NES Library Project and Future Plans

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I am here hosting this week's show and I'm happy to be here, everyone. Keep turning this down . Hello, how are you? Well, a happy happy dragons dogma Tuesday . Darker, darker risen Tuesday Tuesdays to all who celebrate . This morning was the Nintendo Direct, and that's kind of the last big chunk of information to be dropped for the week that was you know your your replacement E three, your summer game fest and loosely affiliated broadcasts . And what do you think ? How was how was the week? There's there's some stuff you will still see a trickle of like hands on reports and other stuff over the next like hand ful of days and in some cases, even into the following month . But generally speaking , you know, in terms of knowledge about games , this is that was it. What'd you think? Yeah . Yeah, some folks in the chat no dust blood gameplay concerns me. Is it still struggling with frame rate? Was Kingdom Hearts four the last gameplay we saw? Did Kingdom Hearts close out summer gamefest week god ? Disgusting . Filthy , nightmarish announcements . Yeah, as Pat says, a lot of a lot of remakes, a lot of remasters , a lot of re releases . Some of those are worth getting excited about and I think that that stuff interesting and it speaks to the at least the attempt when I think about why we see remakes and why we see some of these games. Like one part of it is certainly like the nostalgia play, right? But I do think there's a certain element of this from some companies with some specific games. Ocarina, I think would fit this is that there's also an attempt to be like, hey, you know , there are like it's been a long time since this game came out. There are generations of players that have never played it and and maybe maybe this is a good thing for them to to kind of get them on board . Some of it is, you know, hey some of the port work is, you know, for the Switch two at least is hey, you know, maybe you didn't play Duffle McCry five, so maybe maybe you would want to play it and now it's on the switch too. I think that stuff is generally okay . Brynn notes that it's been fifteen years since the occarina remake and it was thirteen years before that for the original Ocarina of Time. So yeah, that's by my count, almost thirty years since the original release of Ocarina of Time, which is which is crazy to think about because in a lot of ways it's like that's those are the games that formed a lot of opinions and formed a lot of frameworks for other de velopers when it comes to making polygonal video games, polygonal action adventures, all of that stuff. You know, Ocarina was one of the games that kind of set a lot of that stuff in motion and gave people something resembling a blueprint to work off of as they, you know, traveled down that road . Eventually we would have more controllers with multiple analog sticks on them, which is a crazy concept, I know And then we would get camera control on the right stick and that would fix damn near everything . I don't know. Gosh, yeah, there's a ton to get into. I also kind of played and saw some games that I can talk . There's some other stuff that will I'll probably just wait until next week unless they provide copious amounts of footage for me to use to kind of put behind me talking about it. I put up videos for both Crazy Taxi and Control Resident over on YouTube because I took appointments for both of those . But the short version is I really like control resonant. I came away from playing that game thinking, okay, yeah, they're they're doing it. This is like the, you know, that game opens in the oldest house and gets out into Manhattan and then you're out there and it's fucking crazy out there and the combat feels real loose in a way that I think is fun . It does not feel like an overly technical an overly technical kind of character act ion game. It's not like some massive combo heavy timing based sort of thing . You can you can just get in there and have some fun like my man Luke says I just want to have some fun. Luke also says a lot of other things . Hop that put anyway, Luke has a lot to say. But but yeah, control resonant. I thought it looked really nice . The intro to that they basically had us play the whole first act of the game . And in that time I was sold on Dylan as a protagonist, you know, the brother of Jesse Fayden, the brother of the playable character from the first game and all of that. Like coming out of that session I was like, yeah, yes , yeah, I want to like I want to hear what this dude has to say the voice acting is really he seems really unsure of himself. Like there's there's the performance is interesting in a way that I think works for the situation for a character who has spent over half his life in captivity inside the oldest house and all of that. I think I think it works like that. But but yeah, I I had a good time with it and and yeah, I want to see I want, to see more of that thing . I sat and watched some crazy taxi be played and this was interesting, you know, because when this footage got out there, there were people who were like, you know, crazy taxi truthers or crazy taxi lifers, I suppose, is maybe a better way to put it who really hated it. We were like, everything looked so weightless, but like, I don't know, maybe I'm just that's what I would say about actual original crazy taxi. That taxi flies up against shit and grinds against things and jitters and is weird and like crazy taxi was kind of always that way. So it does seem like it still has some controller moves to do dashes and limiter cuts and all of the crazy stuff that they put into those original games. They didn't let us play it, so I don't know if the inputs have changed really on that front, but you know, they're recreating the city from the first game as one of the five cities in the game . And I thought it looked alright I don't know . Uh , they have a story mode this time around and they they really wanted to get across that like, hey, like this thing is a like this this story mode is really it's gonna you're going to get into the lore the history of the world, the lore of the crazy taxi universe, and Axel's story. And I'm like , but yes, like, yes, let's get into the lore of Crazy Taxi . I want to go all the way. And I think that that stuff is at least funny. It sounds like they've got some multiplayer in there somewhere that they, you know, don't have anything to say specifically And of course they, you know, they put up a page on Steam which required them to have an AI disclosure. And so the majority of the discussion around that game has been around their AI disclosure , which I talked to some one Sega about while I was there . And and he basically said that it was, you know, stuff that they had like basically his his line was that none of that stuff is in the game, that yes, they use AI tools at some point during development , but it's not in the actual video game . And to which I, you know, like if I was able to have a long conversation with the developers working on that stuff, I'd be like, well, okay, why ? Why didn't you use it in the full game? Like if you're if you're doing this , then like why bother? So yeah, the major conversation around it has been people saying, well, I'm not going to fucking play this . And that leads me to my second question would be like, hey, was it worth it to use to use AI in that in that place and in some weird kind of nonspecific way that is apparently not in the final game ? Was it worth it to use that to then have to have this situation where now that is the everyone that is that is the major thing that people are talking about like that is the majority of crazy taxi discussion I've seen online has been specifically around the AI stuff and not about the, you know, the game and the good vibes of crazy taxi or whatever, you know? Like it's just like they get a yes, they they get a real stink on them for having used this stuff and and I don't, you know, like they're not even if they're apparently not even using it in the game yeah I don't know that's a it's a really was it used for placeholder arts where they just like had an AI thing generate a fake pizza hut or something like that. I don't even know what the yeah I just yeah you know they they didn't want not want to get super specific about how it was used other than to say that it's not in the final game. And so like, you know, I just at some point like why are you , why are you why bother with all this stuff? It seems like a real , you know, kind of no win situation that it's in right now. Anyway , I can also talk about pinball a little bit. Stern was there with the Pokemon Pinball machine, which I guess is out a little bit. It's in some locations now It's a much more straightforward machine than some other machines. It's got a big kind of captive arena area with a big Miaf in it. And if you hit meowf three times, it starts multi ball . And then the Transformers machine that they had was way more complicated . You know, you could shoot a ball through up into Megatron's cannon and then he pivots over and shoots it onto a ramp. It was a prototype machine and so sometimes the ball would miss the ramp when he shot it, which was fun. And yeah, I don't know. Those are both really neat tables. I'm a little it's been a while since I've seen like a brand new pinball machine and like there's something about the idea of them just having a screen on it that is just showing clips from the Transformers cartoon And like some of that's really cool. Like when you push start on the game, it says, you know, it's like it's got the voice from the narrator, voice from the original series because now we return to the Transformer, you know, and you're like, kind of, it's kind of cool . But there's something about having all of this flashy stuff on the screen and not on the table that I think detracts from the flashiness that a pinball machine should normally have. Almost like they're just offloading that and we' likeve got, well all, these cool videos. You're like, yeah, I guess I don't have time to look at that while I'm playing pinball, but sure, I guess you're showing, I guess, I guess Grimlock is up there fucking something up . And so like that's I don't know. Like I think that you know, it's it steals a little bit of the soul of a pinball machine when you when you just put a fat TV on it. I 'm trying to think the other machines I've played over the years that have had that there was a wizard of Oz machine that that had one that I kind of feel the same way about. The Pokemon and also like there's I think that like they're really good designers when it comes to making pinball machines look good. The fonts on the playfield and the flashing arrows and all this other stuff. I think a lot of it is well designed and it looks good. And then you look up at the score and it's almost like written in white fucking impact font . And like a lot of the text and stuff like is just missing style . And so even when you look up at that screen, it looks like slightly amateurish because you've got all of the kind of slick visuals of the original Transformers cartoon and Pokemon hopping around doing stuff and then like all the text around it is like overly plain in a way that I think doesn't do it doesn't does not serve the machine as well as it should . That's a really minor point, I'm sure. But at the end of the day , you know, I think things like having the score written in these just very plain fonts and everything, I think kind of just, I don't know, there's an opportunity there, I think, to kind of go further stylistically and make those things look more like they're part of the world that you're trying to recreate on the table for whatever that's worth . But both the tables themselves are neat in their own way. Pokemon is a relatively simple, not a ton of ramps, you know, just kind of focused on that center area and then kind of lanes and ramps on either traditional in a traditional way . And then yeah, Transformers is just rotten with ramps and lanes and and you know, the multiplayer balls come out of sound wave's chest and that's cool. Yeah, they're neat machines . Let's take a break. We'll come back. We'll get into all this stuff. There's a lot to get into . So let's do that. We'll come right back . It happens to all of us. Sometimes you're just on the run from thing to thing to thing to thing , and it can be hard to fit food in until it's too late and you're just exhausted. And the last thing you want to do is cook . Factor takes that out of the equation by delivering great meals directly to your door that have been crafted by chefs and designed by dietitians. What kind of meals are we talking about? How about a shredded chicken taco bowl? 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The Nintendo Direct happened this morning seven AM few hours before the beginning of the show . This was widely anticipated or widely known about that it was happening sometime on Tuesday . Yesterday they updated their phone app, their smart device app, the Nintendo today app to let you know that there would be a Nintendo Direct . They packed a lot of games into fifty minutes . There's I was not counting, but video games chronicle. com was and they say they were nearly fifty games on display. I believe them. They opened with Rhythm Heaven Groove , which looks fantastic and has some interesting kind of local multiplayer mini game type things to do, which I think is neat . That all looked pretty good and I'm happy that we're getting a new rhythm heaven game. It does not look other than the kind of new mini games and the multiplayer stuff. It does the games themselves do not look dramatically different from what you would expect to see in a rhythm heaven game, which is both good and bad, I suppose. I don't know. Like, you know, that's the formula. They're making one of those . It's going to, you know, you're going to hit the button in time to the music and occasionally the rhythm is going to change. So you have to hit the button a slightly different way . And they've got a weird little RPG mode looking thing in there. Yeah, there's some there's some neat stuff in there where you're like casting spells on beat in this like role playing game looking thing , you know, and and I don't know, that that all looked pretty interesting. That game is out july second. So great. I'm that is that is I, think the most anticipated game for me at this stage when it comes to games appearing on the switch consoles . Though they did also announce Dragons Dogma two Dark Arisen. Why not just keep the same subtitle? That won't confuse anybody. It's the Wii U of Expansions Dragons Dogma two is getting an expansion . That'll be coming to all platforms that the game is currently on, but they are also releasing it on Switch two It's cool that they're doing that. I can't believe they just called it Dark Arison all over again . Stellar Blade's going to come to the Switch . That Rayman game. Big Walk is out august fourth . Kirosoft is making a cooking game right in their wheelhouse and it is a one piece licensed product . And so it is a it is a one piece cooking game from NAMCO and Kyro Starf le pretty good. They're bringing DLC to Pokemon Pokopia , which is traditional kind , you know, for I guess what has become tradition for the way Nintendo does their stuff is there's kind of there's some stuff you will get for free and then if you buy the expansion pass there will be three updates that come as a part of that . The first of those will come out alongside the free update in August and it is underwater . And so you can swim now, you can go underwater. There's an underwater city. Poplio is down . So one of the best games of twenty twenty six just got fucking better because my man Poplio is in this motherfucker. That's right . Hell fucking yeah, so that's extremely exciting . I told my kids about that and they were extremely excited about it as well . So yes , that will start coming out in August. There will be the second piece of the DLC will also be out this year and then the final piece will be out in twenty twenty seven. So multiple updates coming for Pokeopia, which is great. They threw a date on Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave that's out in September . They're doing some Donkey Kong challenge thing. That's like a limited time event where you can earn digital challenge cards by doing things inside of Donkey Kong. It looks like almost like a Donkey Kong themed version of that NES challenge thing they did . Like it almost just looks like a collection of save states with like some fail states built in around like, oh, you know, complete this level in thirty five seconds or whatever . And Donkey Kong Bonanza will be a part of that if you own that game , which makes me wonder is it just going to launch again, is it just launching the game with a weird save state and then you have to do a thing or yeah the how they will how they will execute on this is weird , but it is out now if you are a switch online subscriber. I don't know if you need to be a part of the expansion packed here for that or not Liza Pea, Devil McCry are both coming to switch two . Muramasa rebirth is coming to switch one and two or I guess just one and it'll run on two well maybe that is two separate releases and not just a switch one game, but it'll include the add on that came out with it They are releasing updates. They're releasing Nintendo Switch two editions for the three Xenoblade Chronicles games. Xenoblade Chronicles one is out now the second one is out in July, the third one will be out in December . So plenty of time to get through Xenoblade Chronicles one if you want to start it all over again, I guess and play the switch to edition of that game. Yeah, they're adding some stuff like on a per game basis I think like the second game's getting a new weapon and you know there's like some other some other shit like that. So they also announced a new one Xenoblate Genesis that'll be out next year . Not really a ton of detail there. They showed a trailer and said it would be a new beginning for the series series they are releasing a follow up to Nintendo Switch Sports, predictably titled Nintendo Switch Sports Resort . They will have like twelve sports in that thing , both table tennis and tennis tennis as well as bowling and archery and boxing and thumb wrestling, which they showed us a little tiny bit of gameplay of that, the thumb wrestling, you will take a joy con in your hand and use that to do like some thumb wrestling business and it's sick. It's it's gross looking . So it's when you when you get pinned into the thumb wrestling game, you have to wiggle the Joy Con to get out of it. The other thing you can do and I presume will have to do is if you put your thumb down without getting it pinned , when you hold it down , your thumb will become more powerful so that you can pin the other person with it. So you have to kind of put yourself at risk It's a risk versus reward system . And but the thing is the representation of the power of your thumb is that when you put your thumb down, the on screen thumb gets bigger and it looks disgusting. It's like he's got a toe for a fucking thumb. It just looks sick. It's disgusting . It's disgusting. And it's got volleyball also . There's a demo for Starfox out today . That game's out really soon. As part of the , you know, as part of hey, this demo is out and whatever else, people finally got their grubby hands on figuring out who developed Starfox. It's Vellon Studios , which is the company that did the physical the cars. They did the Mario Kart Live Home Circuit thing . They did that with Nintendo . They also did that game knockout city is no longer with us. That game has since been shut down . But yeah, that's the it's the company that did Mario Kart Live they are they are doing Starfox, which is interesting . They're doing a final fantasy game that almost looks like a it's like a multiverse thing like they it's called Final Fantasy Resonance. It's a it's an HD two D game and seems like it is some kind of multiverse because in the trailer like you summon class like it seems like you summon cl oud. It's not like a giant cloud doing Final Fantasy summons , but he fights alongside you and the trailer said like, you can even call on Final Fantasy characters from other worlds, but this is this seems like a rebranded version of that mobile game they did . Whatever the fuck it was called is that brave XVS? Was that the is it is yeah, so yeah this seems like it is not necessarily a brand new video game. Pikuniku's getting a sequel. That trailer looked pretty good. Dragon Quest Monsters was shown. That's coming out in December . The Withered World is the subtit le on that . Dusk Bloods was briefly shown, but they didn't really get too into it. They instead just said, Hey, there's a closed network test that we'll be doing in the summer . And so that's that's kind of that they showed a little bit of splatoon raiders, but that was mostly in service of saying, Hey, we're going to do a separate direct for splatoon raiders. That game comes out in the at the end of July, june thirtieth will be the date of the Splatoon Raiders direct . They are doing new colored joy cons to celebrate the release of Splitoon Raiders by. And new col ored joy cons, I mean like the sides of them, you know, they're still black just the rings under the analog sticks and the inner part are a different color . They announced that Delta Rune chapter five was out june twenty fourth . Minecraft is coming to Switch two . And yeah, I don't know. They showed a burst of third party games , rise of the Tomb Raider is out today on Switch two , which seems when there's when there's like a whole different reboot of a reboot tomb raider in the waiting in the wings. It seems really weird to have that one come up again , especially that specific reboot set of Tomb Raider games were really fucking good. Well, you know, I mean, yeah, they were they were good fucking games. So that's cool . And then I don't know, in the final moments this thing really got disgusting. They tried to salvage it at the very end, but not before they spent a bunch of time talking about Kingdom Hearts They're gonna bring a Kingdom Hearts collection to switch to this will be this is again according to video games chronicle. com This is Kingdom Hearts HD one point five plus two point five remix King,dom Hearts HD two point eight final chapter prologue and Kingdom Hearts three plus remind . You can buy them separately or get them in a bundle in October . And then that was just the setup for a very brief and light look at Kingdom Hearts four , which they didn't really give any kind of release for it. It says, It just will be on Switch two at launch. So that's kind of the news bit of it there . Sickening , sickening that they would sully our mornings with such filth in this day and age after all these years to continue to deliver this disgusting filth to us . And then they closed with the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, which they're going rem toake surprise. I mean, that leaked out a while ago. So not the not the biggest surprise of the show, which is a shame because I think that this probably would have been received better if word on it had not leaked . This was they didn't show much of anything. It was just a quick trailer and you know, really story focused, had a narrator going like and there was a village with some fucking elves in it and dog, there's a tree . He did not get into there's a water temple that sucks. There's a this and that is they it was just and then at the end of it you see Link asleep in his bed in a close up of his fingers because he's got fingers now because it's twenty twenty six and we can have video game characters with fingers and it looked weird . The model looked strange . The model looked fucking weird and then that's all they showed . Yes, Link looked like he was very ready to thumb wrestle . It looked weird and then they didn't show anything else. It's out this year . It's out this year and they showed Link asleep in a fucking bed and said, Hey, this is coming . And that's it . And then they were like, Thanks for coming. Thanks for watching. I'll see you later. A lot of people in the chat saying that it had real unreal engine vibes. Yeah, I guess I don't know . Sure . I suppose . I think that like there's an art to putting together these shows , right? And the part of that art is figuring out what to do when your information leaks and trying to decide like is that something you need to react to or not? And I'm going to say nine times out of ten , the right answer is to not react to the leak and just do what you're going to do . In this case , where it is kind of the linchpin of this show, well I guess I shouldn't say that. There are some people I hesitate to even call them people . But are some among us that would be excited for something as disgusting as a Kingdom Hearts four . And so for them, maybe they are excited about this broadcast . And then, you know, there if people are into Xeno Xenoblade, then I suppose that's fine too . But I think in a world where you're hinging, you know, you're closing your show with this thing and and word about it is widely leaked at this point . I think at some point you got to call in audible and say, let's just show a bunch of it . This is a really it's a fine little teaser trailer if this is the first you've heard about it . But if you've already heard oh hey by the way this is happening like then you see this and go what the fuck? game's out this year. If this game is truly out this year , I would assume you would have something to show. So I kind of went into this show assuming that when they got to the the treehouse live part of the show, which I think still might be ongoing as we're doing this , that it would be a big focus on Ocarina because they already did a separate Starfox thing and now it demo's out, but instead they did just go like, let's look at Starfox like all over again, even though the game is right around the corner and also they had press do hands on reporting from Starfox and people have posted footage and there's kind of a lot of Starfox stuff out there at this point . And so that led to me assuming incorrectly that we would that we would see more of Zelda being played live as part of the treehouse stuff So yeah, I don't know. Like I want to see more of I guess it's a good thing because they left me wanting more, right? I want to know more about the Ocarina of Time Remake . But I think what they showed looks weird and now I am left going like u this could be fucking bad like this maybe it turns out fine but But something about the way that link looks is off . And so without any more context of like, hey, here's how the rest of the world is going to look and here's how these freaky elves are going to look. And you know, there's a lot of stuff there that you just go like, all right . So maybe that would help ground it and would help you kind of get a feel for the look . And there's something vaguely I hesitate to use the word realistic, but it is obviously a much higher fidelity link model than the original fucking Ocarina had . And I think there's so much to potentially know about this. There's so much you would want to know about a full remake of such a landmark video game from our past That like they probably needed to whatever. In the end, who cares? These are just press conferences and who gives a shit . But I think they would have been better off if they had showed a little more . And so instead you're left looking at that model, which is, yeah, it's a little jarring and you're like, I don't know, man. Like it's not a slam dunk. You don't look at that model and go . I mean, if you do, you're a maniac. Like there, I'm sure there are people that fucking did exactly that and they're fucking whatever. But like you look at that and go like, I don't know . And then boom twenty twenty six. See you later. All right, great . Great. All right . I guess we'll find out some other day And yeah, I don't know. A lot of games in there a wide variety of releases for a lot of different types of player out there. So, you know, I'm sure you know a lot of different people probably pulled something out of that show and said here's something I decided about, you know ? Like I want to play more I want to play more just baseline regular pokopia. I have not had a ton of time to really get really deep into it yet . So but that the underwater add on sounds good . I definitely got stuck in some weird areas near the water where I couldn't figure out how to get back because my daughter got stuck there and handed me the switch to and I'm like, I don't know what to do. So if I could just jump in the water and swim away, that would probably help. And yeah, I don't know, the existence of Dragons Dogma two DLC Dragons Dog ma two did not satisfy, I think the way some people hoped it would . And so, you know, having having to add on for it hopefully kind of brings rounds out some of the other parts of that game a little bit . So so that's pretty cool . I feel like if you were like desperately searching for new Dusk Bloods info like this was not a this was not enough , but again, they'll have that network test sometime this summer. So at least you know, hey, you'll see this thing soon as and that's probably fine But yeah, overall , a decent show, there's there's stuff in there, you know, I don't know. Like nothing there was really mind blowing, but I think that's just kind of the nature of things this year. I think that a lot of a lot of publishers, certainly the hardware manufacturers, the certainly the first parties are on a track, man . They've got a lot of announced games that they're ready to get out the door . And they're focused on those right now. This is also a year where everyone is spooked about Grand Theft Auto and so they're not going to waste the time announcing a bunch of stuff or shipping a bunch of stuff in a year that is already insanely cluttered in Q four . And so as September gets more and more full with ridiculous numbers of video games , you kind of have to remember that. You're like, okay, there's already a blood bath scheduled for later this year and maybe this is not the best year for us. These other projects can take a little more time. We don't need to announce these right now. We don't need to even talk about them right now. There's so much stuff happening with other games. Let's just kind of clear the lane a little bit and and bite our time on a small handful of these games. And so, you know, there's obviously more that everyone could have announced if they wanted to announce things that were further out . But that's not the trend either, you know, like more and more E three used to oscillate. Like you would have publishers that would do different shows every year depending on what their needs were because if they didn't do a press conference, they would lose their slot. EA did a press conference every year whether they needed to or not because if they didn't do a press conference, someone else would step in and take that slot and it would be harder for them to do it and there's only so many places around Los Angeles for them to do these shows . And so some years EA in particular would have like we're focusing on games that are coming out this calendar year and they're like, okay, they're they're satisfied with their current lineup and they're going to focus on that. And then sometimes you would show up to EA and they'd be like, here's a thing that I think criterion is going to work on. I don't know this like a plane BioWare's doing something weird and we don't know when any of this shit's going to come out. None of it's coming out, but like this is I don't know we're working on this and so you know , they would just fill the time with whatever they had if that was stuff that was three years away . That's what you got. You're like, fuck, I need trailers. You got it, you gotta build me a trailer for this thing you thought of yesterday. Like, oh, the thing we just thought of, oh, I'm on top of that Don. All right, let me get out here and build this for you. And so you'd have a bunch of trailers based on total fucking nonsense . You know, we're done with that for the most part . And so these trailers and these showcases are predictable beats on the calendar and they know what's coming when they have a they have pretty good insight into that and like okay , you know, Ubisoft didn't even do a show this year , right? They they if this was still E three, they would almost be forced to continue to do shows because they know in three years they're going to have a killer lineup and they're going to want to be able to do a press conference and so they can't just not do it . And so they're able to back away from it , and that's healthy and normal with the ebbs and flows of game development. The knock on effect of all of that is that most of these shows are focused on much more near term kind of stuff Um , and I think that's fine and good, generally speaking. Sometimes it's nice to be wowed and thrilled by something even if it's like a zillion years away I'm just like, oh my god, wow, hey, this crazy thing's going on But yeah, EA didn't do a show this year because what, you know, John Madden is back . I mean Madden's come to switch to like you know, people seem excited about that and so there's still stuff there . But like again, you know, everyone is largely focused on getting games out the door and they're not wasting a bunch of time talking about games that they know they can talk about next year . So you know , that's that's just kind of become the way of things . Let's take one more break here and we'll get into Xbox because the Xbox stuff is just like the logistics of everything that they've said over the past week is just a goddamn mess . And they seem to know that . They know that they are in the middle of cleaning up a mess , which is also interesting. We'll be right back . Passwords, they're a nightmare. That's why it's so easy to make bad ones because you're like, well, I can remember one word. And what if I just use that same word across everything in my entire life? It's the worst possible way to go when it comes to, you know, securing your life online , your access to your bank accounts. You're I don't know, you're whatever whatever whatever weird accounts you've got out there . Hey , you need a password manager. You need to get on board with Keeper . Keeper is a password manager. It works cross device. So the one of the big stopping points for having like really good passwords is having to type them in on your phone. It's a nightmare. No , make them all on your PC , sync it all over you, it's on your phone too . And wherever you are, you can log into all of your accounts. 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It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses setup required compatibility and availability var iation plus . All right, where to begin with Xbox, man? So Let's go back a little bit here to earlier in earlier last week. Asha Sharma was sitting down with Bloomberg for an interview and you know kind of talked about what they're doing, what they're planning on doing over at Xbox and some of the early results I guess about how things have been going , the kind of big relevant quotes pulled out again by video gameschronicle. com , she noted , you know, hey, I'm not like she does basically said my mandate is not thirty percent accountability margin, which is the thirty percent number has been thrown around as like something that was a noose around Xbox's ne ck in the kind of later years of Phil Spencer's time there that they had to kind of turn around and be profitable on all this stuff when we saw that last round of layoffs and cance llations . That was often cited as like, yeah, they've got to get to this number because everyone in the company has to get to this number and now she's out there saying that's that's not my that's, you know, my mandate is not thirty percent account ofability margin, it's not enterprise software margins. It's to be the number one gaming and entertainment company and that's what we're going to do. If you think about it, Microsoft has invested more aggressively than nearly anybody in this category over the last six years, we bought Activision and Centimax. We've invested in our core platform. We've invested in hardware cycles. We invest in subsidies even when we're losing money because of memory and storage. So we're long on gaming. We're long on Xbox . We'll keep investing, but we've got work to do. You shared the numbers. We're not in a healthy spot , and so the next one hundred days is going to be about resetting the business. And so that's a pretty and there's a couple of other there's one or two other spots where you have Microsoft Executives kind of acknowledging that shit is not going well , which one is obvious. Two , not always the thing that people say when they are in the middle of trying to fix it and then they're in the middle of trying to unfuck this situation. You don't often hear people say, yeah , we're not where we need to be. We're working on it. We're trying to fucking fix it. And I think that's interesting. I think it's also like there 's an aspect of that that I think is a little classless like in terms of what you're saying about the previous leadership and a lot of that stuff. But at the end of the day, the numbers are what they are. Xbox is not where it needs to be, and it has not been for a very , very long time. We've talked about this at length. I'm not going to go all the way through it, but you know, you could date all the way back to the launch of the originalnect Con on three hundred and sixty, you could so get the launch of Xbox One. There are multiple ramps there where you go like, this is when it fucked up and it's been fucked up since. I've always thought of it as every year talking to Microsoft , talking to Xbox leadership at E three and just like around kind of various events , they always had the right idea. It always felt like they had the right idea to turn the corner and get past the bullshit and they're like, yeah , this is going to be the thing that kind of gets us back on the right track. And then something else would happen and be like, yeah, fucking pandemic like a ton of games got delayed, this got fucked, this got bad, you know, there's there's a bunch of a bunch of stuff like that that ends up happening along the way. And so they've always felt like they were like one decision away from riding the ship , but they never got there . And they are still not there. They laid people off, they cancelled games, they, you know, and and it's really even when you take away the part where new consoles seem impossibly priced and a lot of this other shit that they're walking into , just their own stuff seems very problematic to the point where presumably because they had to reach these margins of profitability , they end up raising the price on Game Pass because they're out there spending money, acquiring content for Game Pass . They've bought Activision and brought Call of Duty onto that platform. At some point something's got to give. And so they raise those prices . And according to the incoming chief strategy officer, Matthew Ball , he has said that they lost millions of subscribers after they raised that price. That was the quot e that GameSpot heard while attending the Summer Game Fest Business Day where he was interviewed . Let me find the exact quote here . This is how GameSpot put it. This isn't necessarily a direct quote. Also, during the talk, Ball discussed how Xbox GamePass lost millions of subscribers in the period of a few months after the dramatic fifty percent price hike was announced in october twenty twenty five, Microsoft slashed the price of GamePass Ultimate down to twenty three dollars a month from thirty after Sharma became Xbox CEO, but BAL said the price is still higher than it was this time last year where it was twenty dollars a month . The value of the offering has now changed, he said, referring to how new call of duty games are no longer on day one , and the changes so far are resonating with users . So yeah, I mean, he's right, that is still a higher price than where they were at . But again, you know , I don't get the impression and it would be irresponsible and no one would do this in this day and age with a company this large or a division this large , Xbox certainly does not have a blank check to fix this . You know, they can't just walk out there and just like lose money for the next five years to become the number one entertainment company . That would be a very easy way to do it. If they could just completely throw money if Microsoft was not did not have like fucking tons of money wrapped up in a bunch of dumb shit AI garbage then maybe they would have a little more money to throw around and lose rather than losing it all on AI . But yeah, if they could just like launch a really powerful console at a really reasonable price when no one else can do so, that's solve your problem right there. That's the most irresponsible strategy in the world. But if you want to get there, that's a good way to get there . But no one can do that. There's an interesting thing here. So when I talk about like is Microsoft aware of the situation they're in, I think there are quotes from this Matthew Ball interview that really say yes, absolutely . Again, this is from GameSpots reporting from the event . During the interview, Ball recalled his first conversations after joining Xbox and how Sharma asked him straight up about Xbox, Is it fixable ? I think that's a really weird thing to ask your incoming chief strategy officer, is it fixable ? And it's weird that you wouldn't know that already as the incoming CEO that you would not have, but maybe, you know , to me that's almost a sign of a lack of faith in some of the longtimers that are still there. It's like, hey , you're an analyst and you're not poisoned by being a part of this company for years and years. You're not a member of the tribe yet , can we unfuck this ? And his answer is yes or rather he says it's incredibly defeatist to think that there is any scenario that you can't do better, that you can't improve? I joined because I believed I can contribute to that . I joined because of what she told me she wanted to achieve. I believed was right and achievable. And then I had conversations with Nadella and others at the company to validate where do you want to go? When do you want to go? How are we going to do this? Do you think we can do this? Do you want us to do that ? And all of that bolstered my confidence from the original disposition of strategic optimism. If we can turn this company around and grow it, do better by our players and we need to do that and we are, we languished for several years . So you know, they're internally asking each other questions about can we fix this? And then also he's saying we languish ed for several years , which is accurate. I think that's an accurate thing to say about like if you're trying to summarize Xbox over the last handful of years, languished is probably a pretty good word for it . And is it fixable ? I don't think there's anything in this industry that is fucked beyond belief . I don't think there's anything in video games that is like so far gone that you can't find a way to make it better . We've seen , again, dramatic turnarounds from generation to generation . And wow, things are a little bit different now because of the ingrained backwards compatibility and game catalogs and all of the purchased games, digitals, purchases that make people not want to jump from one platform to another , I do think that that is still the case. And that said, I don't know that what I you know, so I guess that keep that in mind as a as a setting the table for what then Microsoft has been doing over the course of the last week or specifically what they did on Sunday , keep in mind that it's coming from the position of a leadership that says, this thing is kind of fucked right now and we need to fix it. And she specifically said we're resetting the business over the next hundred days. So when we get to decisions that seem like they were made hastily and are fucking insane , this is a leadership that seems like they've got to make moves right now . And these the moves they're choosing. Are they the right ones ? I don't know that I 'm not sure that I believe that they are making one hundred percent the right moves right now . But this is where we're at. Gears of War E day is no longer coming to PlayStation five . This was something that kind of broke Saturday as everyone sat around at the so the hotel bar at the bar that everyone hangs out at was closed for repairs. And so they opened up a tiny little patio around the corner and had a bar there. And it was a very cramped space where everyone could sit there and swap stories . And so that festering pit is what gave rise to presumably people talking about this gears thing . And so they opened their press conference on Sunday by saying gears of war is now a console exclusive. We're back to that clumsy language because no one's come up with anything better . It is still coming to PC , of course because your PC is an Xbox . Oh wait, they scrapped that branding too. So they don't really have an easy way to say hey it's coming to I guess you could say it's coming to Xbox storefronts and platform only and that would be taken to mean it is going to be on the Xbox store on PC. I think it is also even that's not strictly true. I think there is a page on Steam for it . So maybe maybe they're they're still just bringing it to fucking steam anyway. Anyway, it is a it is a way for yes, it is a way for them to say to say it is no longer coming to PlayStation without just saying, hey , fuck a PlayStation. Because many of their other games are still coming to PlayStation . And so this was a pick and choose thing. They chose this game and also clockwork revolution , which was shown here . That's coming out next year. That will also be exclusive to the Xbox family of storefronts or I guess not yeah, maybe that'll still be on steam too. Who knows ? And so that's a move. There was also a podcast. There was an interview with Matt Booty, who's their head of studios , where he kind of said, hey , you know, like we'll probably still bring multiplayer focused games to multiple platforms and our single player more focused experiences, maybe we'll keep those back. This sounds like a strategy that is not set in stone and has no rules to it whatsoever . This sounds like a strategy that they sat down and said, let's pick a couple of games and make them exclusive because that's the direction we want to at least head in at least test the direction and see how it goes . A lot of people said this just happened and was a super late breaking thing and was almost decided like the night before the show, which Aaron Greenberg who is I, guess, what he's the head of marketing for Xbox said that was not the case and that they just chose to keep it to a small team of individuals and reveal it to the world at the press conference. This led to a situation where there was a podcast interview that went up about gears that had an old version of the trailer that still had the PlayStation five logo in it that they had to then go and replace , which seems irresponsible . If you take what Greenberg said at face value, if we want to walk down that road just a little bit, which I only want to walk down that road a little bit . You could see a world where incoming leadership makes this decision and they make it hastily. I mean, let's let's face it, you know, like Sharma has not been on the job that long. This is not some festering long time strategy that they've been lumbering towards for a long time. So even if the decision wasn't made yesterday, it was still made recently enough that it's crazy , or that it's jarring, I guess . And so the exact timing of it doesn't matter it's more the turnaround on the direction they were heading in and whatever else . So So what does that mean ? It means that what they've said, you know, like in other interviews over the course of the week, you had Sharma out there saying and I think Matthew Ball said the same thing is that you need exclusives. You need reasons for people to buy an Xbox as they return to console, which is another good phrase that practically says boy this thing's been fucked for a long time and now we will return to console. Like there's it really feels like the Xbox division has been taken over by people that fucking don't like Xbox and they're like, no, we're going to fix this shit. And they're like, okay, do you guys even know what you're doing? Do you know anything about any of the no you're just gonna come and move fast and break stuff? Cool. That's a cool tech thing to do . And honestly, maybe that's exactly what this fucking company needs right now because it's obvious that the other stuff wasn't fucking working , you know , so fuck it, man, break some shit. I don't know. Like I can't I can't be mad at it. I got to look at it and go like, yeah, I guess, man , if you want to move faster than this and you want to at least, you know, at least you'll know soon if this is going to work or not work , right ? And so they're, you know, they're they look like they're scrambling because they probably are . I think bringing gears back into the fold well, okay, let's talk about exclusives. Let's talk about selling consoles a little bit . I think it makes sense that you have to have something in this world where these consoles have become more and more similar as time has gone on , you need to have a different iator, you need to have content or something . They thought GamePass was gonna be that thing, you know, because Game Pass is a subscription service. And it's a great way to play games. Why wouldn't you get an Xbox because then you pay could just us a monthly fee and play all these games ? And they thought that that was going to be the direction for them , especially as the company was moving to judging things by engagement metrics and what have you . And so I think that that made a lot of sense for that era , but it hasn't really panned out. You saw that when they had to raise the price, you know, they went out and acquired companies and paid billions of dollars for call of duty and you know like they went out and acquired stuff and just threw it all in the game pass and you're like, cool man, the best deal in gaming just got better. But behind the scenes they're like ah shit you know like we spent all this money and it's not moving the needle . Like adding call of duty to game pass did not lead to a bunch of new game pass subscriptions. I mean in some cases you would say it just led to fewer sales of call of duty though you could also blame that on call of duty not being a very good game this year. It's kind of, you know, like you can you can point a few different fingers in a few different directions on that specific one . But at the end of the day , you need to have a reason for people to buy your console, especially when you're on PC and the best versions of your games are almost always going to be the PC versions because you can outspo,k well it's harder and harder all the time . But you can build a PC that's way more powerful than a fucking Xbox series X So why would you buy an Xbox? This seems to be the thing that was guiding the direction of Project Helix because it seemed like, oh, well, yeah, you're right. Why would you buy an Xbox? Let's just make a PC . That opens up the door to a billion different situations and issues that they'll have to solve around accessory pricing and do they still charge for multiplayer and this and that and like if this thing is still a PC, then what the fuck are we, you know, why do you even have an Xbox? And then the answer is kind of like murky because it's like, well, we're backwards compatibility to work, we need to do this or you know there's no real reason to keep making whatever the fucking Xbox is anymore if you're also shipping a PC . So how do you get people to care ? You're selling people Xboxes because they don't want to deal with a PC. And there's a lot of people in that boat that just are never going to hook a PC up to a TV. They're not going to understand how it works. They're not , you know, they're scared of it , even though it's less scary than it's ever been in a lot of ways . It's still a it's still too much for the average person . Take a look at Windows eleven running on portable devices or hook up a window s machine up to a TV right now and it's obvious. Like that stuff's not ready for prime time . It's getting there, but it's not it's not anywhere near it . Um And so how do you get people to care about buying an Xbox? And the solution they seem to have hopped on to now because GamePass didn't do it is like Oh, what if there were games you could only get there . Because remember, they're not really especially trying to compete with a PC. They're specifically trying to get you to not buy a PlayStation and instead buy their machine. And yeah, exclusive games, especially early in a generation is a way to do that. Earlier in a generation, you've got more people making that decision. And so if you've got a really strong launch of exclusive games, that's something that sways that early audience . Later on, when everything's everywhere and things have changed a little bit, you know, it can be harder. Like how to sell a console is really strange . And so in some ways, it's weird that they're doing it now, but by making these moves now with gears and with clockwork revolution , it at least gives them some data. It at least pushes them in a direct ion . And it seems to be like, you know, it seems the direction that they want to go in is what I was talking about a little bit last week was this idea of for game pass to work and for Xbox to work , they need to have a steady pipeline of major games that you play there . You need to feel like your game pass subscription is worth it every month. And that doesn't mean you're playing the same game for six months straight because if you're doing that, you eventually wake up one morning and go, oh fuck, I play paid more in subscription fees than it would have cost me to just buy this video game. Game pass sucks. They need to have a steady flow of content . First party and third party, but like when you're talking first party content , that's where you have the opportunity to make exclusive video games that are only available this way on this platform where this subscription service exists. They'll still let you buy the game separately if you want to . But they would rather well, I'm sure they'd rather you do both . And so when I look at that direction and you take that again, when you line up that direction, that direction on its own seems crazy when you think about where Xbox has been headed for all these years and all the times they've said, Oh yeah, whatever, man , you know, like we're not the console war is over. It's dumb. This is stupid. We're going to put our games on PlayStation and sell, you know, like, you know That turnaround is insane on its own . When you take it with all these quotes from people that are now part of the new Xbox leadership team, where they are saying, yeah, we're going to fuck we're going to do some shit in the next hundred days and this is with this company's loss is where it's languaged. It's, you know, like when you take all these quotes, you go, oh yeah , they're under the gun. Whether that's something from on high or something that is there's like tension and like a desire to move quickly, just strictly coming from the Xbox leadership . It starts to make a lot more sense . Why they would do this? I can't tell you the strategy is going to work . I don't know that anyone knows that right now and I don't know that Gears of War is the right game to do it with on either side. Gears of war feels like a very safe game to pull back into the Xbox fold because I don't, you know , the only thing PlayStation players have gotten in the Gears franchise is that reissue of Gears one that came and went like that. Most people I mentioned that to didn't even know that thing came out So it's not like Fortsa Horizon, which apparently sold quite well on PlayStation or a couple of the other games they've brought to PS five that have done pretty well . Gears didn't seem like it was doing those numbers. And so it seems like they have pulled back. In fact, you know, you take the quote from Matt Booty about multiplayer games. He was on Gamer Tag Radio . And he said that games with a multiplayer focus will probably still come to PS five, which mirrors Sony's strategy when Sony pulled off the PC , when they pulled their their single player stuff off PC, there was still this acknowledgement of like, well , multiplayer games will probably still be mult i platform because we need all the players we can get. It's a weird thing to think of when we think about the value of single player games and how people have really shit on single player gaming over the years in favor of all these different multiplayer games and free to play this and that you know, it's funny to come back to this idea of single player content as prestige stuff , but that's exactly the strategy that Sony has been running for years . And so at some point, Microsoft woke up and said, I guess we could try that . And so that seems to be at least a part of what they're doing strategically . I think they're in a really interesting spot right now. They have been for years and, it's interest ing to see them now trying to visibly unfuck this thing , whereas before it felt like they were trying to unfuck it from the shadows , and they never quite unfucked it. This feels like a moment where either they will unfuck it or it will reach a point where it truly is no longer fixable . And so over the next five years or whatever, we're going to see how this works . You start to wonder if this is their last shot , how much patience not, you know , Microsoft will always want to have a presence in gaming and what have you. And you know, even if the Xbox console truly did go away or whatever, but this truly feels like their last attempt to figure it out as a console manufacturer . And they're going to give it their all , whether it's the right type of all clearly remains to be seen , but there is something weirdly exciting about that like this shit storm that has been surrounding them over the last week or two as they've been like it puts all the other small shit into perspective where they're doing all this dumb stuff like responding to people on Twitter and fucking we're going to start writing Xbox and all caps and we're going to do this and we're going to do that and like all this meaningless shit . This is the stuff that actually has meaning and hopefully they're appropriately focused on that and they don't waste a bunch of time going on What does Twitter think about this ? Because if they can't come up with their own strategy based on fucking some actual sound data , and if they're just going by vibes and fanboys , there's not going to be an Xbox for much longer . So we'll see . We'll see . We'll see if they can reset the business. They went ahead and announced they showed a bunch of games. They didn't really announce too much . They showed a new trailer for Fable that was very slim, I would say, on gameplay content. It was a nice little story piece . Halo is coming out in July on Xbox and PlayStation and Steam . They are adding three missions to the game that are set previous to the events of Halo one , which I find fascinating. It's nice that they're doing something that will be specific and new for this , you know, campaign remake . They also showed some footage of it running and it's it's faster paced than Halo one. That was that was sort of my other my other thought about re releasing the Halo one campaign is that Master Chief is a slow plotting motherfucker that cannot move to save his fucking life because he doesn't need to, he's a giant armored dude . That doesn't always make for exciting video game gameplay , especially not all these years later when expectations for dual joysticks and movement and we're all good at doing that now. Back when Halo one came out, there was some question about like, I don't know, man, can you fucking can you move with this one and aim with this one? Can you even figure that out or is it too much for your stupid monkey brain? We can all do that now . And so yeah , he is a faster moving dude now and that is that is the right move from a gameplay perspective. Some of that stuff look pretty slick . So we'll see, you know, that's out in July. That's out very soon. The person a four remake was announced and that will be out february eighteenth . This is this looks like exactly what you would think it would be . Obviously Pers,ona in terms of its animations and menu designs and everything else has only gotten crazier and more dynamic in the years after the original release of Persona four . And so remaking it in a style that evokes is more evocative of kind of, you know, Persona five 's wild shit and, you know, some of the crazy UI stuff they did there, I think, is the right move . I was ready to just fucking ignore this . And then after watching the trailer, I was like, oh man , this actually does look really fucking neat . So yeah, I don't know. There's that. They showed state of decay three , which they have not shown that in a long time . A new held blade game. They're just calling it Senua . I don't know Doomatal DLC was announced. They've been talking specifics about this DLC for some time about like the nature of it and you know, and some of the other things that they've done in this DLC . is That going to be out july seventh. And so they finally announced that that exists formally. Crazy Taxi was announced here . They are doing a clear green Xbox series X and a controller to celebrate the twenty fifth anniversary of Xbox, which is this year . Minecraft Dungeons two got a date that's september twenty ninth . You got your requisite sequences for Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout seventy six and Flight Simulator twenty four , which is all of those are getting new content in one way or another . They did announce person a six , which is a which was a very short trailer that did not get any kind of , you know, meaningful detail there they also showed they cl ose with call of duty and the call of duty trailer was focused on the DMZ mode, which is their extraction like mode that they did a few years ago. This is going to be a much bigger mode than it was that time. That time they called it a beta for a long time and eventually kind of abandoned it. This is going to be a more fully fledged mode, but the way they showed it was this kind of fake voice chat , you know, like very military focused voice chat type stuff that is not how people play those games. And they tried to make it look all tactical and serious . I don't think that did a good job of showing the game. Prior to putting this trailer out, they released a gigantic call of duty blog post describing the DMZ mode in like excruciating detail like okay, this is going to be the PVP stuff and then you can collect resources and do this like they really broke it down and after reading it, I was like, okay, that's significantly deeper than the last time they did DMZ. I think that's interesting . I would be interested in seeing how this goes and what have you. But the trailer I thought just looked very generic, just guys skulking around and getting jumped and shooting each other and looting guys and it was just like not that interesting. I think I would have preferred them focus on the competitive multip layer because I think there would be something more to say there the killbox mode or the killbox map they're working on that's a dynamic map that shifts around and stuff. Would have loved to have seen more of that here . The DMZ thing, I think it was just it was just it just felt very flat and not a great way to show that game. Not something you close your conference with either. It's just like, oh, okay, yeah, all right, sure . And then they spent thirty minutes or so talking about gears of war , which um as someone who really didn't like gears of war judgment I was not really on board with the idea of doing another prequel, especially, you know, Halo did this to a cent as well where it's like, Hey, we made a game and left ended on a cliffhanger. And then the next game doesn't really deal with that cliffhanger as satisfyingly or at all . And so gears is just as it's a prequel. They're not following on from the very obvious cliffhanger from the previous game . And instead they are doing this other thing by showing the events the sequence they had where they were they walked through the different parts of that game after after the press conference was over after the showcase was over . I thought did a good job of like selling that game and why they would do this. It's because you know, you think about it and they're like, oh, it's going to tell the story of of Marcus and Dom. And that is to me the least interesting thing about gears , like the state of that world, the other characters. There's there's so many things, especially with how far they've gotten away from that in the later games. I think so much of that is more interesting than the Dom stuff. I don't care about Dom. I never did, I never will. When they killed Dom in was it Gears two ? It was not some heartfelt like, Oh my god you know, so I think that's a that's a dumb focus . But by having this set on the day that the locuss raise up out of the ground and start murdering people, you get like the world of gears before it's been destroyed . And I think that that is interesting to look at and they show, you know, like hanging out in bars and they show like real, you know, kind of seventies looking cars and all this other, you know, they're going to show the origin story of the first time a chainsaw got fucking bolted to a gun, which is great . That's the actual emotional core of gears is the creation of the fucking lancer . And I thought that I came away from that thinking like, hey, this looks pretty good. It's still gears. They're doing a twelve player horde mode , which sounds really interesting . Multiplayer seems like it is still the same thing. They literally used the word sweaty when describing the multiplayer. So just go ahead and write that off right now as a thing you're never going to fucking bother with because they don't care about fixing it though it is funny to have quotes from like Matt Booty saying like oh you know our multiple you know we',ll probably still keep multiplayer games on multiplatform and you're like, okay, this looks like it is the biggest multiplayer gears game yet . And yet you've made it a console exclusive . Okay Okay , you know, the differentiation is that games that are multiplayer only, multiplayer first, what have you is really what he means when he says that stuff like a hell divers , for example, to look at the PlayStation side of things. Hell Divers is a perfect example of a game that largely benefits by being everywhere because you get players everywhere that can play it for these games to have long legs and to have player bases that last for years and years , realistically , you need to rope in as many people as you possibly can to play them . You know , does gears need that? Maybe I don't know. I don't think, you know, again , I don't want to touch I already don't want to touch Gears multiplayer after the little bit they talked about it. The co op mode, the horde the horde mode , I think looks really neat and I want to try that for sure. But the competitive, again , done. Nope, I'm good . Uh , and that was Xb ox . Jeff Keeley had his show where you know he showed the open closed with very big games ,ident Riles Ev Veronica was shown. They dropped the word code from it, but yes, it is, in fact, a remake of Resident Evil Code of Veronica . The Dreamcast classic and that'll be out in twenty twenty seven . They will also the square also showed the third chapter, the final game in the Final Fantasy rem VIIake trilogy . And that looked fine. Again, as someone who did not play the second one at all and played about ten hours of the first one, I respect those games. I think that they look really neat and when I when I was told about the gameplay and how it operated and when I first kind of got my hands on it I was like, oh this is really cool. I'm glad they're doing this instead of just duplicating the same combat from the original game. Like this all sounds cool. But after seven or eight hours of it, I just kind of lost my taste for it. I was just like, yeah, I don't really want to fucking play this. I don't know that I want to play this many hour s of this combat and this and that. So I sort of fell off of it, but I appreciate 's a real achievement that they made it, that they did this , that they pulled it off , that they managed to remake this trilogy. And you know, hey, the third game's not out yet, so maybe maybe they shit the bed, but that they made this trilogy and that it is as well liked as it is considering how iconic the original release of Final Fantasy VII is, how larger than life that game became the very idea of remaking it all seems incredibly daunting . And so the idea that they pulled it off and that they managed to announce at the beginning, hey, we're actually making three separate games, which people are like, are you fucking crazy? And that they have pulled that off and not , you know, not spent forty years doing it. It's pretty awesome . It's pretty awesome that they did that thing . They're making a new cuphead game for the master system . There's also like a new other proper cuphead game in development, but literally they're making a new master a new game for the Sega Master System called Mighty Cuphead Adventure . That's pretty awesome. That was announced there . Alien Isolation two was shown Famido Owedas next game got a name. It's now called Gen Atlas. It was previously called Object Robot . And you know, as Aweda is the guy who made the games about you climbing on big dudes. This game seems like you climb on some big dudes . It's another big dude climber. Less creebling and more climbing, I think , than a dragon's dogma . They showed a new trailer for Stranger Then Heaven. This is Sega's game from the RGG team They announced a cast for that game and it includes Snoop Dog Snoop Dog's son and Tupac Shakur They put Tupac into a video game and then they had Snoop Dog come out on stage and And say like, oh yeah, you know, and a quick exchange with Keeley about like, oh, working with Tupac's estate and all this other stuff. And you know , but Snoop seemed more interested in talking about Death Row Games, which apparently is still coming. It seems like his son is running that. I ran into someone . Someone came up to me during Summer Game Fest, someone I hadn't seen in a bit and was like , you fucking believe this tupac shit just and so we complained about that together for a little bit. We commiserated about how fucked this is specifically because apparently the tup estate is not Tupac's family . And my understanding of it is that Tupac's family is currently suing the estate this person also kind of and you know I think this person is in a position to where they know maybe would have had some dealing . I think we all know Snoop Dog is a person who will show up if the check clears, right? I think at this point in his career , Snoop Dog has really dedicated himself to staying papered up and he's in a lot of he has always been that way to a certain degree. You have to remember all the way back to when like there was going to be a Snoop Dog Cadillac The Snoop Deville, which I think they did do some special editions of those . At one point, in the wake of that, I remember an interview where he was like, yeah, I also got the Snoop de Grill coming that he was gonna make a barbecue grill. And just like, you know, just that's to me that has been Snoop Dog for a very long time as he's a guy who will show up and do a thing . You know, Snoop Dog had a and still has a discord server that I think is completely dead now , but like he fucking fell into some NFT fucking trap. And so some snoop dog NFT discord server popped up that this is just fucking detestable on a lot of levels too . And so it's hard for me to look at Snoop Dog and his business ventures and look at that as like, oh, it's a positive that Snoop Dog has gotten involved with this project. That really speaks to its quality because Snoop Dog is someone who again will , you know, he does not seem like he is choosy when it comes to endorsement deals and all of this other stuff. Anyway, long story short , the person I ran into who, you know, we sat around kind of talking about this Tupac stuff to also had many unkind things to say about Snoop Dog's son and his involvement in video games. So we will see what becomes of death row games in the future. But all of this seems highly suspect. I don't know. Like I think that putting Tupac in a video game and there's a Japanese actor whose name I don't have at the tip of my tongue because it's not Tupac who is also deceased who, you know, is appearing in the game and you know Tupac's not the only one that they're doing this with but Tupac is too it's Tupac man. Like I like this is not a good thing for them to be doing . While saying that, I will also say that I think that Tupac's legacy and Tupac's likeness have not always been treated with the most respect . I don't know if you remember when a Tupac hologram showed up at Coachella . Like it's, you know, and you know, multiple posthumous releases and the way his catalog has been rated and some, you know, if you believe some conspiracy theories, you're like, I don't even know if all of those were too pop . There's just been a lot of sh it built up around Tupac posthumously and this is not this is not great either . It's a funny thing and I can laugh at it because I, you know, like I don't I don't hold I don't hold this in such sacred regard that I'm like , you know, because I think Tupac Tupac's career if you ask me started at its highest point when Tupocalypse now came out came out with Brenda, Brenda had a baby on it. You know, like his first solo work . And I think his output was very uneven. The highs are very high . But there's a lot of stuff that, you know, again, as someone who was a digital underground fan and knew Tupac from that and how he kind of rose up out of that and started his solo career and had all this kind of interesting work . There's that whole period where he's signed together you can find interviews with like Ice T about this . Ice T this stuff pops up on TikTok from like little clips from Ice T interviews where it's Ice Talking about Tupac and the idea that Tupac disliked he was never , he was never in a gang . Shug Knight got him out, you know, he got on death row and just like completely flipped and became this guy and you know, was never really that, you know, he was not that type of fucking thug and he was not that type of fucking gangbanger and he was not this and not that. And so like he just seems like a guy who came from a very different background that got roped into that stuff and , you know , ended up dead, you know And it a lot of it just seems, you know, like to set aside myth, the myth to set aside Tupac's legacy a little bit , it kind of seems dumb You know, that he that he went that way and it just seemed like he never really belonged there. So you know, the latter days of Tupac's career when he was putting that stuff out and Machaveli and all the like it just' alls of it just seemed really fucking phony to me . I don't know. Like it just never it never sat well with me. It never seemed like that never seemed like Tupac the actor or maybe in some ways it seemed a little too much like Tupac the actor , but it did not square with what I knew of Tupac based on his earlier output and what I know of knew of the area, you know, like what I knew of Marin City, you know, as where Tupac was from to some extent . It just like a lot of that stuff just didn't line up . And so like, I don't know, man, like the whole Tupac thing and what Tupac has become , especially after his death is in some ways pretty fucking ridiculous . But that doesn't mean that it's like great that he's in this video game. I still think that this is like a very questionable move . You know, it is to steal a wrestling term. It is a cheap pop and I don't know, I think Stranger than Heaven probably has other interesting things about it that would be worth talking about . Maybe in a few days we can talk about those . Who can say? Um what else? There's a new Gundam game that was shown here. That's No It's Do you wonder so there's a studio? There's a video game studio called That's No Moon , which is a Star Wars reference. And so when the trailer started and the That's No Moon logo showed up , like there were multiple people who were like, Oh, this is a Star Wars game . But it was cross fire, cross fires back. Remember crossfire, Asia's biggest video game for the last thirty years. There's never been a bigger one and there will never be a bigger one. They're trying it again . That's no moon is making a new crossfire game. This is a single player shooter . They're doing some interesting looking things around how cover works Um and the trailer itself looked pretty interesting and then they at the end of it says it's crossfire and you're like, oh my god why are people still taking smile? I mean, well, the answer is like 'cause they have some. I was like, why are people still taking smile gates money ? Remember that Remedy and Iron Galaxy, I guess, did the multiplayer, right? Remember that crossfire X came to Xbox and did a grand opening grand closing in like a very brief period of time where Remedy did these single player campaigns and I think Iron Galaxy did the multiplayer and neither parts of that were very good and it was in like a beta test state for years on the Xbox, seemingly . That game came out and then and is so like they ripped all of it out. If you have it installed on your Xbox, it has been patched to just be a screen that says, This game's not here anymore . You can't even play the campaigns. It's just fucking gone , which seems stupid. The thing about Crossfire is seem to imply that this is a single player game, but like during the trailer, it really looks like it would be a good two player co op game. Like it almost looked like the next like the next coming of my A ofr Two , which is maybe not what you want as a comparison for your video game. The Army of Two games were not amazing, but they're memorable . And so So yeah , I don't know . The game itself looks pretty neat, but the part where it is a crossfire game is so gross to me like oh, hey, we're making another one. We're trying it again . Remedy couldn't get it done. Maybe these guys can't. Like it just seems like this is weird. It's just weird. They announced Guild Wars three. There will be some sort of beta for that available in twenty twenty seven . They are also releasing that on PlayStation as well as PC . And so some of the quotes I saw from them about it was this notion of like, hey, yeah, we really want to make sure we nail this control wise so that it handles well with the controller because we're coming to console and doing all this other stuff. So yeah, they showed a new Star Wars Galactic Racer trailer. I stood and watched a bunch of that at the old summer game fest and that game looks really great. I didn't get a chance to play it, but Galactic Racer looks fucking rad and looking at the modes and stuff they were showing, like it looks almost like a rogue like in a way. Like there's a tour mode or something where you will get certain numbers of like if you fail out you, lose a retry, like you have a set number of lives almost, but you're buying permanent upgrades for your for your speeders and stuff as you go. And so that's pretty neat. It has a landing mechanic of some kind. I kept seeing a perfect landing thing in the upper corner . Great sense of speed, the collisions between vehicles are great and it's got like a real burnout flavored takedown camera when someone crashes that I think looks fucking awesome . Again , great sense of speed , looks great . Some of the some of the tracks are looked really wide to me in a way that stuck out . But yeah , that looked tremendous. I'm very, very interested in that. They showed Virtua Fighter , which is now called Virt Fuighta er Crossroads . They showed a lot of the story mode I don't really know what to make of this. The story mode looks like silly and not silly. It doesn't look like World Tour Street Fighter Six Silly . But like I don't I don't know the way they talk about this game has me like wondering if it's going to be a fun and good fighting game . But part of that is because they are spending a lot of time focusing on this story mode with a bunch of characters that I don't really care about currently because I don't know who any of them are . And so here's Virtual Fighter and then here's a bunch of dip ships walking around doing stuff. I'm like no, I want to see the I want the lady to do the fucking I want her to to do a backflip and kick. I want I want to see Akira do stuff wait, wait a minute .e Inadst, it's like a big whisper like that's Pi Chan. You're like, oh , so that stuff could be super fun and interesting . A couple of points I was looking at and go like, wow, you're just making virtual Quest two here, aren't we? What the fuck is this? They had a separate thing focused on Virtual Fighter that they aired later that same day that again, most of that was focused on that single player stuff, but they did have a thing kind of near the end that was like, oh so this versus mode and we're going to show some of that and you look at it and like it looks okay And also the way they talk about it . The way they talk about it in that thing, there's a lot there's a lot of like, hey, you know, we want this game to be simple and everyone to be able to pick up and play it, but also we need ed to be have some depth to it and but we really wanted to be something that people can just jump into and play and we really want to, you know , and you know, like at the end of the day Virtual Fighter is a three button game. It's block punch kick. It's not super deep on its surface. You can mash your way through the arcade mode in that game relatively well . The changes they seem to be making look fascinating , but like I look at it and go like, I don't know what you're I'm not really sure what you're making here . I don't believe they let anyone get their hands on it this week. I think that they only had a presentation sort of like crazy taxi So I don't think there's a ton of new information there there . But like the yeah, when they get out there and say, hey, we want to make a game that anyone can play but still have the depths, it's like it is kind of a meaningless phrase But that combined with what they were showing and looking at it and trying to map like what I think about Virtual Fighter and how it looks and feels and plays , like there's just something about it that looked very off to me . And so even the verses stuff that they showed, it didn't really look like Virtuo Fighter anymore . I'll be happy to be wrong about that. You know, like we'll find out eventually here I suppose. But that game's not out until next year. It just, I don't know, it looks weird. It looks weird and I don't know what to think about it . I also tend to agree that like, yeah, it's sure some. point At you need to have a departure from the thing you keep making and like hey, you know, they made a lot of virtual fighter games and and I guess it makes sense for them to want to try something different. Also it's like kind of a different team at this point, you know, I think there's a handful of people that have VF experience, but obviously it's been a very long time They showed Star Wars Zero Company which is, the tactical the tactics, the Xcom style Star Wars game . That's out in August and looks pretty fucking good, man Let's see Monster Hunter Wild's Ascendants was announced. That's an expansion to the original game that did not seem to satisfy anyone who was already unsatisfied with the state of monster hunter wilds . They showed a little bit of clutch, which looks pretty good. It's a driving game . The Wolf Among Us two resurfaced after a lot of years of not resurfacing . The next stellar blade game was shown. Different protagonists had an interesting look to it. They announced the next set of Street Fighter six DLC , which will include Tifa from Final Fantasy , along with some other Bozos . And yeah, they closed with Final Fantasy seven Revelations . And that was a pretty solid show . I mean , let's keep this recap going and if we go all the way back a full week ancient history , Sony had a state of play . Playstation spent some time announcing some games themselves before before everybody else even got started, they showed a bunch of vulvarine which looked alright incredibly bloody to the point where I think someone finally gave a quote that was like, yeah, if you want to disable that stuff you can it looks more a lot more linear than the Spider Man games that insomnia did. You know, it's not it's not Wolverine clawing his way around New York City , which wouldn't make much sense . And it looked nice. I don't know. It looked like, you know, I don't think it's like a mind blowing departure from, you know, like you look at it and you you look at that and you know what that video game is. You look at that and you go, yep, he's got meters and when he gets hurt, he can burn some meter for healing factor and he's got claws and he fucks and rips people up and there are a zillion different suits in it because they can't ship one of these games without having everyone's favorite fucking wolverine costume in it because fan service is ruining everything. They announced new characters for Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls . There's a Dave the Divers spinoff that seems to be a cooking game. It is a boncho the Chef , which had a really nice look to it They showed the upcoming Tomb Raider game and also that was a chance for them to say that they are pushing it back a little bit Anaperna showed a game called The Lost Wild , which is a I saw this. I got to look at this, I got to look at this game. I watched them play a little bit of it . The trailer the trailer for the Lost Wild . I don't know that that does it was nice to sit down and get a look at it and hear them talk about it a little bit because the Lost Wild they want to their pitch for that game is that they want to make a game where dinosaurs behave like animals and not monsters . And so instead of it being like, you know, it might as well be Godzilla showing up and roaring at you or whatever, it is much more you are hiding because you don't have a bunch of fucking weapons and you are hiding under vehicles and you know you are being hunted by dinosaurs as you work your way through this island complex . You basically wake up on an island you have, no idea how you got there, you were in some kind of car accident or something happened. And you're like, What the fuck? And as you dig into it, you find other humans and key cards. And you have to find floppy dis tocs save your progress and even when you save the game, you can still be jumped by dinosaurs. Like the save like you find the machine to put your disc into to save your game and a meter fills up, but as that meter is filling you can still get fucking jumped and so it seems kind of fucked up and it 's got a it's got a neat look to it. The pitch was very neat. The pitch was very neat. So we'll , you know, I'll keep an eye out for that . They showed Ace combat six here or I'm sorry, Ace combat eight, close enough . And it looks great. The story trailer had a whole lot of story in it . The strange real is extremely real here in Wings of Thieve that That game will be first playable on september twenty eighth through some sort of buy the expensive edition play it early kind of thing. They're making a new stuntman game Which is fucking crazy . Sabre Interactive is publishing a new Stuntman game called Stuntman Hollywood. And this time they've got licensed vehicles so you will have what is it? Like you'll have back to the future, you'll have the Dolorian in there. You'll have Kits from Night Rider . I believe there's a Jurassic Park thing in there , but I don't think that was in the trailer . The Mad Max And I believe fast and furious, but Stuntman was always a weird Oh Miami Vice. Right, yes, there was Miami Vice of course . They have they have partnered with Universal. So any universal IP that involves cars is probably on the table here . The Stuntman games were very when was the last one? I mean, I feel like they have not made a stuntman game in decades . But it was very much like okay, you're listening to someone on the radio and they're like, go here and do this, and you're driving through this course and you're doing all these stunts and you're getting graded on it at the end . two thousand nine. Yeah, yeah, Xbox three hundred and sixty. That was that was the last stuntman game. It's been a while . And so yeah, you're driving as a stuntman in a movie and you're doing, you know, you're running through these courses and following the directions. And it was always a neat idea that I felt, I don't know, some people really like those stuntman games. I always felt like they never quite came together . It was like, this is a really neat idea and I'm not that excited about actually playing it . But yeah, Stitman and Hollywood, it's cool that they're going to go get real movie licenses and everything else. I think that's a fun way to bring this back. That's a really cool thing for them to do. So neat that they're doing that. Control was shown here. They gave it a release date september twenty fourth . We already talked about that. Probably the biggest hit of the PlayStation show , the biggest thing they're doing is that they are bringing Gitaru Man to the PlayStation plus backwards compatibility catalog , and so you'll be able to play Guitaru Man on a PlayStation five . That is going to happen this month and then next month they're releasing Syops , the Mindgate Conspiracy . The ultimate B game. Syops is a cool fucking game that is not an amazing video game , but it was a pretty fucking good solid ass video game in its day that had fun telekinetic powers , you know, years before Force Unleashed did it and it is a pretty cool fucking thing . So pretty awesome that this is happening. That's got to be Warner Brothers doing that, right? They since they bought Midway, I assume they have the rights to all of that stuff. So yeah, they showed a new until dawn . And then they announced the new God of War game game which is a it's a God of war guide den where you play as Kratos' dead wife whose name is I still I still don't remember, I don't know that I have heard this pronounced out loud still. Lau Fe Lafe LAUFAY. So the game is called God of War Lafay, Lao Fe . Laufe . They always just called her Fei in the game. So I don't I don't know . Anyway, she's dead as spoilers for God of war as a concept . But yes, you it seems like the opening they showed it like twenty minutes of seemingly the opening of the game And I found it to be a very slow and sluggish way to debut this game . It seemed like a bad way to go with it But the combat seems much more directly , I don't know, I mean, you know, she's got a sword . And so not to say that the God of War is not a character action game unto itself, but this looks like a bit more of a traditional character action game than God of War ever did where she is fucking launching people up in the air and doing shit, you know, like you know hitting hitting fucking monsters with swords. It looks fine . I think it's good that they're doing something different because I think if they just rolled right into yet another god of war, that is just one too many, but like , hey, we're going to tell this side story and fill in this interesting gap in the story because what happened to her after she died, which seems like a question of like, well, she rotted in the earth stupid. Like, oh wait no, that's not how any of this works. And so telling her afterlife story about all of this , I think is a sound way to go . She's got a gelatinous cube with her that is apparently named Frank . And yeah, I don't know. I thought that the trailer that they showed looked a little too sluggish and a little too dull. I don't know. It wasn't a trailer. They just showed gameplay . And it's cool that they showed a bunch of gameplay, but also they showed a bunch of really underwhelming like quick time events and like all this other stuff you're like, okay, let's what is what are we actually doing here ? That I wish they would have tightened that up or just gone with something of a more traditional trailer here I think it looks fine. I don't know. Like again, it's it's I don't I like the idea of a gelatinous cube , but still I think the gameplay looked a little underwhelming . But again, it's the early parts of the game. And so all you can really do is look at it and go like, well, I don't know, maybe once you've crawled your way up half the skill tree, this combat looks a lot better . But beyond that, it looks like a pretty kind of bone stock . Hey, we made this here',s a mod ern action game for you from a publisher that makes those . And it's not something that is highly, you know, I can't imagine it's going to be some game that's highly technical. You're not going to play it and go, o likeh, I didn't get an SS rank on that encounter and I need to play, you know , it's clearly not that kind of game because it's meant to be a little more mainstream than that, but you know, it looks like something that PlayStation would make. It looks like a game that PlayStation would develop and publish . And it's really dumb, man. I don't know. Like people are dumb . I don't know if you know this , but there's a lot of fucking stupid people out there . I think it's very easy to look at this and say this is an interesting and fascinating like story to tell in the middle of Kratos' adventure and fill in these gaps in the story and this is like interesting material to go off of if you really care about God of war . And I think that makes a ton of sense . But naturally, like dip shits on the internet or like, I can't believe you play as a woman. Where's Kratos ? Where's Kratos? I don't want to play as lady. I want to play as cool guy Kratos. I want to kiss Kratos on his manly lips . I want to feel his rippling muscles. It's just some weird fucking I don't know. Like I said, people are fucking crazy. People are fucking stupid online and those people, you know, I'm convinced that those people do not play video games at all at this point. They just they're just making like weird angry man videos to try to make money on the internet or whatever. It's a real pathetic state of affair s, but these people are fucking straight up losers . It's annoying because as someone who also looks as someone who looks at this game and goes, I don't know, I don't think this game looks great I have I feel like I have pretty standard reasons that are not fucking creepy force feeling that way But these dip shits are out there like this is their own they're picking the video games away from us . I am a white man and I must be served. It's really fucking pathetic. I don't know. Like these people are just fucking losers . And that was Sony's thing and that's and that was E three , you know and so something I you know, like with the announcement of Crazy Taxi and seeing that that is a very straightforward like sequel to Crazy Taxi , I found that interesting because there was I want to say there was a quote from Sega around the time they killed the super game where they kind of said, hey, yeah, you know, we're maybe like going a little less into this free to play live service. Like you know, it felt like that they had gotten their lumps from trying to break into live service and canceling that game hyenas and whatever else that maybe they had learned some lessons and said, Okay, we're just going to make traditional video games . And the thing I'll say, you know, Keyley's show would have been the show where most of it would've shown up . But I guess my question or my feeling here is that the trend seems to be we are seeing way fewer of those those way fewer free to play, way fewer live service launches . Obviously Sony has had a real change in their strategy and that's probably part of why they don't have more games to announce right now is because they probably went down that road for a while, killed some stuff , and are still kind of working their way through to the other side of that much of Microsoft stuff seemed to be, you know, very traditional traditionally focused . Much of the stuff on Key's show seemed like that as well. You didn't have the big sponsor block of like let's call it the extended Hoyoverse. Not just the games that they make themselves, but all of the other studios that are making fucking knockoffs of those you know, you didn't have that giant block of those in Keyley's show anymore, which doesn't mean those games aren't being made but it does mean that they're not sponsoring they're not sponsoring as large of a chunk of that show. We did see a couple of those during Keeley's show for sure . And that's just not to say that those games should never exist. At some point, that stuff became overwhelming . And also , it seemed like a lot of traditional publishers were chasing that dream all the way down . And I wonder if this is something that that I wonder if we're seeing a pendulum swing back a little bit where it's like, okay we tried this. We can't do it. We don't have the we don't have the right studio structure like whatever for whatever reason, you know, Sega can't figure it out . And so they seem to be kind of bailing out on that a little bit . And we don't really see a ton of this stuff coming from anyone else right now either . And so I wonder if any lessons have been learned . I wonder if we're making our way to the other side of the well, I got an idea. What if we made a battle royale game? Those are hot . Like I wonder if we are on the other side of those pitches . And I wonder if we're getting to the other side of the extraction shooter wave also . And so maybe we'll see fewer announcements of those types of games. I mean, well, you know, we still have, you know, call of duty is doing its DMZ mode and whatever. So there's still launches that will include that style of game . But you know, we didn't really see much of anything out of EA . Ubisoft didn't really have much to say, you know, Ubisoft is in a certain amount of upheaval . I would I guess what I'm saying is I would not put it past Ubisoft to show up like in a year or so and say like look at this extraction shooter we made and then have it flop out in six weeks or something but hopefully they've learned some lessons there as well . They seem to be working on the division three . So hopefully that'll be solid . I would I would play a I would play another division game for sure . And then there's all the talk that the new Far Cry game is their big test bed for A I shit and the report the report on that was also attached to also it looks terrible so maybe they will spend a bunch of time trying to make a fucking big AI far cry game and then realize that none of that shit works the way they wanted to I feel like if I was in Ubisoft's shoes , after all the shit that's gone down there and just the lack of games and you know them spinning their franchises out to this other to this tencent thing or whatever , I would be about as back to basics as you could get and just be like, look , we've just got to get some fucking good games out the door. If we want to fuck around with this stuff in the background, like sure, but we don't have time for that right now, like look around you. Everything is on fire . Let's make a video game. Let's put out a handful of video games here and after we've found our footing and this studio structure is solid, then maybe we can fuck around with this AI shit and all this other fucking garbage that you want to waste time on . But to do it right now when Ubisoft already feels like a really weird company I don't know, that just seems super strange to me . Valve reiterated that the steam machine and the steam frame are going to be out this summer this was part of an announcement that they are expanding the verified game program to include those devices . Currently the verification only exists as Steam Deck Verified and Steam OS verified for people that are running Steam OS on non Steam Deck devices , but this will expand for those machines as well, which makes sense. They needed to do that, and they're going to . But the actual news here is that they are committing , they're once again committing to a release time frame here for the summer . So that could be right around the corner for those devices we will see how much How much that stuff costs and how all of that goes I don't know . A VR headset seems like an especially tough sale these days you know ? Like what do you even play on that thing ? Who's even making VR games anymore? Is there anyone left ? Or is this is that done ? Seems done . But I don't know they'll put a headset out. It'll it'll it'll be I'm sure it'll be a fine I'm sure it will be a fine headset and it'll play a lot of the VR games that already exist, so if you want to play those, there's at least there's those . Some people like half life Alex, you could check that out, I guess. I don't know . You just go play space pirate trainer or whatever. Like that's that's still the that's still the best one of those. I don't know. And that's the news Sitting on the other side of all of this stuff, I don't know what to think. I think there were definitely I feel like everyone had something that I at least wanted to know more about . Every one of these showcases, there was something in there that I was like, yes, that's I want to play that. I would like to play more of that . And so it was nice to see that. It feels like there's maybe a little bit of a something for everyone kind of thing going on there and and there were a billion other showcases with a billion other games that, you know, there's there's and are we in the middle we're in the middle of steam Bullet Fest , which is a great name. And that'll be going on until june fifteenth, but there is a Steam Nestext F or something . I keep getting emails from people saying our game's going to be part of next fest. So there's something there's something . Killer Bean is out in early access, according to the front page of Steam . Remember that trailer? You don't? Well that's probably fine . So yeah, I don't know with Next Fest right around the corner. I wonder if maybe sometime in the middle or sometime after that presumably is when you when you would see the launch of reservations or pre orders or whatever for steam machines and steam frames . I would like to try both of those devices . I would like to use both of those devices and see how it goes. I think that yeah the front page the front page update on Steam rolled out to everybody that's been in beta for a long time. So it is not I feel like it is not new to me. I've been in this beta for a long time , but it is that is maybe slightly shocking . They still have the it's not that much lower , but you know, the new releases, the popular upcoming games, like they've still got that stuff in place . Um some of it has changed position. Like there's a little bit that 's maybe a little harder to get to if you're looking for those lists but a lot of that is still there largely The Destiny two triumphant rewards silver bundle . Ooh, Exo rally championship is out. I did not realize that okay, that game just came out a couple of days ago . Remember that game XO one? Of course you don't. They made a driving game out of it. It was like a moon exploration game and now they've made a racing game where you're driving a fucking moon rover. And that's real silly. I really want to try that game out . And you know what? I'm gonna you heard it here first. I'm gonna try that game out. That's cool that that's out . What else is in the popular new releases section here solar punk ? Not a lot of porn here anymore. What happened ? Where's the where's all the porno . Oh, I guess NBA the Run is also out today . That is the game that people keep likening to NBA Street . That's also a game I will try out . Hooray Why don't we get into some emails . Podcast at Guard. Bike is your email address . Do send me an email , and I will I will, you know, endeavor to answer at least some of them here on the program . Let's see . Let me filter these . Gil from Atlanta wrote in and said over the last few years I',ve started feeling that game trailers are getting more and more stale . There have always been marketing trends, but it feels like now every trailer uses the exact same formula, reveal a story hook, then graphics, then gameplay, crescendo here, cut the music there, slowly pan the camera through environments, yada, yada. All of this is surrounded by the most media trained talking heads in history. I'm watching people talk about games they've passionately worked on for years as if they're presenting the local news . I don't really have a question. I just miss Dorks on stage and marketing campaigns that felt unique to each game. Yeah , I mean I think, you know A lot of trailers for content I mean movie trailers, I think are probably not too far off in fact they're probably taking inspiration from one another at this point but But I don't know. I think a lot of this stuff is just being produced like in a way that is generally accepted as good and that maybe is a little less interesting . And I might say stop watching video game trailers. I don't watch so I will tell you, I do not watch most video game trailers Because I just, you know, let me let me read a quick thing about it. Send me an email with a with a paragraph about your game so I can look at that and and you know, if something catches my eye somewhere later down the road then hey maybe. But yeah, generally I don't think yeah , you know, they're trailers . You know, there's mastered the form and that's probably why it's kind of boring is because everyone, you know, like everyone's gotten good at using video editing tools. You don't have a lot of cases where like even for smaller games they can, still they can still get a trailer out that still looks, you know, like acceptable by modern standards, you know ? I'm sure that's all that's all kind of part of it. But yeah, I mean as far as like people that are super media trained talking about games, I mean, yes, I tend to agree with you there. I think there's there's definitely something missing from editorial video game coverage right now in terms of getting people to have more real conversations around games . There's a lot of stuff that just doesn't happen anymore for one reason or another because a lot of publishers are a lot more buttoned up with it and want to have a very kind of dry and focused marketing campaign. And so I think there's a lot of stuff there. I think there are also just not as many outlets out there to do those interviews and to do that sort of stuff. And so and they present themselves on stage when the time comes in the most professional way they can. And that's just largely how it's gone. So yeah, I think it's yeah, you know, the industry matured a little bit and it's it is what it is Zabrum says in the chat here, I cannot believe they didn't show Injustice Three. I told you told you they probably wouldn't do that . Told ya I would put my bet on the game awards for that one . I meant it Let's see here . Carl from New Zealand writes in chi chi, New Zealand. Is that an abbreviation or is there a place in New Zealand called ch ? Anyway , after seeing them put Tupac into stranger than fiction, I feel like they've now flattened out Tupac Shakur, the human being that lived and turned him into another piece of IP. They've flattened out the life he lived, let the tale be sculpted to fit into whatever narrative the time requires and let him become a vibe . At this point it just feels like the person that lived the life feels gone, leaving us with an IP to be slotted into movies in Fortnite as the time calls. That's just Batman . Is this just what happens to famous people as they die or was this a deliberate thing that was brought through by the forces that controlled his rights ? Both. I you know, like what is, you know, like look at Elvis like what, you know, Elvis is just a caricature of Elvis and and when you see modern takes on Elvis , modern art or drawings or whatever of Elvis , it's always at a very specific era and look and whatever. And you don't get seventies Elvis. Look at what they're doing with Michael Jackson. Look at how they're trying to rewrite history there and try to sweep stuff under the rug with a biopic and all this other like You know, the number of things that they will happily like, oh no, no, I mean, look at fuck dude, look at what the WWE tried to do with the fucking ultimate warrior When he passed away, like the day after of like appearing on WWE programming after not having done so for years and years and years, like they did the Hall of Fame thing and then he showed up on TV and that was dead the next day then. they And tried to just pretend that he was like, we're going to start giving the warrior award to people who embody a warrior spirit and all this other stuff. It's like you just forget all the stuff that Ultimate Warrior went around and said like he was speaking at school s and this like all this incredibly homophobic like just like taking that man at his word he's a fucking scumbag. Like it's a shame that he passed away but like trying to turn him into some kind of icon of like the paragon of integrity like just fucking crazy man . Like that's what yes, at some point at some point that is what capitalism does , I guess. I don't know . And so yeah, like again, you know, I don't think it's a surprise that this would happen with Tupac. I mean, you know, like Kurt Cobain's legacy, I think, is maybe slightly better protected than most, but even that's I don't know . You know, the person's no long er around say the things they used to say , the feelings they used to have about the world . And so it's very easy to smooth that stuff off for better and for worse and just like the person becomes a, you know, their legacy becomes a caricature of who they were, right? I mean, that's I feel like that's a very standard thing. People are complex, you know, people are fucking messy . Some people are just fucking shitty . And so after death, I don't think this is something that even celebrity does is right, you know, like there's a there's always a big push . Well, we don't want to speak ill of the dead . And I get it. You know, like what who you're fighting with ghosts at some point if you're wasting a bunch of time talking shit about dead people . But obviously the reality is way more complicated than that. So yeah, it's not surprising. Like Tupac we were talking about it a lot earlier, but like, you know, Tupac became a caricature of something while he was still alive in some weird ways, you know ? And so seeing, you know, the parts of his person sanded down into , you know , some hyper fixed version of the fucking like super gangster that he became portrayed as late in his life is not shocking , you know ? I mean, you got to sell black light posters at the Spencer's Gifts, right? You've got to do this. You need to, you know, like here's here is Bob Marley and this is how he will always remain for all the rest of time. Was Bob Marley a complicated individual? I don't know, maybe I like weed , you know? Let's see what's our next question here Here's a Alex from Brooklyn writes in with something that's not going to happen. Hi Jeff, what if GTA six comes to Xbox Game Pass on the series consoles at launch . Yeah, what if, man, I don't know . The upfront cost for this to happen will be astronomical . However, this would solidify Xbox Series X and S consoles as the platform to play GTA six with GamePass. Down the road if Rockstar succeeds in migrating the GTA Online player base from GTA five to six, Xbox will then continue get to continue supplying the game via the GamePass subs and collect the thirty percent commission of each Shark card sold through the Xbox store, your thoughts on this unlikely scenario would be really cool . So long term games like this are probably a bad thing for game pass eventually because again, it leads to that realization on players where they're like, oh , I spent more time playing this game like I spent more money on this game playing it via game pass than I did just buying it outright. This was stupid . And that's that doesn't make a lot of sense. GTA Online's player base is going to be spread across a lot of platforms . Also, Sony, I think, already has a co marketing deal in place for GTA six . So I wouldn't , you know, in some ways that ship is sailed . But no because no one's going to just like eventually someone just buys GTA and and cancels that game pass sub and I think anyone doing the math like no one's going to jump especially this late in the generation . No one's going to go Oh dude that's so cool that they're doing that I'm going to take my PlayStation five and throw it in the fucking bammer because I can just fucking go buy this other version of the game on a subscription service. Let's go buy Xboxes. It's just not how it's going to go . Like people are like, don't get me wrong . People are people are stupid . We are idiots , but I think that would even be that would that would not work. That would be too dumb . You know, the the scenario for stuff like that is like, oh, well maybe someone tries it out and they really like it and then they buy it and they buy a bunch of DLC or whatever . But that's something you sell to existing subscribers. It doesn't bring new people in the door. I don't know how you bring new people in the door with Game Pass and I suspect Microsoft does not either , which is why they've lowered the price on it and they've cut call of duty out of it. And the path they're taking with Game Pass seems to be like this is still a really good deal and they're they went out and secured a bunch of third party content , but it's a lot of stuff that you might not want to buy at full price if you're a savvy player. You're not like half the stuff in that Xbox showcase are you looking at it and going like I got to get out there and buy that or are you looking at it and going like, yeah, you know, if this was something if I had game pass and I looked at me, sure I'd try this out. This looks okay. I'm not going to spend seventy bucks on it . But okay , you know? I mean, they're still probably digging themselves out of the hole they created by raising the price anyway . So, you know, game pass might not even be in the healthiest state at the moment so yeah, I think that's a bad idea for a lot of reasons. I don't know. Eric from Pasadena writes in, so Marathon has been free. They extended this out a few days because they had they had some server issues on launch day, so I think you still have a couple more days to go play Marathon for free . Eric says I tried and purchased marathon during the free week and my experience went from good I guess to hell yeah baby when I did something out of character for me I started playing a bunch of auto fill trio gam es with random players. I've been shocked at how overwhelmingly positive the experience has been, even as a pretty middling shooter player. Teammates on Voice Chat have been jovial, helpful, and on task in nearly every round. What gives? Shouldn't extraction shooters be an endless pit of human despair ? Should we look should we look to design choices like communal rep orts and just low enough stakes are players in a way advocating for their beloved but supposedly beleaguered marathon by making it a fun place to play ? Yeah, I don't I don't know. But yeah, there's there's been so you like yeah I think the struggle with playing with random players in marathon in trios situations is sometimes you have players that don't have a mic , and those players tend to get ignored because everyone goes in with a contract, right? Like everyone has a task they're trying to complete . And I think what has become the standard etiquette for that situation is the player who can't talk on the mic is their shit's getting done last if it's getting done at all . So I think that's that's sort of how that's gone. I have this is interesting because I've seen other people on the other side of this that have been like, yeah, I tried it during the free week and I think I get why people like it, but it's too fucking brutal and like I under I think I understand what this game is now, but I don't think I still don't think I want to play it, which I think makes sense. There are some people that are just not wanting going to want to do the thing that this game does . Um , but yeah, I've I tried playing with strangers a couple of times and during season one and had decent times and some not so decent tim es. So I don't know, you know, it could be that since you're playing during the free week , everyone's kind of in this boat of being new and so they are they are just giving it a shot and trying to try to give it a go. So I wonder if it will change after the free players disappear We'll see . We'll see but yeah I need to play a lot more marathon. They just ro lled out the the mode that they talked about at the launch of the season where it was like everyone goes in with sponsored kits or rather you go in with a with a team and sponsored kits and there are no other players on the map for a while and then eventually it backfills with rooks , which are other human players . But you get some time to just kind of go around and fuck fuck over the AI , which seems fun . And the dark level is truly dark . Like it's crazy, like, you know, we see a lot of nightmaps in games, but yo , they made one that's fucking like you need they give you a flashlight and motherfucker you need it . It's it's , you know, for a game that has like minor horror game elements in some cases they went there, they they leaned into that a little bit with that map. It's it's fucking dark fucking dark in here . Um Let's see . Anthony wrote in and said I heard you on the VGB's podcast, which I was on recently . I was also on the VGC podcast. It's all about B's and Cs , as you know, as Tupac once said I urge on the VGB's podcast discussing why Nintendo would be wary of adding Warrio and the Warrior Wear Crew to the new mobile game Pikoniko . This is morbid, but if I were the same shit head I was back in twenty ten's high school, then that game would be played with an album of Lee Harvey Oswald or Charlie Kirk Midneck Explosion, and those moments would be intercut with Wario giving an oh yeah thumbs up to the camera after each micro game. Do you think there's the chance that Nintendo was worried about graphic or sexual images being used in the game, shared online, and being surrounded by an established character ? Is Masky, who is the character in Piquedo Niko easier to bury into obscurity if bad behavior became mainstream news stories . So the thing about Peak Donico is that you need to know is that it's in almost every scenario with rare exceptions , it is only using the face and it is mapping that face onto different bodies and different, you know, like all sorts of different it's like you'll see a face in a cup of coffee and you'll have to stir it with your finger to win . And so it's the faces are usually surrounded by cartoon drawing and everything. So you're not getting full body shots. And so the opportunity for and also you can't modify what it detects. It has face detection. If it does not detect a face, it is probably not going to use that picture to begin with. So I think they did a lot of that there upfront to prevent bad photos from getting used in the game . But sure, yes, the thing the other thing I'll say is, yeah, you could fill up an album with pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald, but like again, because the faces are getting cut out and put onto the face of the head of a baby or whatever else, sometimes the faces are not super recognizable . When my kids' faces get cut out and put into these different scenarios, sometimes it's hard to go wait wait because they're all baby photos of different kids and you're like, I'm not sure . And so if you were to take, you know, objectionable people or controversial people and put their faces into it, I don't think it would matter. I don't think it would make a big deal . With like maybe the possible exception of Hitler, I don't know, 'cause the mustache stands out. It's very easy to see that and go, oh geez . Shaquil O'Neill showed up in one of my recent games of that because I have a picture of a picture of Shaquil O'aNeill's f ace that was on the wall in our old office and picked that up and used it , which was super weird. Peak Oniko was neat . Um Tamas from Budapest writes in and it says now that you're coming up on finishing off the NES library I was wondering if you had the opportunity to compile a printed publication based on your scientific findings, what would that look like? Would it be a coffee table book, a series of zines , a scientific paper, perhaps how much work do you think it would take to create something of the sort now that you have all the data ? Yeah , so I don't know. I feel and this is something I think we'll probably talk about a little bit when the series is finally over here in a week or so Yeah, I've been I've been thinking a lot about that a lot and going like what is, you know, what you know, what is this what have I learned here ? Um , and it's , you know, so if you if you're not familiar, I have been I spent the last let's call it three years . Coming up on three years , a little under three years I suppose . Playing and ranking every game released in North America for the eight bit Nintoend entertainment system . It's like seven hundred and fifty is games and it has been a really fascinating journey and I feel like I have learned quite a bit over the course of it and I think about I view the platform in a very different way now than I did . And in some ways , in some ways I think slightly less of the NES than I did before we started because of the number of games I have had to endure that are on the lower end of the list . Um , but the games that stand out and some of those are games that I had previously played, a lot of them were games I had previously played , but there were a number of them that I had not . There are some games on the NES that are tremendous . To this day , games that still people that still work and still and are still worth playing , I would say . I think that that is the NES gets put on a pedestal. The thing I was combating against the, thing that I wanted to push back on when this started specifically established opinions, the established canon, if you will , of what the NES was . And that became a selection of the best games and a selection of the games that are funny in a bad way that would then get trotted out as like this is the worst game I've ever seen. It's like no there are two hundred games worse than that game game you don't even know how bad it truly gets until you go into those depths . The popularity of the NES led to obviously that big rush of everyone trying to put games out because you know, like there was a land grab almost . And I think that led to a lot of games coming to that platform that you look at them and go like this didn't need to come here. It's neat that it did, but these are bad reasons , these are bad games to bring to this system . Also , the number of games that are vis ibly British, visibly European, the number of games that are visibly derivative of like the games that were visibly developed by people who have experience making Commodore sixty four games . The number of NES games that are like from an audio perspective, just like you just you see it, you hear it, you know it. You go, oh, okay, yeah. I think that is something that is something I always thought of as a we saw on the Sega Genesis . Since it shares a processor with the Amiga, there are plenty of games that came out in both places , but the NES got more than its fair share of that and they kept all of the arpeggi ated audio, like all the music, a lot of games that could only do music or sound effects, but not both at the same time, which is a very C sixty four kind of thing . And that has been that I that completely caught me off guard . See, I had a bunch of those code masters games at the time . And so like I had stunt kids and one of the Quatro, I think Quatre sports . But I had seen all of that stuff and you know, you realize like, oh, these are all these weird fucking British games from Code Masters, but there's so many more of them and a lot of them are licensed games, you know, and there's a it's it's really that was the really again, that was the thing that caught me off guard was how many of those games truly exist on that platform because I did not know that . The pure the sheer number of games that Rare developed for that platform ridiculous . You want to talk about legacies or you want to talk about like, you know, discovering things that maybe tarnish a legacy a little bit . Fucking rare . I leave I leave this I leave this list behind thinking less of rare as a developer qualitatively , but man they fucking got work and they fucking cranked it out and that's admirable in a completely different way . Um and yeah, I think those are probably just some of the things those are the things that like when asked those are the things that immediately come to mind . Um, I don't really have a good way to sum it all up just yet . But those that those are kind of the preliminary findings I would say of the endeavor is like man, there's a lot of fucking European games on this thing that seemed like they came from somewhere else from another platform, I mean, not just necessarily another part of the world And just how many fucking weird third parties just cranked out a bunch of weird shit and poured over a bunch of weird shit in the late in the cycle. I think that stuff's really fucking bananas . So yeah, I don't know. Like there's probably something to be written about it. It's probably not a book because I you know, like honestly to do a book I would be starting over again because I would have to play each game again and write a paragraph about it. If you wanted to do a coffee table book or whatever the fuck , you would you would, you know, not in every case. I mean, you know, you want me to write a paragraph about RaiGar. I could write it right now. It's easy but you know, you want me to write a paragraph of , you know, like some of this other stuff like I would I would need to or I could re watch the vase. I mean, yeah, I could, but that would take long er. It'd be easier to play each game for like five minutes and go, okay, that's this one . And then probably , you know, from memory be able to generate something, it would probably be a lot faster just to play every game again and yeah, man, I don't know. I think that it's interesting. I'm excited about what's next because it is a different we will be applying the same science to a dramatically different situation And and I'm I'm very interested in that that's going to be hard I had a thing all I've said this before, but like I had I had exactly in mind what I was going to do next. It was all squared away. I'm like, this is what's going to be next and this is what I'm doing . And then like a week ago , I sat down and looked at it and I started thinking about something else. I'm like, you know, what would be actually really fun would be to do this other thing instead . And so I changed direction just recently and and yeah so I'm signing up for another two years. We'll see. We'll see. I don't know. Maybe we've taken over under on how long it'll take to get through this next one once we get there, but but yeah, that'll be that that'll be next and we'll probably just roll right into it. I don't really I don't really see a need to to take a break. Maybe that'll make sense. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. We'll keep it natural, baby and see what makes sense, but my first thoughts on it are just a just to keep going . Yeah, maybe pause in the middle to play all the way through fire rock . The Famicom Disk System Smash hit that I that I very much want to play . So I really want to play Fire Rock. I just haven't had time. Now that all this summer game fest garbage is out of the way Um , you know, we can get back to what matters and that's me thinking about fire rock . Nick from St. Louis writes in his says, My son recently discovered our N sixty four collection. He now loves Mario Party. Am I a bad dad? Yeah, you got to keep that shit away. That's that's like I learned it from watching you type thing. That's like he found your weed stash. It'd be it'd be better if he found your weed stash than finding a copy of fucking Mario party. Like this is you need a trigger lock on that thing. You need to put a fucking thing in there and like you, you know you need to not leave that out where someone can just fucking find it. There are laws in this country still. I mean, there's still some Let's see I think that's going to do it . For us here? You know what? A handful of people wrote in kind of one last question here, Eric and Northro Bko wrote in but a lot of people sent in some version of this question . If GTA six got delayed again, do you think that all the other companies who delayed their games to get out of the way would delay their games again in turn or would any of them release their games earlier to fill the fresh vacancy in the schedule of big game releases . It would be very difficult, I think, even now in June . If you if you know your game's not going to come out until early next year and you maybe you did that specifically to get it like even fable, I think at this point . If GTA got delayed tomorrow to some unspecified time in next fiscal year or something let's say April. I don't know I think it would be very difficult for anyone working on a game that thought they had all that amount of time to suddenly go oh shit oh shit oh shit and get their game out in October and November . Once you've made that push like all your schedules change every you know you realize you have a little bit more time to do some stuff and you probably start working on some features that maybe you thought weren't going to make the cut because you've got that little bit of extra time. You're probably not wrapping up on the exact same schedule and then just sitting on the game until February if you're making fable So I think a lot of games would be in that same position that they would just simply not be able to go, oh yeah, let's release three months earlier. Like they just would not be able to do it I think what you would see instead is you would see September games get pushed to fill that gap. September would stretch out, it wouldn't be the bloodbath that it is right now and you would see more and more of those games kind of leak into later October and November because you know, that that's just more likely an easier scenario to fathom . And that's gonna do it. Thanks everybody for writing in. Podcast at guard. Bike is the email address. Head over to Jeff. Zone . Check out the Patreon. You can get an ad free version of this show. You get a bonus podcast every Wednesday and and more and yeah, it's it's been a it's been a bidy week. It's been a wild a wild week I supp,ose . And I'm glad to be on the other side of it . And it was an interesting, I don't know. I felt like it was an interesting week of games and announcements and stuff. There's definitely stuff I plucked out of it going like, yeah , this is definitely something I want to check out . But a lot of it felt, I guess, you know , as we said and we already went into the reasons for why , but it felt maybe a little safe, a little focused on games that are out near term, focused on a lot of games that had already been announced that we're just seeing way more of or getting dates for and what have you. And so, you know, on the scale of like E three announcement legacy, you know, like where does it land and all that other stuff? Like, you know, I think that the end result will be a bunch of really good looking video games , but in terms of excitement around this week, I'd think the excitement maybe wasn't quite there in the quantity that some people want it. Ultimately that's them focusing on a thing that doesn't matter because it's not about how good your press conference was or your showcase like, you know, this is all stuff that you know we can fucking debate aimlessly for years and probably will, but none of it really matters because what really matters is them shipping games and how well those games sell . So nothing about Nintendo just showing Link sleeping this morning is going to be a massive impact on the ultimate reception of that game . It's easy to get caught up in this bullshit because it all happens in the moment and sometimes it is very fun to get caught up in this bullshit as it is happening as someone who has been talking over press conferences for a very long time . I get it . It's high powered . You want everything to be slick and focus ed and this and that and you know it all makes sense in that specific context. But ultimately , no one gives a shit . You'll see more trailers later , the games will eventually come out , and that's the time that actually matters . So here we are This year's ads were alright . And I'll see you tomorrow. We'll do some more stuff then. Have a good one . Bye . You can't reason with the son. Trust us, we've tried. This summer it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's omni shade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. 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