at least give it another shot. And extraction itself is in a slightly different place now all these years later , so, you know hey, they were they were here doing it before Arc Raiders and and all of the popular extraction shooters modern extraction shooters, I guess I should say. So I'm curious to see what their second swing at that ends up looking like . And of course, very curious to see theit Schw to version of the game. Let's take another break. We'll come back. We'll talk about the rest of the news after this . Hey, when summer rolls around, you want clothes that feel a little bit lighter, maybe a little more breathable, things that are easy, but you know, still put together. Sometimes you got to go places and look, you know , presentable . That's why you gotta check out Quince. They focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. You know, like a breathable linen or soft organic cotton, well made basics, but without that luxury markup. 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And so there's some sick part of me that's like, well, what if I bought the Xbox version of the game and then I could download that terrible, that's a terrible return on investment on that is a nightmare . They put the game on sale too. Like they've got their, you know, their free thing happening and then also like it's thirty percent off, which is kind of cool. I don't know. Season two sounds interesting. It just went up this morning so I haven't had time to look at it . And like for starters, it seems like the new map is a dark version of the Dire Marsh, which is one of the maps from the from the first season of the game, but they're doing a thing here . They've added a new experimental mode. They've they've actually been pretty good at they've been pretty good at rolling out these kind of experimental modes and trying to figure out like, okay, what are people gravitating towards? And so one of the things they're doing right now is they want to do a mode that has like a little bit less player vers us player conflict . And so they've done a mode where you go in and you are the only team on the map. And after a handful of minutes , eventually any rook joining the game might be put into your game. And so other players may be joining your game over time to and you have to deal with them. And instead of being able to extract whenever you want, there's only one extraction at the end . And so any of the rooks on the map or anyone else, they will all have to converge on this one point at the end, which sounds like it could be a slaughter or maybe everyone will be good guys and maybe this will be the thing that makes marathon players stop murdering each other at first sight, but I don't know . That sounds like it could be a real fucking kill box . And and that all sounds pretty exciting. I'm pretty excited to get back into it. It's I've been playing it here and there, but kind of, you know, knowing that like, hey, I'm not going to hit the marks. I want to hit during season one. So you know, I've been I've been playing it a little more laid back and and so yeah, I don't know. Now that they've got their new season out, I'm pretty excited to get back into it. And yeah, I guess I wonder I wonder what it's going to be like this week in particular because they are doing that free thing where anyone could just download the game on any platform and play it all week and I guess progress carries over if you decide to buy it, which is kind of awesome but yeah, I'm kind of yeah, I'm definitely itching to get back into it and check it out some more. Anyway the Xbox The new Xbox leadership is it feels like they've been doing a bunch of really small things to try to stay in the news and there's just been kind of a weird like I, don't know , like they're not really announcing much of anything , but but they're kind of doing little stuff here and there and trying to be they're trying to be aware of and responsive to the community. They launched their kind of like little Reddit style feedback hub kind of thing . And I think they even we were talking about this a couple weeks ago. I think they ended up doing the one that I saw and went like, oh yeah, that'd be an easy for the thing for them to knock out. I think that's the thing they did. They changed like the play count from hours to days or something, you know, something like that for like the l isted play like our count for your games . I think they changed the way some of those numbers are surfaced or something. It was like, yeah, okay there's an exchange. So they have their showcase coming up and while they're still a platform holder, they are still publishing games on multiple platforms . And this has been something that like weird broken brained children in the Xbox community or whatever have taken some umbrage about is that sometimes Xbox trailers will have PlayStation logos in them because the game's coming to PlayStation or the game's coming to Steam or the or whatever . And this started because Matt Booty was on the video gameschronicle. com has recapped this situation. Like the tweet itself is like embarrassing enough , but when you look at the when you look at the chain of events that led to this, it's like somehow even worse Matt Booty was on the was on the official Xbox podcast, I guess . And and he was asked if the showcase would continue to show would continue to have transparency and show what platforms a game is coming to and that this has been a thing that they've been doing for a while . The quote from him is we'll be very clear about which platforms the game is coming to and we want to continue the precedent. I think we've got a good system going where we make it clear in Showcase and that apparently fucking angered idiots , like actual like fucking brain children, like actual fucking dopes , including this guy who is apparently named Klobriel who said online, I feel like the bare minimum expectation many had was for Xbox to really focus on their own platform, at least for the time of the showcase Which fucking who fucking gives it like the games are coming to PlayStation. Tell people that. Like be honest about what's happening with your fucking games instead of just like no we're not hm m This got a response from Asha Sharma, who is the new head of all Xbox . And she said, seeing the feedback on the logos, it was a miss, and I own it. We're talking about how we adjust for future Xbox shows . Are you fucking crazy ? Are you out of your absolute mind? I mean, you know, it sounds like for future Xbox shows. So the showcase is probably already pretty much locked. They're not going to go rerender every single trailer in the show to take a bunch of logos out or maybe they will. I don't know, like they seem desperate enough. This is sad . These sorts of responses are sad . These sorts of responses are we have no faith or courage in any of our conviction about anything we're doing . And so anything the community says , we're just going to go, yeah, we hear you. And yeah, maybe we will change that. It is pathetic on the part of Xbox to like this is what created the problem in the first place . Like this is something that I don't think maybe gets talked about enough in the kind of weird Xbox fan uprising shit that happened over the last couple of years . But Xbox did a really good meaning bad job of like elevating some of these console warrior fucking maniacs , the tim dogs of the world, if you will. You know, you would have like the head of marketing following some of these guys and interacting with them online. And even Phil Spencer would do that, you know, like they were they were at least making these people feel like they were being heard , even if they were like, okay, yeah, I mean, you know, we're going to do what we're going to do. But yes, we care about the community . We hear you . And so when it came time for Xbox to become multi platform , all these people felt like, well, well, I've got a voice because I'm important. It's like, no, like Xbox did a bad job. Xbox put these people on something of a pedestal and then as soon as things went south , those people f ucking went bananas in Berserk and turned on them and all this . You're traitors to me and you have killed my children by I can't believe Xbox would do this to me and they're just like repeating the same mistakes Um , all over again by doing stuff like this, it's embarrassing . Like find a course and stick to it and sell it to people . Don't just go I mean, yeah, we'll think about it . It's sad . I can't fucking believe that this is like they went through a leadership change and this is now what this is now what Xbox just like come on . Fable's been delayed. They pushed it off until February of twenty twenty seven . The reason given is what's the exact so that it can have the dedicated moment it deserves . They posted this announcement in cont ext of like all of the other games that they have coming up both for both first and third party . The games they mentioned by name here Halo campaign evolved gears, of war d ED, call ofuty modern Warfare four , as well as third party games like Control Resident, Star Wars Galactic Racer and Grand Theft Auto six . In order to plan our game launches through the holidays in a way that works best for players, we're moving fables to february twenty twenty seven . And they will show it at their it will be shown in some form at the showcase. This is I think people have been hearing whiffs of this for a little bit a fable delay was perhaps in the works. And so this is just kind of confirming some of that . It's interesting. I don't, you know, like Grand Theft Auto is a big deal at the same time ,able F is such a different game . I think it's kind of a strange sort of scenario. Also, Fable is a game that will be on game pass, and so at some point don't you want good reasons for people to sign up like if people are going to be engaging with the Xbox more frequently because Grand Theft Auto is out , wouldn't you also want them to sign up for the highest tier of game pass so that they can get the day one game so they can get this? Wouldn't you want to have something of a Marquis launch? I guess they'll have halo and gears and whatever else. So maybe maybe they just don't need as well as Minecraft dungeons too . So perhaps they just won't need fable for that window . To which I would say, sure , why not, why not move it out of that lane if you've got all these other games coming out? Because ultimately when you're in that subscription business, you don't want to have like it kind of flips the release cadence on its head. Normally you would go, we're going to load all of our games into holiday because that's when people buy video games. Like that was always the traditional thinking about like, okay, if our game's not out by Black Friday, we might we're fucked . And so you would you would ship everything October, November, you know, or, you know, from the release of Madden until Black Friday. You would launch your game then to try to get some piece of holiday action, I suppose . But now they're in the business of having to have content all year round because what they don't want, the ideal scenario for Xbox is that they've got something every single month that makes you go sh,it o,h I got to keep this subscription , right? And if you're annual then I guess they don't do annuals, right? I just really, they really want to they don't even fucking do annuals. And so it makes sense. Put fable out later in, you know, like in February and get people to, you know, keep ideally keep their game pass subscription through the holidays and keep it until Fable comes out. And then hopefully in March or April, you've got another hit there, you've got another hit a couple months later. Like they need to get eventually on a track where there's one big deal every single month that makes people go oh shit . Yeah, I guess I can't cancel it this is coming . And even if they just play a game for a few weeks and then go and do another thing and then go, you know, and and go and move on to the next game, at least they stay in the ecosystem. So I think that, you know, that cadence or that structure I think is largely that's still going to happen whether GTA six comes out or not . And so moving fable into this window, I don't think is necessarily a bad thing, you know, it's probably a game that could maybe use a little bit of extra time. Any every game could, right? Every game could always use a little bit more time . Anyone making a game will always tell you, man, if we had two more months to do this, then the launch would have gone like this or whatever. So sure, why not? I don't think that that's a huge deal at this point. Unless you're like die hard fable fan, which I don't is that I'm not even sure if that's a person anymore . You know, who is desperately waiting to play this game Then I don't see any real downside to this . This seems like a perfectly fine. It seems like a fine move for them given the slate of that they have themselves . Like forget about GTA and whatever else, but just like what else is happening happening on game pass, what else is happening in first party? Like those are the things that I think they really need to be thinking about and scheduling for the existence of GTA is in some ways too weird to predict. And we'll see I think the interesting the interesting metrics will be how much of a lift does each console get from the launch of GTA six in terms of new console sales or whatever, right? A lot of that comes down to who's doing better co marketing or who's who's doing the co marketing deal which seems like Sony is involved with that again and so you have to envision you have to imagine that Son y sees a much bigger lift out of the launch of GTA six than Microsoft does . But I think that's I'm curious that's the thing I'm curious about with this is like how does that end up panning out for on the Xbox side of things? Do they see significantly more consoles sold ? Like how does it end up doing over there . So yeah Anthropbees in the chat says Fable three is fine. People really complain about that menu. Yeah, I mean the menu is bad. Fable three is just like the problem that Fable ran into is that Fable two is it's in some ways the mass effect problem . Fable two is fucking great. Fable two is a great game. It was an awesome follow up to the original Fable . Fable three is not different enough from Fable two and the changes they made like that menu and some of the structural things about that game are not as good as Fable two. So Fable three is just more fable two and that's the problem with Fable three . And then after that they got into, you know, connect games and fucking whatever all the other all the other chunk . So yeah, I don't know. Like this feels like something of its own thing. I don't know. Like I'm not like obviously it's a different studio. It's a reboot. It's whatever, you know , I guess I'm not looking at this and thinking , here's going to be the follow up . Here's going to be this is now it's time for fable for like I'm not like this seems like it's going to be a completely maybe not a completely different thing, but this seems like it will be different enough from those games that it has to stand on its own. And in some ways you, wonder if the f able name is going to cause more trouble than it's worth. But that remains to be seen. We'll find out in February in the department of everything is ten times more expens ive than you thought it would be by now . The Steam Deck got a sign ificant price jump last week . The two current model s of SteamDeck are now like this happened last week and still reading the numbers. I'm still like, Jesus . The one terabyte SteamDeck OLED is now nine hundred forty nine dollars , the five hundred and twelve gig model is now seven hundred and eighty nine dollars . This represents like a forty percent increase or so, slightly more than forty . It's it's a lot of money . It is a lot of money. The quote from Valve is, you know, what I mean you could sing it along with me at this point. I think even though they didn't use the exact same words that everyone else Steam Deck itself hasn't changed. These new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole will keep you updated if anything changes. So you know, market forces, unprecedented times, all of that, all of that , all of that rolled into one. You know, the thing to remember here is that valve gets hit harder by a lot of this sort of stuff than some of the other manufacturers out there because they just don't make st eam decks in the quantity that say Sony is making PlayStation five's or Nintendo is making Switch Two's or what have you. So because that they are a little like slightly more bespoke than all these other consoles out there , they're not getting priority pricing. You know, they're not getting volume deals. They're not buying so many parts at a time that they're able to, you know, enjoy the benefits of that scale . And so they're likely to get hit harder by than typical consoles. They're going to hit get hit the same way a lot of third party PC OEMs like a lot of the way those companies are going to get hit , you know , those components will go open price and it's going to be a fucking blood bath . And that's kind of the end of it. It's not about valve making more money or whatever. They're probably not making a significant amount of money on these things at this price, at this point . And it's frustrating, I don't know, like it's all frustrating, but like this one, I think is a little extra crazy just because the numbers are so far out of whack compared to what these other price raises have been, but it's just the situation with how many of those things they fucking make, you know , like it's when you when you kind of do the math on that that end of it, you go like, yeah, okay, yeah, I see why this would happen . Ultimately, this is just , you know, all of this stuff is All of this stuff is getting priced out of reach , you know ? Like it's the funny reaction I see to these things is people that say , you know, especially by consoles, you know, kind of more dedicated consoles when the prices go up and they go, who do they expect to buy these things ? Like people there are saying are also saying the same like, how the fuck are we going to sell any of these things at this price? Like this is crazy. Like they're not over there going, yeah, this is a calculated move and we love it. They're over there going holy shit . What the fuck ? Like how I mean, we knew this was coming and like you know, we'll still sell significant significant number of these, but not the way we want to be, not the way we should be at this many years into a generation. Like no one is fucking stoked about this, you know, like I think people think that like these companies are sitting back and going like a yeah , good times man raising these prices. We're going to make so much money. We're gonna squeeze all these people. Like everyone is getting sques , you know , like it's just kind of a fucked up situation that you just go like, yeah, this is kind of how it's going to be. The steam machine will who knows how much that thing will be at this point . But this stuff is fucked across the board. Yeah, Mason said, you know, building a PC is fucked right now. Yeah, go try to price out PC parts . It's bad . You know, like some of these alternative RAM manufacturers are starting to come online a little bit and they've got some products like Corsair is sourcing some Chinese RAM . And so they've got some vengeance modules, I think that if they're not out now, they're out soon that is kind of a different supply . That's not immediately making the price fucking bottom out or anything like that , but maybe over time some of this stuff level out in some way, but you know it just feels like the unrecedented times need to be fucking swept out of office and swept under the fucking r ug before can even hope to fucking change . So yeah, and obviously the, you know, the the impact of all of these fucking phony dat ers that are probably never going to get built in the first place is only exacerbating that fucking problem. So it's a shit situation across the board, you know , like all these companies want to sell this shit to you at prices that would they hope that you will find reasonable , but no one , you know, like no one on the other side of this equation. Again, like no one is sitting at fucking at PlayStation headquarters going, yeah, nine hundred and forty nine dollars finally. We're getting what we deserve for our premium , you know, like it's not like they're fucking not happy about it either . So it's a fucking Valve is not stoked about this, I'm sure . But yeah, there's a some kind of video about the steam machine seems to be have been uploaded to the Steam Backend recently , which makes people think that Steam machine pre orders might not be that far off . So maybe we'll find out the pricing on that sooner rather than later But fuck, man Fuck On other handheld hardware front Assis has announced an updated version , well lightly updated version of the Xbox Ally X that they are going to call the Xbox Ally X twenty for the twentieth anniversary of Xbox . It will have a slightly larger screen. It will be an OLED screen that is seven point four inches as opposed to the seven that is on the baseline model. They're shrinking the bezel a little bit. It's not some massive change . It will also have TMR sticks on it, which is kind of cool. And it will have a transforming D pad, which is one of the cooler controller things that Microsoft ever did, and then they immediately bailed on it . Those Halo four Xbox three hundred and sixty controllers you could rotate the pad to make a cross rise up out of it and sink back into it. So if you wanted better kind of four way controls or just better field whatever you're into . It seems like it's something like that that they're putting into this, which is kind of cool . The D pad on the existing Xbox Ally is not amazing . And so as someone who owns one of those, these upgrades are just frustrating enough to be like, Mother. The internals are not different . So it is basically the same thing. They're going to have a dock with it, I guess . But yeah, it's it's a hundred twenty hertz OLED display with with free sink support . So you'll benefit from that. There's a catch because of course there is It sounds like it is only going to be available as part of a bundle and it will come with the ROG X Real R one edition twenty glasses. These are AR glasses. Companies like this XREL company has been making these for a while. Like I find them interesting. I've never I've never actually tried them , but it sounds fascinating, but it is it is big monitor in your glass es. It's not full VR or anything crazy like that. It is just a set of glasses that you can plug into , well, I mean anything, you plug it into your phone or whatever, but you can plug it into the ROG and have a big display inside of your head if you want that. Kind of a weird thing to put with a portable device I don't know well I don't know. I mean if you're playing weird porno games on a plane you don't want them displaying on the unit itself so you put on the glasses and then you can You can pour it up . Right? I mean, that's the that's the that's the ideal that's the ideal scenario . But you know, people will watch movies in these on planes and stuff like that. Like it's, you know, like the glasses have been around for years at this point and they seem to be getting better . But again, I have not tried any of these. I should probably get my hands on a pair of those glasses at some point just to see what they're all about . But bundling them together seems like a good way to make this thing cost three thousand five hundred dollars as a package? I don't even know anymore. I don't even know how much anything is anymore. That sounds like a ridiculous amount of money and bundling them together as part of the I guess is this the okay, is this the twentieth anniversary of Rog ? Not of Xbox? What ? That seems ridiculous. Yes, it is, it is the twentieth anniversary of the Republic of Gamers. Happy anniversary to the Republic of Gamers . Who can believe it's been twenty years ? I certainly cannot . Thousand six . Well, I guess I don't yeah, weird, weird. And lastly in hardware related news, Sony announced a bundle of or I guess not a bundle, but a bevy products earlier in the year that they didn't necessarily give too many details about availability or what have you . But they are now giving those updates for the Flex Strike Fight Stick for PS five , as well as a monitor and some speakers they announced around the same time Flex Strike is their wireless fight stick. It'll be available august sixth , as they say on their blog just in time for M arvel Tokon Fighting Souls . Usable on PS five NPC um and it's two hundred dollars It'll be available for pre orders on the twelfth if you're interested in that. It's like a nice looking fight stick if you're looking for a fight stick that like mirrors some of the design cues of the PlayStation five five , which okay , I don't know . It looks alright . I suspect you'll be able to do better if you wanted a better fight stick than that for around that price or perhaps even notably less than that. I feel like you could do better on a fight stick . Sometimes PlayStation fight stick stuff can be a little weird at least PS five fight stick stuff can be a little strange on support but there are plenty of sticks out there that do the job and plenty of fighting games that just support kind of the PS four era contro ller protocol stuff so you can use those five six as well . They have a twin I think the idea that they're advertising this monitor this way is very silly . The headline says twenty seven inch gaming monitor with dual sense charging hook launches in the US and Japan august twenty seventh . I feel like when I want to know things about a monitor . It's things like refresh rate . What type of panel is it ? You know, is it an OLED? Is it have is it GSYNC compatible? Is it VR? What's the, you know, like there are specs about a monitor you might want to know about . This is a twenty seven inch Q HD IPS display fourteen forty p ax resolution . It has VR supports it's supporting up to one hundred twenty hertz on PS five and PS five Pro and up to two hundred forty and hertz on a comp atible PC or Mac . I think if you buy this monitor specifically to play station games on, you're that's dumb . You should be getting a four K screen at this point. Like I don't, you know, like I like fourteen forty for an up close monitor. I think it's pretty good . But considering a lot of PlayStation five games are, you know, built around the idea of four K in the beginning. You know, kind of silly. They are taking pre orders for that later this week and it will run three hundred forty nine dollars ninet andy nine cents . That's I don't know, this seems like an okay monitor for that price , but you can get an OLED in that price range and you should. You know, there's not there's no reason unless you are extremely worried about burn in, which I can tell you is with having two of my three monitors here being OLED monitors, I have not experienced burn in on any of these screens . I think that you could do better . I don't think that this is something this feels like a weird fit in the market. This feels like this feels like a suckers monitor for people who think, oh, it's going to be the ultimate playstation monitor , which is not a thing. You know, I don't know. I assume when they say monitor that usually means it doesn't have speakers on it , but I don't know for sure . But typically when we talk about the differences between calling something a television and calling something a monitor, it's like, well, it's got a tuner or it doesn't have a tuner or it has speakers or it doesn't have speakers or whatever . This seems like I don't know, if you were building a fucking e sports sport audorium playstations , then I guess I could see someone getting a bunch of these monitors and putting them at all the stations because then you can just dock the controller on it and it looks nice and it's out of the way and whatever. But like this just as a product when you think about what other monitors are out there, it seems very strange . They also have a set of wireless speakers called Pulse Elevate . They look like funny little cones . They say they pair perfectly with the twenty seven inch gaming monitor. So that's, I guess that answers my question about does that thing have speakers? Of course it doesn't . They do not have any further details on pre order or retail pricing, which they're just kind of like reminding you, Hey, these speakers still exist . They're just coming later this year. So yeah, I don't know, all this stuff looks okay, I think the monitor in particular, you could do better for the money. The wireless speakers look nice and I'd be curious to see how they sound, I suppose . But yeah, I don't know, kind of a weird a weird set of hardware. But I guess, you know, there was a time there. There was a brief window there where PlayStation owned Evo and when they said, Hey, we're making a fight stick, you're like, Oh, I guess that makes sense because you guys owned the fighting game tournament that you would do this. And now they don't. But they're still putting this fight stick out. And sure , why not? Why not ? Why don't we get into some emails ? Podcast at guard. Bye is the email address for you to send emails to me . Let's take a look here. Chris asks the age old question from Virginia . Is it just me or do the controls for Mario sixty four suck ass ? He's so floaty and I feel like I am constantly having to readjust Mario to even read a sign . This motherfucker slips and slides just walking, I am playing on the switch with Mario three D all stars. I've always wanted to beat this game because I know it's one of the most important games of all time , but I just hate the way he feels. Do I need to be playing on an N sixty four or do I just need to get good? Probably both Probably both. I think those switch versions of the games might have fucked up input latency . So that might not be a good way to play it in the first place . Also, a thing I'm dis covering is that a lot of these games you can't they don't feel quite right on other controllers . I think the N sixty four controller is kind of an abomination . It is a horrendous twisted mess . And as time has gone on controller design in the wake of the N sixty four controller I think tells the tale of like , hey, no, this shit sucks . But a lot of those games and I can't speak to the three D all stars version of Mario sixty four because maybe they would make some tweaks to it, but those games were largely built around the idea of that controller and specifically that analog stick and the way it feels on your thumb And so I think there are things you end up missing a little bit when you play a game like that on any other controller. And nowadays people are playing sixty N four games on a wide variety of different platforms and setups and FPGAs and you know, whatever, like the Mr N sixty four core is good . It's not one to one perfect, but it is really, really good . And software emulation has come a long way on the S sixty four over the years as well, you know, like that has gotten really good just playing it on a PC , except for the part where you have to control the game. If you're picking up your typical dual analog modern controller, there's a lot of stuff that just doesn't work the way you want it to. There's a certain feel that that analog stick has that for better or worse , I'm going to say maybe worse because it makes the game harder to play and harder to enjoy nowadays , but Mario sixty four is tuned for that thing Um and so in some cases I happen to have this Sitting here. But in some cases you are going to want to find a way to hook an N sixty four controller up to a PC , which is a terrible position to be in. There are a lot of different ways to do this. If you want one that's really low latency, I bought a thing called the reflex adapt and the reflex adapt box you can get a ton of adapters different real old controllers , like even virtual boy controllers or just all kinds of stuff . These are the same controller adapters that are used for the Mister for hooking real controllers up to that through the snack system . And so the reflex adapt can be flashed with a different firmware depending on what you want to plug it in to mister Adon's. com sells these and they're really handy . You might have to do some insane controller remapping to get whatever it thinks an N sixty four controller is on your PC to get an emulator configured exactly right and and yeah this has been this has been a really handy thing plug controllers into the PC and And yeah, you can you can play a lot. You can play in sixty four games on the PC. And the thing I found hooking this up the other day for some stuff I was fucking around with is as much as I don't like this analog stick , it is immediately apparent like, oh man , like this is how these games originally felt and how they're supposed to feel. And like, oh right, they kind of don't feel right on all of these other analog sticks. It's fucked up, but it's true . This is also this reflex adapt is really good. I think you can this would be a good way to hook a jaguar controller up to a PC, I believe. There are a number of different ways to accomplish that as well. But you know, with the old with the big PMU out there , you know, mastering Jaguar emulation, you might want to do that with a real controller and this is going to be a good way to do that. But yeah, there is something to the M sixty four controller. These games were made for it and as it turns out they, feel somewhat better there. You can obviously get an N sixty four controller for the switch . I've not tried that , but I've seen enough people say that there's input latency on those switch versions of the game that you might end up not you might end up still having some issues there as well . So yeah, I think that Mario sixty four controls just fine . But I think if you didn't play it then and you played a lot of Mari o games that came out after that and then are going back and trying to play Mario sixty four . I think the big thing that sticks out is the camera control because remember the N sixty four only had a single analog stick, not dual analog , and so camera control gets relegated to these C buttons on the side and it's a bad experience . And so seeing things the way you think you should see them based on how modern three D platformers exist in today's world is rough because Mario sixty four was the game that built that fucking blueprint in the first place, and they did not build good camera controls into that game . And so I think that's the Like that's the thing that makes that game a little bit hard to go back to if you don't have if you don't know what you're getting into , if you don't if you have not played that game on real hardware and understand kind of the true nature of the N sixty four , I think it can be hard to understand those kind of more fiddly aspects of camera control and what have you So yeah, I guess I wonder if that's something that people coming to this game for the first time are like uh this sucks. This feels this feels terrible or whatever how much of that is just based on how that genre evolved , you know ? And as controllers became more normalized and we stopped fucking around with this garbage ass N sixty four controller , you know, like camera control and all of that stuff became significantly better in a lot of ways. So yeah, I think that's that's probably what you're experiencing, Chris . Mario sixty four is well, yeah, I have a lot I could say about Mario sixty four, but maybe there'll be some place for that some other time. Nicholas and Charleston writes in and says When Mario Kart World was first unveiled , the open world nature of the game, larger player count , costume changes and previous years long support for Mario Kart eight made me think that World was going to be Nintendo's attempt at a live service game , as we have seen that is not the case . In fact, World seems to be a game that most people seem to be pretty on to the point where Nintendo has said that it's not Mario Kart Nine . I'll say as an aside, I first heard the if this is not Mario Kart nine thing , I guess it's about a year ago now . But that was something that like people knew that people knew that Nintendo thought of that game that way before the Switch two came out. That's not some backwards thing where they're like now that it's kind of maybe not looked on as favorably as it has or as the previous games, like they're not saying that now to try to distance themselves from it, that was their feeling on it out of the gate. This is not Mario Kart Nine . For whatever that's worth, I mean Anyway, they have changed some of the ways people can play the game and set up races, which seems like it's notable because Nintendo usually doesn't do things like that. To that point, do you think we'll see continued support, new tracks, two new tracks, etc for world , or do you think Nintendo may try to actually make a more traditional Mario Kart nine and put it out during the Switch II life cycle? I know that Nintendo has generally had one entry per franchise per system, cadence as of late, but this game has been a head scratcher. I , I could see it going either way. You know , who know s? They could be right around the corner from announcing a massive update to that game that bolts a bunch of new stuff onto it. I think there's a lot of if they really wanted to confine that game into a more traditional Mario Kart like mold that's largely an issue with menus and presentation . Track design obviously matters there too. You know, that stuff is pretty different. But I think if they wanted to like sneak a real Mario Kart style track design into that game, it would not be hard . They could even do modes where it's like, hey, there's lower driver counts in this one to justify like why they've got narrower road s and things of that nature . And so I don't think it would be hard for them if they if they were really dedicated to making Mario Kart World more traditional like they could do it. I think the part the problem with Mario Kart World is that what they showed of it and I think the early impressions you get of that game in your first hours with it are not accurate because you play it and think like, oh man it's got this open world thing and then you go drive around it. It's not always easy to drive around it. You can't drive around it the way you want to if you want to do split screen, you know, there's like weird restrictions on that side of it and the things you can do in that world are not that interesting . You know, they tried to put some challenges and little things out there for you to accomplish, but that stuff is not good . And so they made an open world game, but the open world is kind of the worst part about it. And that is frustrating because that seemed to be the pitch, that seemed to be the reason why you would do this. And instead you got a Mario Kart game that feels like it is somewhat without focus . And yeah, and the best part about it is that it has like fucking nine thousand hours of music . like a zillion different covers of classic fucking jams . Like it's mind blowing the soundtrack on that game. Just how much of it there is. But But but yeah, you know, like it doesn't seem like it's a game that is satisfying what the traditional Mario Kart player is looking for. And I don't think that it really found a lasting significant new audience. It's just kind of a weird it's just kind of a weird thing . If I were them, I would be inclined to just move on and maybe give it a handful of years here and put out a new Mario Kart and put out Mario Kart nine or whatever . Like they're different enough games that they would be in theory different enough games that you could certainly get away with it. And there's no rule saying Nintendo can't put multiple fucking games out, you know, they do whatever they want . So I think they could certainly get away with that. I think that that would be well received if they did that . It's kind of a bummer , I think, you know, if you were like, Ah, we're going back to making just fucking Mario Kart games. I like the idea that they seem to be willing to take chances, that they seem to be willing to kind of roll the dice and make something different . And so on that level, I appreciate Mario Kart World . I just don't think they did a great job with it. So it's just sort of where we ended up . Um , in conclusion, Diddy Kong Racing two No. Bug nine to nine writes in and says last week you wondered what a next generation console could provide over what we already have. In Forta Horizon six, Tokyo was pretty empty probably because it would stress the current consoles too much . In what generation could we get a crowded city in a performance centric game like Horizon ? So no . So the reason It's a racing game. It's an open world racing game where you want to get from point A to point B and be able to have fun doing so . And so if you put a bunch of realistic traffic in that game , it would not be it would not be a good game . It would not be as fun to play And so that's the struggle that they actually have. Like from a performance perspective , they could certainly put more cars on screen than they do. Could they have bumper to bumper traffic and have it still run it, you know, like I get like eighty or ninety frames per second out of that thing on PC . Like maybe not, you know, I'm sure, you know, if you fill the city streets full of cars , then yeah, you would you would probably you would probably take some kind of performance hit naturally. But but the problem that they actually have to face is not necessarily one of performance when it comes to that specifically, it's it's hey, what makes for the best fun video game ? And so it sort of makes Japan, it makes Tokyo anyway , a very difficult situation, right? Because one of the things that makes Tokyo the city that it is is how densely packed everything is . You know, everything is packed together, most of the a lot of the streets and alleys and all their stuff are barely wide enough for a car to get down them in the first place . But like, that's kind of the magic of that fucking city is all that is, you know, it's a it's a train it's a city it's a great city on foot and on train s, not that people don't drive, plenty people do , but you know, it just that would not make for a fun video game if they filled it full of people . So yeah, I think even in a world where they had significantly more performance and power or whatever, a next generation console, whatever it is , you would still not f itill full of people because you're making a driving game where you want to be able to drive two hundred miles an hour and that's hard to do in a city , you know, in a in a driving . Let's see . Michael in Brisbane, Australia says, I have a two year old who thinks the TV is a giant tablet, and gets their grimy sticky fingers all over it, causing smudges, etc Did your kids ever do this, and how do you keep your TV screen clean Yeah . I thought when I got a TV and moved out to the garage that I would be able to keep this TV clean It is covered in fingerprints . The TV's inside . The TV inside the TV that they play games on inside has had crayon all over it . The other day I discovered that my two year old was trying to feed peanut butter to some of the people on screen. And so there was peanut butter dried to the TV. It had been there for a little bit when I saw it. So it was a little difficult to get off off . And yeah, the screen out here, you know, like they've been playing Fortza and some other stuff. I got a two year old kid that just says she wants I want to play video games and then she wants I want to play car game and she wants to set up Forta and she wants to drive around and crash into stuff and she has a really good time with it except she continually hands me the controller and says can you help me? Can you help me ? And so she really wants is for me to get it going really fast where it's not going to crash for a while and then hand it to her so she can so she can steer it back and forth and stuff. It's pretty amazing stuff . And so they have been kind of playing some of that stuff . Jack says you should put auto drive on. Unfortunately, any kind of movement of the stick or buttons or whatever snaps it out of Auto Drive. That was the first thing I tried. It was like, oh 'cause I'm just gonna pick a spot on the other side of the map, turn on auto drive, handle the controller. It's gonna be fucking awesome. I'm going to get so much work done. It's gonna be badass. I'm going to book all these appointments. No , instead she gets it out of that and then continue and then hands me the controller every thirty seconds wanting me to correct the steering and then no appointments get booked. It's been and also they've touched the TV and smudged their hands all over it. And I have not cleaned this TV yet . And I'm tired . I'm very tired Hand her a dummy controller she knows She's too smart for her own good. She knows if she is not actually controlling the onstream reaction. She is I've she's she's she's fucking smart Let's see here . Ryan from Texas writes in asking about unfair mouse and keyboard advantages on the new Xbox. It just occurred to me that with the new iteration of the Xbo x becoming a PC hybrid, how our games going to moderate the possibility of ranked play on platforms becoming unfair due to the use of mouse and keyboard versus controller players. I play a lot of Rainbow Six Siege and some players use Zims and Chronuses and other platforms to let you use Mouse and Keyboard on a game that doesn't allow it on console. If you don't already know, Siege does not use any form of Aim assists, so the skill gap potential is massive for mouse and keyboard contro to ller. Obviously this results in huge skill gaps and ruins the ranked experience. I'm sure other games will have this same issue. Do you think Xbox can find a way to address this? Yeah, I mean this is this is solved. This is like I don't know why more games don't do this, but and I think even call of duty doesn't do it as harshly as they did when they first came up with the idea, but it's input based match making and you ban people using a chronus. Like, you know, if you can detect a chronos, you ban it because those are people trying to sidestep it. There are plenty of console games today that allow you to plug a mouse and keyboard in. I think Fortnite you can do it. Like there's a number of console shooters and stuff, multiplayer games that allow you to hook a mouse and keyboard up to your console and do it . You just you do matchmaking based on inputs and that's it. So controllers play with controllers, mouse and keyboards play with mouse and keyboards, end of story. It seems relatively easy to do . Unless you are so confident in the way your Aim assist or whatever, like if you're confident that that stuff is balanced. I know some games have had aim assist to a degree that people have felt that game pads were actually superior to game and to mouse mouse and keyboard. And so some of that kind of depends on the game . And I have heard that Marathon has like really big aim assist on it that has been really helpful for gamepad players, but pretty early on I shifted over to mouse and keyboard simply because I didn't want to get shot in the back without being able to spin around and get somebody And that has been that's why I switched. It's been effective for me that way, but sometimes I think about sometimes I think about changing back to gamepad just to give it another shot . But early on when I was just like having when I was just getting fucking murdered in the early days of marathon, I thought, man, I need to be able to turn around and get some shots off. And that's been very effective for me . But yeah, some people in the chat are even backing me up yeah, it sounds like the Amysist is pretty strong in marathon. So maybe I should maybe I'll switch it up season two, try some game pad out again and see how it goes . But I had some bad early experiences and to be honest, I just part of me was looking for an excuse to finally use my stupid Esports keyboard , which someone which Zack wrote in about asking about the model number in case anyone else wanted to know about that . It is the Fury Cube M thirty HE, it's a Hall Effect keyboard. It's just the left half of the keyboard and so it's the half you would use to play games . Generally speaking, you know, some keys use M for map and there's no M on this thing. So I had to I had to remap map to the B key in Marathon in order to to use this thing. But it's I got it for like thirty five bucks on AliExpress . I don't know. The prices may vary. I broke down speaking of fucking buying random shit off Ali Express . I was buying a flash cart off of there because the one I had has been missing for enough years now that I'm now convinced it's gone gone . Did someone steal my fucking ever drive ? Out of the office, it's entirely possible. It's entirely possible back when there was an office. It's been gone that long . Anyway and I also bought one of those pangua the Baitong Pengu controllers that you can shift all the other stuff around all these other ways. And I ordered one of those with all the weird attachments and all this other shit because I have to know. Anyway , that'll show up . All that stuff will probably show up next week or perhaps even the week after , but it is on the way and we'll talk about it when that stuff shows up because it just sounds fucking ridiculous . But yeah, you solve this problem with input based matchmaking it was a genius movement when Call of Duty did it. It was the thing that made me feel like, oh now I can play Call of Duty on PC just fine because I can just hook my controller up to it and I'll play with other people who are playing on console and it'll be totally fine. And it has been. It's been good . It's been good. That's been a good way to play that game. Grant writes in and says Nintendo should make an Apple TV style box one hundred and fifty pounds just like the Apple TV for a tiny switch to board and a box. Why not? A lot of people like me do not want the handheld side of things and surely cutting costs to increase sales is needed right now. Yeah, but like the sales you would so the parts you would cut out of a switch to make it not portable are not the parts that make it super expensive . You still have to put RAM in it, you still have to put the CPU in it. You still have to put the graphics hardware in it. Like you still need to build ninety five percent of a switch too . And you have to build the dock into it by default. So all the parts of the dock have to still come in there. You still need HDMI out, you still need all of that stuff . Like it's not you're not going to save a dramatic amount of money on that . I mean, they already tried to cut I mean it's why the Switch two doesn't have an OB screen is because they want to keep costs down on that thing and you know,, like and and, you know, if they had gone with an OLED screen and the thing had been even more expensive then maybe you could say, oh, maybe that starts to make sense, but like, it's not enough. It's not enough of a savings to be worth it . Especially for Nintendo to just like have to spin up a whole 'nother revision of the fucking console and ensure that you, know , hey, we've got something in here firmware based that says, Hey, this is never going to have a touch screen, so no games can ever ask you for that. Any game that relies on the touch screen in some way, which I think there were a couple switch one games that you could only play that way . You would need some kind of pop up that says, yeah, don't play this . Like it doesn't run . And so it creates confusion on that front, minor confusion, but there's still some . But I think you just end up in a situation where that just rapidly becomes not worth it . And you might as well just buy because you might as well just buy a switch to and leave it do cked. Because also, what would they do at that point? Would they still give you Joy Cons ? Or would they just pack in a Pro controller because that's expensive too ? It's not enough of a savings to be worth it. It would not be one hundred and fifty British pounds. I'll tell you that much . I buy a long shot . Brian from Culver City writes in and asks how do you feel about the use of AI to create Mr Cores ? I'm sure some cores we already have been AI assisted, but there seems to be a desire to get more new arcade cores on the plat form, with people vibe coding off of Mame emulation . The thing that always excited me about Mr was more of a quality over quantity, it's getting totally accurate reproductions, not just more . What do you think? Yeah, so this is this stuff has been happening for a little bit here and I think even, you know, beyond using AI to put some cores together which is which is happening like a core for the PGM, the polygame master , which is like some of those cave shooters and like Knights of Valor and all those insane Chinese belt scrollers that someone likes, I don't know. Like a core for that just came out and the developer, it's closed source and the guy is saying, Oh, I used AI to do some of this and some of this and whatever. But yeah, there are cases where people have even without the AI involvement , I think my understanding of the possibilities or whatever of F PGA based emulation has changed a bit because I always thought of it as well you're decapping these chips and you're getting an electron microscope and you're recreat ing these chips one to one on the FPGA and you know, like there's a lot of stuff like that that like some of the cores that have been the most popular on this were not necessarily made in that way . Like I think the GBA Core, the PlayStation Core and N sixty four are largely kind of repurposing some of the work that's already been done on software emulators. And you end up with a result that is probably more accurate timing wise than a software emulator is just because of the way an FPGA executes . And I'm getting a little bit out of my depth here. So apologies if I'm off a little. But generally speaking , the other thing you find is that so many different arcade cores or so many different arcade games share pro cessors or even consoles or whatever? And so in a lot of cases, these chips are already recreated. Like if you want to if you want to use any, if you want to make any kind of arcade core and it uses a Z eighty, which a lot of stuff does , there's already a damn near perfect, if not absolutely perfect implementation of the Z eighty written in the code that an FPGA needs. And so it becomes about adapting , like bringing in that chip , hooking it up the way the arcade board expects it to be hooked up with the right amount of RAM here, the clock speeds here or whatever. And all of that stuff is stuff you can kind of do without necessarily getting the exact arcade board and doing it for every single arcade board . And so a lot of that work gets done. There's a great sixty eight K processor for FPGA, that's existed for years . Multiple different versions of it. And so a lot of hooking a lot of this can be hooking those existing chips up that were made the right way, quote unquote and hooking them up to different types of hardware and the different expectations of each individual platform. Like the Genesis and the X sixty eight thousand both have kind of the same processor in them as the Amiga even , I guess, just about if that's not a sixty eight hundred anyway . But they use them at different clock speeds or they use them in different ways or there's different memory requirements and what have you. And so that's the stuff that makes up the different platforms as you're hooking this stuff up. And so you don't need to , you don't need to start from scratch on every single one of these things is what I'm say ing . Some people have used like existing other emulators out there or they've in some cases they've coded their own emulators as a stepping stone to get to making an FPGA. Like I don't think the developer of the PlayStation Corps decapped those chips like did all that stuff . And the end result, would it be more accurate , perhaps would it if you were making a one to one recreation of the hardware of a playstation, would it fit inside of that FPGA? Maybe not . Maybe it would not be possible . And so I think in some ways, like, yeah, the vibe coding AI thing that's happening nowadays is kind of an advanced version of that. But we were already kind of on this road if, you look at core development for the Mr . It was not the it was not what we were promised when we started hearing about the magic of what an FPGA could do They were not being built in that exact way . And the question then becomes can anyone tell? Does anyone know? Does anyone notice the difference? Because the latency part is significantly better than you get on a lot of software emulators and a lot of the other checks and balances and you know, like people have people have coded because, you know, people have been making emulators for a long time. People may build test suites to test specific emulations of these heart, you know, edge cases and everything else to go like, oh, does it pass all these tests? And so you can get like a game boy ROM or whatever and run it on an emulator and it'll say like, oh, it passed one hundred and sixty eight of two hundred and forty eight tests , and you know that that emulator is not one to one perfect with every edge case that they've come up with to build this testing suite around. And so the goal becomes to pass all the tests in the test suite, and then you still find some edge cases with home brew where that doesn't work right because it's broken over here, this or that. And so it's a very it's a tricky set of circumstances, but in a lot of ways it's, kind of the only way that people can do this without investing in extremely expensive hardware to decap these chips and do all this stuff . And all of this is being done by hobbyists for zero money . Some of them are patreons, but generally speaking , not a lot of money. And so I don't get mad at it. It kind of is what it is and in a lot of cases it still seems like it is more accurate than some of the software emulators that are out there. Also, I think in a lot of ways some of the core development on Mr has really been an interesting way to kind of fact check Mame a little bit because some of the things that were done in Mame, some of these games that are emulated by Mame, some of that stuff hasn't been touched in years and years and years because it's just worked quote, unquot . And is it one hundred percent accurate? Like, you know, maybe some bugs will turn up here and there and someone will go in and fix them and whatever, but like some of this stuff hasn't been touched in a very long time . And so some people are taking Mame as reference, which is always the intent, right? Mame was built to be like reference material for this sort of stuff , and they're using it in this different way . And sometimes they'll find inconsistencies against checking it against real hardware. And so sometimes you'll have situations where a core developer on the Mister will uncover something that's like, oh, this thing happens in Mame that is not accurate to the real hardware. And because I was doing all this, I uncovered that and now I'm shipping those changes back upstream to MAMEM and now MAME is improving as a result. And that's kind of like the best case open source scenario, right? Of like, everyone is fact checking each other , everyone is using it and leveraging it and doing different things and pushing on it and pulling on it. And like we're getting to a point where all of that stuff is improving as a result and that's fucking awesome because MAME as a documentation project is incredibly impressive . But again, some of that documentation might be a little out of date. And people are a little bit better and smarter nowadays than they maybe were twenty five years ago . I would be a little surprised if there are things in Mame that haven't been touched for twenty five years, but you get my point the thing that we're seeing now, yeah, is like people are in some cases trying to point an AI at MAME and saying convert this into something that will boot and compile in quartus . You know, here's the Mr. Framework, here's this , build me a Mr Core . It's maybe not quite as simple as that . And they're finding some success with that. There's some weird stuff that and it also feels like there's a bun ch of arcade cores that are happening outside of the normal release flow for this sort of stuff where this PGM core just showed up and the guy that made the PGM core had to come out and say, this is not a fork of this other core that is very much in development. This is all our own original work and we did this and this and this, but also it's closed source . So So I say prove it, but I don't know and you have other like there a Star Wars Corps, a Star Wars arcade corps just showed up out of nowhere and then someone immediately forked it and got it to support Empire Strikes Back , which has a slapstick in it that the original one doesn't have, I think is the main hardware difference. But like there's a lot of stuff like that that is just kind of happening all the way even the retro achievement support that's happening off to the side now , like that guy is using AI to build some of that stuff . And yeah, I don't know, man. Like with something like a Mr Core , I think I am more willing to trust that than a lot of other vibe coded pieces of software because in a general sense an FPGA core is not going to have network access and so it's not going to expose a zillion API keys or whatever you know like there are the the damage it could do security wise is seemingly lower than running all this other fucking weird shit that people are making and farting out all the time. Now with more and more stuff moving to token based bill ing and getting way more expensive to use, I have to imagine that some of this stuff will taper off because just the process of getting an AI to generate you a program out of thin air or whatever . And by thin air, I mean other people's work that it uses uncredited will just get more expensive in a way that just people won't want to do it as much anymore. So that seems like something that is a significant problem . But yeah, it's definitely a weird state of affairs with a lot of that stuff . Vincent wrote in to say Sega Saturn bad says the Saturn is a hugely disappointing console. Every third party release has trade offs, almost all first party titles are arcade games, years of niche YouTube videos had told me that this had a massive hidden gem library. Sega rally is amazing, but I'll take my beloved Ridge Racer any day. Someone else's nostalgia had me fooled. Eh I think the impact of the Saturn is a little bit lessened by arcade emulation , which we were just talking about, right? Um , the Saturn is still one of the best ways to play Capcom fighting games . And at the time, it was far and away, the best way to play it unless you were going to buy an arcade machine . You would go get your four meg RAM cartridge and you would plug it in and you would fucking enjoy all of these fucking Capcom fighters and they were fucking awesome and they were better than the PlayStation versions by fucking miles man . And so when people talk about the hidden gems of the Saturn Library, they're usually talking about two things. They're talking about the worldwide library, not just the US stuff , because the U. S. third party Saturn like when you go and look at every game released in the US for the Saturn, it's a fucking dismal. Like there's a lot of fucking bullshit on there. You're going to be like, yes, let's go play Scud the Disposable Assassin and Amuck or whatever. Like there's just so much fucking shit that Western publishers cranked out that just either sucks on its own or there are games there are games that are significantly better on the PlayStation . Of course, like these are the reasons why the Saturn failed in the marketplace, right? When people talk about the Saturn and they talk about what they like about it and why it's such an impressive catalog , they're talking about either games that only came out in Japan , or they're talking a lot about arcade ports , which the Saturn was very notable for having some fucking awesome fucking ports of fighting games at the time . And you don't need that anymore . It's cool that you can play the Saturn version of X Men versus Street Fighter . But if you're gonna play that in this day and age , just emulate the arcade version . You know , like if you want to play radiant silver gun, the Saturn version is a great way to play it. There is still an arcade version of that that you might be interested in playing as well. That's one that's a little more of a toss up , where I think you could kind of go either way . But yeah, there's a good catalog of scrolling shooters and arcade ports and stuff that are great . And so that stuff's impressive and interesting and a game like Sega Rally is not available in a lot of other forms. And so yeah, Sega Rally is amazing. And also Sega Rally didn't get ported too many other places. And so if you're emulating the arcade version of that , you're emulating a thing that expects you to have a steering wheel. And so the inputs are usually weird and there's a lot of caveats around that . And so you end up in a situation where that becomes like another kind of like oh if you're going if you're going to play games on the Saturn, this is a great way to do it. But if you're going to play virtual fighter two that Saturn version's fucking awesome but like you could also probably pretty easily play the arcade version of VF two if you really wanted to. And so that's something we experience a lot, a lot, a lot talking about old video game machines and their libraries . This is something that like in its day , the Sharp X sixty eight thousand was fucking a mind blowing concept because it was a Japanese computer that had the same CPU that everyone that Capcom was using in all of their arcade machines . And so they ported these really good, really accurate versions of games like Strider and Final Fight and even Street Fighter II to that thing , at a time when that was a commodity , at a time when that was impressive . And now all these years later, between all of the legally rereleased emulation packages and street fighter collections and Capcom arcade cabinet one, two, and three, like all of that shit . There are plenty of ways for you to play Final Fight , Strider and Street Fighter two . And so that shrinks the catalogs, the interesting catalogs of these platforms significantly. Um , and so you reach a point where some of those games become curiosities more than anything else. Like, do you want to play Street Fighter two but with the music pumped through MIDI hardware . You know, do you have a fucking MT thirty two or equivalent ? Because then you can play Street Fighter two with the music rendered in a totally different way. I think it sounds notably worse than the arcade version because the arcade version has fucking soul. The original arrangements of those songs have fucking sound fucking awesome. And when you put them through an MT thirty two and it just sounds like some GM ass general ass fucking midi , you're like, yep . Not gas man. It's interesting , but I don't think it's better And so this happens all the time. This is the biggest problem with the Amiga I think in today's day in these in this day and age . The amiga is thought of in the exact same way where people who love the amiga love the fucking amiga. But how much do you want to play the ig Ama version of ion Act Fighter compared to I mean the Master System version or even the original arcade version . It depends on what you have nostalgia for , but these days a lot of ports of a lot of games have fallen by the wayside as like interesting curiosities, but you would never play them. Do you want to look at Space Harrier on the ZX spectrum? Of course you do. Do you care about it to play it a bunch? No, go emulate the arcade version, like at this point. Like, you know, go play it on the three D S or something. Like you just don't you just don't need it, man. And so that's why a lot of these libraries very different than they did even twenty years ago, especially the Saturn, because Saturn emulation is something that has really only become great over the last five, ten years . And so there are just like better places to play a lot of these games . And I think that's a pretty normal thing and that's something you'll see not just with the Saturn , but with plenty of other platforms unless versions of games have reasons to stand out unique things about that port that make them stand on their own and make them interesting. I think there are a lot of cases where just the libraries of these, you know, you hone them down and go like, okay, I don't ever care about this , I don't ever care about that. I don't need this because I have this. Like Double Dragon for the NES is a great example of like that's a vastly different game. If you like that game, you still might not like the arcade version of Double Dragon or Vice versa, probably more likely to be vice versa. Double Dragon two on the PC engine CD is actually like a pretty fucking neat version of that game and the music is sick because it's a CD based game . And so it's cool as hell . And that's a great reason to go and play that game. That version of that game , is it as good as the arcade original Double Dragon two . Actually I think it's like it's different like visually different all this other stuff, like that version of that game is really fucking neat . Anyway Let's see here . Julian writes in and asks about too much early access. Obviously, there have been big success stories that have leveraged early access to the betterment of both the game and the developer like Baldur's Gate three , but is this release tactic or even just the term itself getting way over used . Sometimes it just feels like a shield the dev is using to deflect any issues in a mostly complete game while they slowly chip away at QA problems , not a path to major content injections or an eventual more robust final one point zero game release. Can't blame anyone for doing what it takes to get funding flowing these days , but do we need more terms to differentiate the approach each game takes ? Is this just too appealing a tactic for develop ers to not take it or does it not really matter at the end of the day ? I think every developer is going to use it a little differently because games are made in different ways and you know like a lot of developers are in different financial situations as well. And so they're going to be using early access for different reasons, you know? You'll have fully funded games that show up in early access and you know they're going to get made and finished and whatever else . And it's just a matter of time . And sometimes they want player feedback And I'm sure it helps on the QA front as well. I mean, getting it out to a much larger number than any like if you went to contract some QA house to QA your small team game . I'm sure they would find a lot of stuff, but shipping it is the surest way to find out every single way your game is broken . And so it probably helps on that front. You could argue that like, hey, man, developers should probably not be getting free QA out of their audience . But ultimately it was designed for players that know what they're getting into and are willing to, you know, to look at an unfinished product , you know ? And so the idea is supposed to be that you know, like the players that are getting in are people that are going to be willing to submit that type of feedback and they kind of know what they're getting . And so I don't have a problem with that. I think it is sometimes weird when you've got games that are just like clearly this the development on this game is locked and they're moving forward and and like, yeah, maybe they'll get some feedback and you know, they'll get some kind of free QA out of it . But it seems weird that they're calling this early access when it's also coming out in like two month s or whatever. Like some of that stuff's a little funky . But it helped. I mean, you know, like Baldur's Gate three seems like it certainly benefited from itsrom its time and early access, I mean player feedback probably helped quite a bit with that . And you have some studios that are simply out of money or out of time or both. Same thing, really . And so they need to ship this thing to start getting some money coming in so that they can, you know, finish the rest of it or whatever. But yeah, I don't know. Everyone uses it a little differently. I do agree that sometimes it does feel a little funky . And because you do end up in scenarios where you have games that launch in early access and then die there , you know ? You've got small developers that ship a game and they, you know, and it's in early access and like no one showed up . You know ? And that's not a good situation either. I was going to say I don't I don't know if Valve has any kind of like automated like it almost feels like there should if you launch a game in early access and don't update it for x number, like there should almost be a thing on the page that says this game was last updated x number of days ago and maybe it does do something like that. Okay . Okay . Because there kind of needs to be like they have the big block of like questions and questions and answers and stuff where you kind of fill in the blanks about your game and why it's in early access and all that stuff. But like it does feel like there should be you're saying there is something, but I don't know that I've seen an exact day count. I'm trying to find a game in my library that is in early access, but I am not immediately finding one . Okay, six months. That's what it okay. So that's letting people know that a game has gone stale . Okay, so putting up a thing that says the build has not been updated in six months is a good okay, good. Six months seems like an okay number. That's because if you put a ticking timer on it after like a week or something like that, I think that that's maybe not good for developers to feel like they have to sh ip every so often or face the fate of this number getting too higher . Oh, you can sidestep the timer by just posting news updates. Yeah, that's not great. Um Golf or Work groups. See how did that never make it out of early access? Golf? Question mark Okay, yeah. Note, the last update made by the developers was over nine years ago. The information and timeline described by the developers tier may no longer be up to date . Yeah . And like Devolver published that like golf for work groups is neat. Originally known as golf question mark . That game is everything it needs. The other thing I'll say is that golfer work groups is one hundred percent of everything it needs to be . Like it's perfect as is and just take the early access thing off of it because that game is fucking done . That game is badass . It's it's like held together. I mean, it is, it is could it use a little more structure or something? Sure maybe . Sure maybe . But golfer work groups is fucking sweet . Always was This build contains much improved versions of the holes we made to show Valve in two thousand eight. We will hopefully make enough money to continue working on it . What's the current state of the early access version answer. Game is completely fun. They're right . Golf for work groups is fucking rad . So this is a weird case of like this is doing a strong disservice to this game like and they should just like, well, I don't know, Devor's the publisher and maybe Devolver doesn't want to touch it or whatever, but like and maybe some relationships out. I don't know. I don't know what the deal is there, but by having this thing here that says this game's in early access and hasn't been updated for nine years, if you get to this page you're going to go when you should get to this page you go hm m because it's golf for fucking work groups and it's, you know, it's it's in some ways a bit of a trifle. It is a light experience. It is not the most structured game of golf on the planet . But I had some fucking awesome times with this much before twenty seventeen, back when it was golf, question mark? We would get we would get servers together and whatever. But I don't know, maybe it's just funny that it's like this Maybe it's just funny that it's like this, but you know at some point you should just like say this game is no longer like launch it quote unquote. Say yeah, it's no longer early access. It's just out because if you don't know how if you don't know why it's funny that it's like this still , then you're never going to buy that game. You're going to see that page and go what the fuck ? And never yeah, Colonel Sanchez one point zero launch with a Steamfront page ad spread. Yes, put golfer work groups on the Steam Front page . I sense a great need . Let's see here. We have time for a little bit more here . Alex from Roll Lol writes in and says I just ordered my Neo Geo AES plus and was wondering if you got one as well, if so, what are you looking forward to doing with yours ? And which games do you hope get a re release or even a brand new port ? Thinking about playing something like Eartheon on the AES sounds dope . Additionally, as a collector, do you see the AES plus making waves in the community and resale market? We talked a little bit about this, but yeah, they're going to sell a new geo . It will have HDMI out on it . It's from Playon , which is the company that's been making like the reissued Atari twenty six hundred and seven thousand eight hundred and all that stuff . You know, it's frustrating because it's a frustrating reminder that some of this classic Neo Geo stuff is now controlled by the Saudis and that SNK is , you know, in an unfortunate state these days . And so that part of it is very frustrating . On its surface, I like the idea of reissuing the Neo GO and they're selling new like they're selling new cartridges as well. Not new games, but you know, they're going to , I mean, at least not at this point , but they are going to be they're doing a run of some of the existing games in the Neo Geo library, and they're selling those as well . It sounds like that innards of this thing are coming from the same place that the Neo Geo Corps for the Mister came from . First Hack and Hotego, I think their work is being incorporated into this . Hotego did say at one point that he was he was lightly involved with this . And so from an accuracy standpoint, I think it will probably be what it needs to be because they did it. Like Furtech is a like Furtek is a person who did all the electron microscope, like, you know, decap and chips and all that fucking crazy shit . So so like that they sell replacement parts for NeoGO's if yours broke. Like they went and made new chips based on some of the work that they did . So from that angle, it'll probably be pretty accurate . It's , you know , again, the unfortunate state of SNK and its ownership and all that stuff feels real bad around this . As for the pricing and resale market and everything else I don't know how having a new run of games will truly impact prices of existing cards . My gut tells me it will well so you could look at this two ways. One you'll, have a bunch of new devices on the market that can play neo geocartridges . And so in theory, demand for neo geocartridges, especially the ones that are not getting reissued and resold may go up like they will probably never be able to do a new run of SVC chaos because that has Capcom characters in it and the licensing is probably such that they probably are not going to go out of their way to do a new run of SNK versus Capcom . And so you may see a situation where the games that can never be reissued for one reason or another , maybe those go up, maybe there's more demand for those . The other thing I would say is that a lot of the neo geo market these days is filthy with bootlegs and like, you know, if you're not deep, deep, deep, deep in it to know what you're looking at and know what you're looking for and know that you're getting it from a reliable source , it's very easy to buy bullshit out there and spend way too much money on it. Like there's a bunch of stuff on eBay. There are a bunch of ne ocarts on eBay that super expensive . Like you can go spend two grand on a copy of Wind Jammers on eBay right now . But you might get it and find that it's a repro. Like you might dig into it and be like, oh, this is a fucking bootleg cartridge. And you know, it'll still work, but you paid fucking two grand for it. You expect it to be the real feel , you know ? And so a new source of newly made cartridges that everyone knows are not legit first run real originals , but are still technically official enough to be something . Like maybe that helps clean up that scene ever so slightly, but I bet what it will happen is like the demand for cartridges will go up. People will unknowingly buy a bunch of bootlegs . And people will find that out and be really bummed out later, I guess. I don't know. When I bought Mark of the Wolves for the Dreamcast , I paid one thousand one hundred dollars for it . And long after I got it home from Japan , not that long, you know, a year or whatever it was the dream cast version of that game was announced and released . And so it was this weird feeling of like, wow, now there's a really good port of this game available for way less money . I was like, fuck , man , shit . And so the prices on those Mark of the Wolves carts dipped down a little bit in the nineties , kind of in the early two thousands, kind of in the wake of that disc appearing on the market , but it wasn't too long that it was right back to where it was because it's not necessarily about other ports of the game or other, you know, like if you want to play Neo Geo games, you don't have to spend any money to do it . It's trivial to get the full run of those games and play them on any number of devices. You could play them on your ph fucking if you really wanted to. It's not that, you know , but there's a finite number of those original cartridges, and so they're collectibles based on that. And so nowadays, in fact, let me tell you, let me tell you something. Let me load this up . Let me see what this has to say about the current price of my mark of the Wolves cartridge. Last time I checked it was up from what I paid for it significantly, but it's been slightly tumultuous, I guess. Let's see here So according to price charting , this cartridge is currently worth three thousand one hundred and forty eight dollars , which is quite a bit more than the eleven hundred I paid for it . So that's kind of cool Cool . I don't know. I mean , that's for a complete inbox copy of the AES version of the game . And I mean, apparently Metal Slug three is four thousand six hundred dollars, Jesus . And four is two thousand two hundred . SVC chaos is currently fifteen hundred dollars Oh, I refreshed the page and the value of SVC chaos just went up sixty bucks. So holy . So you know, the valuations on those cartridges have been out of fucking control for a very long time . And anything that gets people to play, you know , play some of these games, I think is a good thing , but I don't, you know, again, the status of SNK as a company means that none of this stuff feels good in any way, shape or form. So that is kind of the sticking point, I think in a lot of this stuff I don't think it will impact those prices one way or the other. I think that you could make the case that those prices go up a little bit because you'll have more people looking for them because you'll have a bunch of people that own new geo hardware . But also the target audience for this stuff is Sickos already . It's still like a grant like you know they're selling like the pricing on this thing . If you want all the cartridges they're making, which I think if you're if you're in on this, you would probably just get in all the way . Let me find the the information here . They're selling a white one, which looks kind of cool. A white neogeo looks kind of neat That's three hundred and fifty bucks. The US the standard looking model is two hundred and fifty bucks . And then they're selling like that three hundred fifty one and comes with I think with one of the met al slugs, but then they're also doing a pack a thousand dollar version that is the hardware , some controllers and I think all of the games they're selling in the first wave of reissued games and that list is let's see here . Okay, so what you'll get here is it's the console , you get a wired stick, you get a wireless stick , you get a wireless game pad , you get a memory card, which I assume would just be the same I imagine that's just new versions of the same memory card that already works in existing Neo Geo cabinets, which is I don't know, kind of neat, I guess . I wonder if they will still work on stupid batteries and ten games . Those ten games are Metal Slug, King of Fighters two thousand two, Mark of the Wolves , Big Tournament Golf, which is Neoturf Masters to you and me, Russ ia. Shock Troopers, Sam urai Showdown five Special Pull Star , Twinkl Star Sprites Magician Lord and overtop . Overtop's okay, I don't know, Pull Star's fine . Like that's a good batch of games . It's not the King of Fighters I would have included, but that's fine . Swinkle star sprites is a hell of a game. I mean , it's no money puzzle exchanger, but what are you gonna do ? They got neoturf masters. There's no wind jammers here. So the other thing is like, you know, a lot of other developers worked on neo geogames, and so some of the rights on these are split in weird ways, like Data East owns or what's the company that owns them now that owns all that IP. Anyway, the company that bought all the Data East IP controls wind jammers. And so , you know, it would be it would be business work for them to reissue a wind jammers game on this platform right now, G mode. Yeah . But I think even G mode has since been acquired by anyway, I'm not positive, but yes, GMO owns all that stuff . And so , you know, that's it's very interesting that they're doing this In any other world where SNK was not in the position it is , I think it would be like kind of exciting just to see what happens , you know, just to see if they if they continue down this road and issue more games or if they only ever make these ten games and that's it . You know because they'll run into some issues with licensing or just ownership of those IP's or whatever with some of the games that came out there . And so Yeah. And you know, like Metal Slug one 's f 's fine . I'm curious about the bios in these things. Like the NeoGo unibios, which is a hacked bios that someone made years ago , allows you to enable cheats and set the region of your console because some games will show different titles and blood or no blood depending on how the region is set . So you want to set some of these games to Japan so that they bleed right and what have you. And so I wonder what's going to happen on that front. But they have recreated chips for this. This is not an FPGA, this is not emulation. Like they're like they're kind of doing it seemingly . And it's kind of crazy that they are making new geos with HDMI out Okay, it says dip switches for language selection. Okay , so it'll have dip switches for language selection and overclocking in different display modes . And overclocking is kind of an interesting thing because some of those metal slug games fucking slow down quite a lot. And so over the years people have cobbled together overclocking options into emulators or found different ways to get those games running smoothly. And so if they're building that into the hardware, that's fascinating . You know, it's cool that they're doing it. And it will ship in November . Uh Jeff from Queens sent me a bunch of tear down shots of an intelligion Amiko . No real details here . Other than that the innards of this thing look like a fucking much larger phone board or whatever. You know, it's like it doesn't look great. I had heard that there were some tear down shots of an Amiko going around because I was I had to look for fucking a firmware update for an analog NT mini the other day and when you're digging through all this other stuff you find yourself stumbling into all sorts of other stuff , but yeah, I don't know. I don't think this means that I think this is someone this might be an older console or something. It doesn't I don't think that this is indicative of those things shipping in large quantities. I think that they have a couple of them out and about, which they have had them out and about for kind of a long time now. And this might just be someone posted a bunch of shots on one of those. I'm not certain what the what the full on source of this is, but yes, thanks for sending those . I suppose. Brandon from Texas writes in, we'll make this our last question and says the Xbox Helix is for me. Something because someone wrote in last week and said who is this for he says as a PC gamer who loves the Xbox controller and doesn't want to deal with Linux bullshit , it is nice to have a console where the majority of what I play is accessible on my TV without dealing with streaming or some other annoying PC setup on my TV . Sure , yeah . I guess, I mean , yes , also the eventual end goal of all of that Linux bullshit is to also be that . So the thing I would say is that when you look at the trajectory of Windows eleven right now, it's very much not in a state where you could just hook it up to a TV and play games on it. These handhelds, this Rog Ally X is not still not ready for prime time even after a bunch of Windows updates. And so I don't think you want to deal with a bunch of windows bullshit either Uh or most people will certainly will not will not want to, and so for as much as yes, there's some Linux bullshit I think by the time the steam machine gets out there, you're not gonna need to really fuck around too much . Like if you use a steam deck and you're only playing games out of steam , it's a very buttoned up experience . It's only when you want to start fucking around and doing weird shit that you need to drop to the desktop on that thing and okay, we're going to run this script and install these emulators and do this and do that and you know and that stuff you know , it's not that different in Windows. It's just you maybe know how to do it because you've dealt with Windows for longer , or maybe you haven't, depending on your previous experience. And so windows might be mystifying as well . I don't know I don't know. I think everyone's going to come from a slightly different position on that, but yeah, I mean the end idea with all of these fucking things is to make them more consoleized and make them things that any one who can pick up a controller can understand what they're looking at and how to get there. And that's by the time we get a steam machine, we will have been multiple years in on Steam OS. The steam deck has grown by leaps and bounds. It has gotten so much better than it was . And yeah, that stuff has worked quite well, so I don't know. I think you will not have to dick around with a bunch of Linux bullshit if you just want to play games on your thing . And that's going to do it . Thanks everybody for writing in . Again, podcast at guard. Bye is the email address . Send it an email . I mean next week we'll have more, I guess summer game fest news like next by the time the next podcast rolls around , we will be on the other side of all of your video game hopes and dreams coming true right I wouldn't be able to legally move my fingers this way if it wasn't the truth So I don't know, we'll reconvene then and recap all of this stuff if you're watching live we're about an hour out from Sony's state of play . And so that's where a lot of this I think there were other there were other shows taking place as we were podcasting. So in some ways it has already begun as they say as, the man in that movie said it has begun . So I will see you next week. We'll talk about video games A weird, a weird concept, I know, but it got us this far. I'll see you then. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. 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