Future of Console Disk Drives and Design

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Exclusions apply for licenses see HomeDepot. com slash license numbers Hey, what's happening everybody? Welcome to the program . I'm Jeff Gerstmann. This is the Jeff Gerstman Show. It's a podcast . It's about video games for I mean, while there are still those we're all in on that . It's here we're mid june twenty twenty six and And yeah, I don't know. We're about a week removed from the summer game fest as well as the assorted shows that air around it . And yeah, I don't know . We're settling in for the rest of the year, you know, settling in for the back . This is when all the video games come out . You know, and now the payoff like, you know, we spend the first six months reaping and then the next six months sewing and and everything comes out great, right? I mean, then that's that's sort of the that's sort of how that's supposed to work. I think we're in the middle of the Steam fest , which is a bunch of demos are out . And that's running through the rest of this week into Monday . I there's I don't know, I've never been a big demo person because you know, those games come out eventually and you know, it's like I, can look at them then. There are so many games out right now that spending a much of time going like ah, the demos. You know, it's like well I don't know, there's there's a bunch of other stuff. But But yeah, I don't know, the sprawl zero demo is probably the one that I was most attracted to. That's that's been on my wish list for a little while here. It's a first person shooter kind of in the vein of , you know, like maybe I think, you know, from a from a distance, I think sprawl zero looks a little bit like quake two like aesthetically the form factor of the guns and just the little bits and pieces of how that stuff looks . But gameplay wise, that's that's not really the game that they're making. It is it's a game in which you seem to only be able to hold one gun and that's more than enough because when that gun is empty you throw it at people and that's fun . And also you have like gravity gloves that you can use to like pull guns toward you. And so hey, zap, you know, so you zap a gun into your hand . They give you like bullet time and when you kill people while bullet time is active, health pops out of them and so you end up in this cycle of make things slow, shoot a bunch of people, throw your gun at someone, grab another gun, go pick up this health . You know, you're kind of popping in in and out of slow motion all the while and navigating this environment, you know, that has a nice look to it and the shooting feels good. The the gravity stuff feels very crunchy, like there's a lot of stuff in the environment that you can kind of grab onto and filling at people as well or, you know, sometimes you are pulling holes open in walls with it and yanking yanking walls apart so you can keep moving . Yeah, I don't know. Like it's, you know, the it's the sort of demo that like I played some of it just because I've been wanting to, you know, like after seeing a trailer of it a while ago and throwing it on my wish list. I was like, oh yeah, I need to look at this and played a little bit of it. It was like, cool, I don't need to finish this demo. This is a game I'll play when it's out. I don't need to you don't need to sell me on sprawl zero. I'm already I'm in on that. I want to I want to see that thing. There's also a game called , Oh God, is it Wind Runner that I wanted wanted very much to Windrunners There's a demo for Wind Runners out now. I was drawn to this because it looks a little bit like Loof Rousers which is an amazing video game. You should go play Loof Rousers if you haven't I mean it's it's like the last it's the only good Vita game but well I don't know Luftwers is great everywhere but but yes it's a tremendous game on the the Sony PlayStation Vita . And Windrunners is very similar looking and also not yeah Windrunners is trying to do sort of a you know like it is it is a rogue light take on that on like flying a little plane around between levels , you get new missions for the next level like oh, there's a truck and you need to blow it up. Or there's hey, there's some cannons here you need to kill. And pick one of these three power ups, you know, that sort of thing. Power reps seem interesting. I don't especially like the music. The look of it is like okay in spots and I think it feels good . But boy is it really hard for a game to escape the shadow of Loofed Rowsers. So yeah, I don't know. Windrunners just made me want to reinstall Loof Rousers and that is my recommend s that's Jeff's pick a click for twenty twenty six . You should reinstall Loof Rousers and play and play that like delete your progress . You should got I did everything you could do in Loofed Rousers and and I am ready to delete all of that progress and play it again . So and the soundtrack is so good in Loof Rowsers . Oh my God . You should play some Loof Rousers. Let's take a break. We'll come back. We'll talk about some more video games that are also not out after this. Man, I loof seriously , go get into some Loof Rowsers . Not right now. I mean after the show or during the show. Go play Loof Trousers . It's twenty It's twenty twenty six and you don't have time for jeans that feel like garbage, jeans that don't fit . 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I don't know what kind of I don't know what kind of life you're leading but you should you should throw down you should throw down two dollars for a copy of Loof Browsers if you haven't already because it's it is an amazing video game . Let's see. There's some stuff that is kind of like the last little wrap up from me as far as games from summer game fest. Some of this stuff ended up getting talked about on the bonus podcast and there's there's a video up, but you know, just to kind of recap a little bit stranger than fiction is kind of I think getting overshadowed a little bit because of all the Tupac talk . All of the discussion around Tupac , which I spoke with the Canadian media , the CBC about Tupac . The combat in this game is really good. It's they had a brief demo that was all combat focused and and it's it felt it feels amazing . It is a lot of like directional stuff like you have buttons for your left hand and buttons for your right hand. I think my favorite thing, like the thing that I think is most exemplifies what is cool about this combat is in one of the sequences there's a guy that will run up and like he'll grab your hand. Like you have a knife in your hand or you can choose different weapons, but in this case I had a knife in my hand and he would grab your hand. So you couldn't use the knife anymore . And so you had your free hand and you as you 're pushing that button, you are punching down on this guy's hand to break his grip, but also other guys are creeping up on you. So if you push in a direction and hit that left button, you're like doing back punches and back fists and trying to keep these other guys off you while you're trying to knock this guy off like it felt really fluid and very natural and that is probably the best part about it is that the combat itself feels very natural . And sensible, it is rooted in the idea of sometimes when you're punching, you need to turn your body . And so lefts and rights in combinations make a lot of sense . And I think a lot of that stuff is pretty cool . It's a shame that it's all being kind of overshadowed . I think by the the Tupac stuff and there's been some quotes RGG studio about this stuff kind of in the wake of some of this where they've said, oh, you know, yeah, we didn't just check with the estate as families involved. And that was one of the big concerns was, you know, Tupac's estate is not being managed by the family and a lot of stuff. There's some stuff there, but there was also some quotes wish I remembered where these quotes came from. I want to say maybe it was game informer but But it was a lot like it was a lot of like, what would Tupac be doing if he was still alive? What would he be like? What would he? And it's like, what? That's that's way more than your that's way more than you should be that why would you say that about what you're trying to do with your video game where you have two pox likeness in it? That's not a that's not a sensible thing at all. And so that's pretty yeah, I don't know. Like some of the stuff they've said publicly in the like since summer game fest, I think has been kind of ridiculous on top of all this. And so yeah, I don't know. Like that continues to kind of overshadow the game itself which is a real shame because I think the thing they're doing is pretty neat and and the combat feels great. It's a it's a great it feels like dramatically different from the Batman style combat that I think has, you know, kind of permeated so many melee combat video games. And so it's nice to see something that feels different but also still feels and still feels up to the task of handling that kind of that concept of like one versus many . Like that's what the Batman thing was designed to do, right? Is like, okay, Batman's surrounded by dudes. How do you take out these dudes in a sensible fashion? And this is just another way to approach that and I think they do a really good job with that. Terok Origins, I played Tarak Origins on the Switch two and That feels neat. That's a that's a neat video game. I don't know. It I use the cerebral bore to drill into the heads of a bunch of dinosaurs and weird aliens or something? I don't know this I don't know, those other dudes in there as well as you know exploding crossbow bolts and things of that nature. You've got some abilities in there. It wasn't really clear during my demo what the abilities did. But in terms of just like, hey, you're you're kind of hopping around out of the way of things, doing some side dashes while also , you know, shooting up some guys as you go. I was playing at single player. It's a co op game that most of the trailers have shown it as a three player experience , but they were they were very deliberate in saying, hey, by the way, you can play this game like offline single player only , like all that stuff, you can play this game that way . You can toggle between third person and first person. So if you want more of a classic Turk look , if you're one of the sticklers who says I need my turk to be precisely as it was on the Nintendo sixty four . If you're if you're super if you're just a fucking maniac . You can do that. That said, I actually did find the first person to be a little bit easier to deal with than the third person . But I did talk you can toggle back and forth very easily, so it's kind of whatever. But I came away from that feeling pretty good about it, which or like, you know, hey, hey, there's there's a there's a game here. This this could be really cool . Like the particulars of it in long form, I mean, we'll see I kind of play through one level and fought a big dinosaur and it took a long time . But I got there. I think the only thing I haven't really talked about at this point is Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis Yeah, I don't really I don't I don't really know what to mb Ridaer yeah, I was not I was not moved by the Tomb Raider demo, I suppose and They've , you know, so what they showed was a little bit of puzzle solving and then kind of an extended quick time event sort of that was rough . Like there were things about it that were rough and some of that stuff I think is on me because like so they've got things in the environment like logs. Like if there are logs that are vertically leaned against a wall, two or three of them, that's something you can jump on and double jump up off of , which was not immediately clear. And so it took me forever until someone came over and said, Yeah, you can jump off those. And I was like, okay, well is it okay? And I said to the guy, I said, well, I'm color blind. I don't know. Maybe this just don't stand out is like, oh, we haven't done any of the accessibility work. But I'm not sure that there was a straight up accessibility thing and more of just like a I don't know that these logs really read as something you can jump off of and why can we jump off these logs and not the wall right next to it? The wall looks much craggier and easier to jump up than the logs do . So that's kind of weird. The other thing is like so they presented a puzzle solving situation where, well, a puzzle is maybe generous . I mean, it's a puzzle. Video games there's two gears that clearly and there's a hand le you can pull. And when you pull it, the gear turns, but the two gears are too far away, they're not connected . And you look and see there are pillars where two more gears could go on and where are the gears? So you've got to find the gears . One of the gears is very close by, one of the gears you have to jump up these logs that I couldn't see and go and do all this other stuff and to eventually get it and have it fall down of water fall down into where the the gear is needed to solve the puzzle and they give you a scanner they let you scan the environment and it really feels like someone just sat down and said, shit, man , how do we get people to realize that this is a puzzle that needs to be solved? Or how do we get Lara Croft to say something about the gears that guides the player? And so when you pull out this scanner and go around the environment, it'll highlight plants that you can pick up because there's like a crafting system for crafting healing items and stuff like that, but also like she can look at the gears and quip about them or whatever a little bit . That felt real as a reboot of the original Tomb Raider, it felt like that they are over complicating what was a fairly straightforward action game . I'm not exactly a fan of the original Tomb Raider to begin with, but but it just seemed very like a very strange way to tackle what is what is like a very, you know, standard kind of puzzle to solve And the scanner thing just seems really strange to do this like vague metroid like thing in this game that like, oh well I don't know, maybe maybe the things should pop in the environment a little better and then may be you wouldn't need a scanner to look at this stuff. I don't know, who could say? I don't know. So you go through this whole process of this , you know, putting these gears into this thing and then that makes the waterfall shut off and then you can walk through a door. And then I think time jumped for. I think they they weren't this was not a contiguous piece of game. I was left with the impression that like that's one thing and then they wanted to show you this other thing. And then they just made it. So when you walk through the door to this temple, it just warps you to somewhere else so you can do the dinosaur fighting. There's a lot of dinosaurs in it. This is again, you know, like I've managed to block out a lot of Tomb Raider, the original original Tomb Raider after all these years. But I remember there pretty much being like a dinosaur in that game . A single T Rex that you fight at one point and it's crazy and you're like, What the fuck? Why is there this ? And in this one, and am I right about that? I'm asking Chat at this point because that is vaguely how I remember it. Okay, so there are little dinosaurs little so yeah that's okay, there are raptors as well. Okay, so that is that is how it goes here. You're shooting a bunch of little dinosaurs . It takes her a long time to reload the guns so there's sort of a empty er weapons at them and then you kind of have to run around a little bit while she reloads . You can do a slow mow kind of max panish dive and you know, you can kind of dive and shoot the dinosaurs and that's pretty effective . And they had you kind of running away from the T Rex in a sequence that opens very crash bandicoot like, meaning you're running into the camera , which I don't know , you know, why like Crash Manakut did that and it was like neat at the time because no one had done it and then you look at it and realize like this actually kind of sucks to play and then they did it again in uncharted all those years later and you're like, oh, this is fun because it's like a throwback to when they did it in Crash Bandicoot. Boy they sure have learned a lot since then to not do this very often and to now have it in a Tomb Raider game on top of all that. I'm like, I don't know why this When Naughty Dog did it, it was like, okay, I get it. I get it. You did the thing. You did the Crash Manic. You did the thing. Yeah , sure. So this and this is kind of a quick time, a series of quick time events. So there's, you know, there's things that are breaking and you're hitting button to do this, you're hitting a button to get out from under this and you know, you're running along the way. But then it is mixed in with like little bits of like kind of action platforming kind of things where there will be a grapple point above you and you can hit the button to swing across. And then you swing across and you land weird and you're sliding and it looks like you're going to slide one way, but if you don't notice that there's like a log , like a fallen tree or something and you don't hit the jump button to land on the tree, you just die and then you get to do the whole sequence again . And even sometimes and this is where I say the demo was a little rough because like there were times when I made the jump and then she glitched out and fell off or you know, this is like a rough demo, you know, like not, you know, not production quality, whatever. They're still working on it. So it's not, I don't think that's like the end of the world type stuff. But the sequence itself was more just like yeah, again, I feel like a lot of the things that it wanted you to do like they do this thing where they're like, hey, we put in these quick time events and so you're going to be mashing some buttons to get out of this and doing this. But then the jumps are not telegraphed at all. Like you're already drawing controller icons on the screen. You might as well just put them all there. Like, oh, you want me to jump here? Okay, I'll jump here. You want to run up this thing? Okay, good. Like just go full dragons lair at that point, just like make the fucking tunnel glow and let me push to the right to dodge the fucking evil fucking knight on the chessboard, whatever. So yeah, I don't know. Like it feels very I don't want to say it feels like they're doing too much because they're doing some stuff and it doesn't feel great. I don't know. Like I did not I did not come away from that demo feeling incredibly impressed by it. I also didn't really come away from it feeling like finally a true homage to the original Tomb Raider because the original Tomb Raider is a lot of things. The original Tomb Raider is someone trying to make a polygonal three D take on like Prince of Persia in some ways, you know ? Like it's very much about lining up your jumps and then you push the button to make her hop back wards a couple of times. So you're all lined up and then you got enough distance to make the run and jump and you know , and I think that like when they did was it tomb raider anniversary That felt like a decent way to modernize Tomb Raider. I felt that they kind of sanded over some rough edges with that original game and anniversary felt like a pretty good like that was a good window for kind of the traditional Lara Croft game, the traditional Tomb Raider around anniversary and then some of the stuff that was coming out around it . Or like there was one game after anniversary that I remember being pretty good specifically anyway. But anniversary was like pretty good in its day and so I don't know to remake it again is kind of ridiculous just anyway and then also this just doesn't feel um I don't know, the demo they had did not feel like a modernization of Tomb Raider. It felt like we're taking this story and making a very different video game to me . You know, they've got like, okay, now we've got some slow motion this and that and you know, like you're certainly climbing on things and you're certainly climbing up walls and grappling from point to point with your grappling hook and like there's certainly like navigation. Like the whole sequence of getting the second gear is very much you doing tomb raider shit for a little while , but it doesn't feel right to me and I'm not some sticker for, you know, I'm not over here, you know, hold, you know , holding out hope for a faithful recreation of the original Tomb Raider or even Tomb Raider anniversary, you know, which which was was good in its day , but but at the same time this just doesn't, I don't know, it doesn't this just feels like someone sat down and made a video game. Like it doesn't it doesn't feel like it's capturing the stuff about Tomb Raider, the scanner feels really out of place . It made me it was funny, you know, the the Nintendo Direct having like rise of the Tomb Raider in it was like a really ill timed reminder of like, oh man, they already rebooted Tomb Raider into something kind of fucking awesome . Like they already found a way to modernize Tomb Raider and make it kind of a cool game and they made like two or three of those and they weren't all of the same level of quality sure , but they were all quite fucking good and in some ways like created a great path forward for Tomb Raider to take . And so to see, you know, obviously years have passed since those games and so obviously we must we must reboot again that's just the way of things . But ye , I don't know. This does not this did not leave me feeling like oh yeah, great. I'm I can't wait for the new Tomb Raider which those that last set of reboot games, that reboot trilogy did a pretty good job of like, oh now dude, I never I was kind of not super into the early Tomb Raider games, but these are badass. These are great. These are cool fucking games , very different games, like not faithful recreations of the original, you know, the first three Tomb Raider games or whatever. Remember it was a I guess it was Tomb Raider two, right? I feel like EGM and like all the magazines had that shot of like Lara Croft and she's wearing like a fucking parka and there's a snowmobile because she's gonna be in the snow Whoa and people were like blown away at the idea of Laura Croft having different outfits . Simpler times, I suppose , but yeah, I don't know. This yeah, the demo did not move me. It yeah, I don't know. Like we've seen a lot of like, hey, you're going to adventure through the jungle and you're going to, you know, traverse this and shoot this stuff. And like, you know, outside of even just Tomb Raider, obviously there's been dozens and dozens of games that have taken cues from the Tomb Raider games and done things with that over the years. I mean, even the uncharted games to some degree , you know, traffic in that type of of story and setting and climbing, certainly . But yeah, I don't know, this doesn't feel like a particularly great one of those and we'll see how the final game kind of pans out . They're also doing some AI stuff with it. There's been some, you know, some coverage of that as well, which is, you know, disappointing on its own. But but I think, you know , even if you can set that aside, I just don't think that this is a great game. You know, and maybe they will maybe they will pull it off by the time the game ships, but the demo they showed was very much like, yeah, I don't this isn't this doesn't seem like it's going to be a great game regardless of your feelings of Laura Croft and Tomb Raider in just a general sense. Like this does not feel like an especially great video game . But we'll see. That's Tomb Raider, a legacy of Atlantis, I believe it's out early next year. They pushed it into yeah, February . February . Wow . Um , you know what's take one more break. We'll get into the news. They're making a new , well, they're making a legend of Zelda game. Which is crazy. I don't know. Let's talk about that when we come back. One of the cool things about Rocket Money is that the app will sometimes notify you , hey , we saw a thing that you're getting charged for. And we think that we can help you out on that. Most recently it was my storage locker. They're like, Hey, this storage locker. 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They've over the years, Rocket Money has saved me hundreds of dollars on phone bills and satellite radio and some of this other stuff just by letting them go out and do their thing. And that has been fantabulous . Absolutely fantastic . And also just on a day to day, you know, you get a little alert like, hey, you got some bills coming up this week and you know, if you're if you're low on money in one of your accounts or something like that and it's not going to cover the bills, it'll say like, hey , you know, these bills they're coming, they're going to wipe out what's left in that account. You might want to do something about that. I'm like, yeah, let let me me something about that, oh God . Let rocket money help you reach your financial goals faster. Join at rocket money dot com slash Jeff G . That's rocket money dot com slash ge ff G. en That's rocket money dot com slash gefg . This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. 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 set up required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus. The Legend of Zelda They're going to , I don't know if you've heard about this, but they're going to remake the nineteen ninety eight classic Legend of Zelda the Ocarina of Time , which is a video game that was released on the Nintendo sixty four . It's one of God two AB S one of two the to three Nintendo sixty four games that were good . And so it stands out that way . And so of course, naturally they're going to remake it They did not show much of it at the at the Nintendo Direct, they closed with it. It was just a picture of it was just here's Link sleeping and a pretty underwhelming presentation . Maybe this would have been less underwhelming if the existence of the game had not leaked months earlier . And so everyone was expecting it here and to then have and to then have it be this very light presentation was unfortunate , but at the end in the end who cares it's just a trailer. The game will be coming out sometime this year. There was a tiny little bit in these early days as we are scrounging for any detail we can get , there was a sentence that was not displayed on the website for the for the store page for this remake, which Nintendo has a store page up . And there was not a lot of detail on that page, but if you looked at the source code to the page, you could find this sentence which has, since been removed . The N sixty four classic reborn is a full remake for Nintendo Switch two Experience Ocarina of Time with stunning visuals, updated designs, and timeless gameplay that's it . So you know, presumably that is all accurate information that they just did not surface because, you know, they for whatever for whatever reason, you know, the design of the page didn't lend itself well to having a summary sentence . But on the back end of their tools, probably everything needs some kind of summary sentence in there or something and so that was written in there. If we assume that that is accurate , well, I don't know. There's not actually much to glean from this other than it's a full remake, which I think was pretty obvious from the look of the from the look of the video . Stunning visuals updated designs. I think that, you know, visuals and designs being separate bullets here or separate separate things here tells you if we again, if we take this at face value, that they will make some updates to the flow of that game, that they will they will update to the design of the video game in some way, shape or form , as opposed to remaining wholly faithful to the original game . Stunning visuals, I think it's up for debate. I don't think what they showed looked actually particularly good at all artistically. They're like, okay, yeah, I don't know, stunning is maybe the right word, but not in the way you mean it. And timeless gameplay is interesting because that almost sounds like that they would not make dramatic chang es to the kind of moment to moment gameplay, which I think is the sort of thing that they I don't know, there's stuff that they would certainly change just because games have been modern ized in a lot of ways that like , you know, a faithful recreation of that gameplay might not make a ton of sense. Yes, as Brandon Chad points out, classic gameplay might mean like old Zelda, not breath of the wild . Sure . Yeah Yeah, I think that you could you could certainly look at it that way as well. Yeah, I don't know. I think the thing I want from this is well, I think, you know, again, as someone who has not played Ocarina since the original game came out, I know that they rele reased it on was it three DS or was it DS? Anyway , the handheld re release of the game did make some interface changes that kind of made the water temple slightly slightly easier to deal with and, you know, and so they've they've already spent a little bit of time fucking around with this game . And you know, I think that that seems like it worked enough for that three D S remake. Like those changes seem to make sense. I guess I would not want a completely faithful faithful reissue of this game. If they just said, Okay, we're just making it look way better. We're going to remake all this stuff, but ultimately it's the same video game. I don't think that that would work by today's standards both from a just design of the world and again the some of the water temple stuff, I think is stuff that they could probably touch up even further if they wanted to go further in that direction , but more importantly, I think it comes down to how you control link. And I think it's one of the things that becomes a little bit easy to forget because they continued to make the legend I was a surprise, surprise. They made legend of Zelda games after Ocarina of Time. But Ocarina of Time is a game that sets the stage. Ocarina of Time is the blueprint for a lot of stuff that followed on afterwards . But as we got to controllers that had a second analog stick or kind of buttons in a more normal place , they were able to kind of they were able to kind of modernize some of those controls ever so slightly . I think there's room to probably reapproach and rethink a lot of those controls . I think what I'm saying, what I'm getting at here is I think Link should jump . I think they should they should let Link jump at will whenever Link wants to jump he should be able to. You shouldn't it shouldn't be like when you walk to the edge the word on the button changes to just say jump which I again when, you look at the p ile of shit Nintendo sixty four controller they were dealing with , that fucking mess like yeah, this is what you have to do. You have two action buttons and you have the C buttons for other stuff, you know, like you this is what you kind of have to do . And so now that we are a little bit away from that and now that we have different ways to approach things like equipping weapons and subscreens and whatever else they want to do with, you know, shoulder buttons or whatever, I think there's a lot of stuff there that would allow them to revisit a lot of that to the point where I think they should redesign parts of the world because again, like this world was designed in such a way for a character who did not jump at will . And that's a weird thing now. Like they could certainly keep it all and people would get used to it, but ultimately that's an insane thing to stick with all these years later. And so you know, when we look at the later the later legend of Zelda games basically like the run from what? I mean, I guess it's like it's Ocarina up to Twilight Princess, really And and you think about how, you know, those g ame the controls in those games sort of evolved. I mean, they did kind of get a little bit better at doing that sort of stuff in terms of controlling link in a in a traditional sort of thing . So I don't know, yeah, it's you know, you gotta give him some amount of credit for leaving people wanting more But also yes, in the modern we get to breath of the wild, like Link can jump and so you know, you ask the question, you know, do you keep that in there? I think it would be really weird . And timeless gameplay I think kind of shoots this in the head before we before it even gets out of my mouth, but could you imagine a world in which they actually just recreated the story and the locations and everything of Ocarina of Time, but did it in a very breath of the wild like way . Like if they if they made that . I think that would be bad . I don't I don't for the record. I don't think they should do that at all. I think that would be fucking stupid . But like I think that but it would be very interesting to see them try to do it and just be like, okay, no, here's it's a lot more contained now. There's not that many mountains you can climb. You see that mountain over there? No, you don't. You still go fucking, this is it. This is the game . Walk across this fucking field. You should get a horse. Stupid, why don't you have a horse dummy? Yeah, but I would be would be I would yeah, I would I would love to see them fucking try to do that because I think it's terrible. I think that would be a terrible idea . But that would be neat to see either way this seems like it would be relatively safe is maybe the word . I don't know , I don't know. It's hard to it's hard to conceive of, you know, well, I guess it's easy to conceive of a few different directions they would take and I'm curious to see what they end up doing . And the trailer that they showed, I just don't think I don't I didn't think that stuff looked very good and yeah, I don't know, not a great initial showing for the game. But hey, it will have stunning visuals updated designs and timeless g ameplay. They removed it so you know it has to be real, right? I think that's how that works. What else is going on? Fuckin' I don't know if you know this, but dude, I'm so sick at talking about fucking Xbox man. Holy shit . They did some other shit this week that really felt like another shoe dropping. It felt like they've been doing this like the events of the last few days here make the last one hundred days whatever, the last few months here of whatever the fuck Xbox has been doing to be like the world's worst soft shoe routine of like, hey everybody hi . We love you guys. We're retweeting you yay and and then this week they're like, okay, by the way, the stuff that the stuff we sent out to employees earlier about, you know, hey, there's a tough road ahead. Here's what that actually means , which, you know, is obvious. This is obvious what it was going to mean . So in some ways, this is not shocking , but in some of the ways that this is unfolding seem like the dumbest possible way to do this. Word broke of compulsion studios , compulsion games , the studio that made We Happy F ew and South of Midnight . The award winning South of Midnight, by the way , that that studio was potentially going to be closed . And then that kind of got refined as kind of some more details got out to like, well , actually they are negotiating to see if and the negotiation process seems to be very murky and like, oh, is there going to be , you know, are they going to spin out to be independent? Will someone else buy them? What's going on? You know, and so it seems like that there's a potential for that outcome to happen here instead of them being shut down . But either way , it seems like Xbox is looking to is looking to divest themselves of of these studios. That initially comes from Bloomberg . Jason Schrear over there has some reporting on that . And this initially started as kind of a vague like, hey, there are significant layoffs coming presumably after their end of fiscal year, which is in a couple of weeks here. So sometime after june thirtieth and and a lot of that stuff was kind of non specific but it's been getting a lot more specific over the past few days. And so now it is not just compulsion . It is also double fine and it is also ninja theory that seems to be in the mix here in a similar fashion of like, hey, maybe these studios will spin out and go independent, which sounds expensive, and I don't know how that actually happens considering the position that all of these studios are currently in or that, you know, hey maybe someone steps in and invests in them, which also I don't know who is ready to step up and take on any of these studios right now and bring them into the fold. I think that that's kind of a tricky one as well . And so we have these three studios that we know about this is apparently ongoing around these studios. And so congratulations, Years of War Eday is a console exclusive. Hooray . This feels like a dramatic change. On top of all this , a couple of key departures here , Craig Duncan , who had become the head of studios as Matt Booty kind of ascended . He was formerly of rare, but kind of became more of a central figure back in November of twenty twenty four , according to video gameschronicle dot com He is going to be leaving along with Louise O'Connor, who was also formerly of Rare and became the studio's chief of staff after Rare's project was cancelled . And so the two of them are going to be leaving the company. That's their that's like twenty months. That's what is that eighteen months? Yeah, about twenty months for them to be in that role. And so they are moving on and leaving the company . One is left to wonder if rare what is rare on the other end of this, you know, is rare a company that's going to just kind of oversee the rest of the sea of thieves lifespan and then and then see you later or are they, you know, like what what's going to happen there Double fine, I think , um, you know, Double Fine just shipped two games , you know ? Like they like the Keeper and Kilm came out close together for a studio that sometimes took years to ship out game . And so those games , you know , we kind of came and went and we'll see what happens with Double Fine. I think there's I don't know, you want to say, hey, there's always going to you're always going to be able to find somebody that's going to want something like Doublefine has to offer. And Microsoft for a long time seemed like a really good solid place for that especially because of game pass. You know, some people in chat saying like, oh those games didn't sell those games didn't do this, those games, you know, and like yeah, you know, they were not fucking like, yeah, guess what? The multiplayer fucking mobile game about pottery didn't sell nine million copies. Like you know like what the expectations on these games like no one is trying to make south of midnight the biggest game, you know, like it's like we've got to sell, you know, we've what's the mountain dew flavor that we can make for South of Binnite. Like, you know, these games are not supposed to be that big , that size, whatever, whatever it is, you know, like they're they're not supposed to be on the hook for x number of sales or whatever . These games are and ninja theory , you know, the Hellblade games I think are in a similar boat, right of like, hey, these are these are games that are well regarded in one way or another. They're it is not like I don't think the Hellblade games have been especially fun to play , but it's very interesting that they make them . And they're the perfect games when you're running a subscription service . These are like high touch games. These are games that are winning awards in some cases that are well regarded that you put on a subscription service because you can't have every single game be some home run out of the park thing. You need to have a portfolio of games to round out what you are offering to players . And so those games make a ton of sense in an environment where they're focused on game pass and all of that. You go like, okay, yeah, it makes sense to green light another hellblade if you are if you are expecting it to do something on game pass . And so, you know, this isn't something where you're like, oh it's going to hell blade to send you was sacrifice whatever is going to this is the game that's going to be massive on PlayStation five, you know, whatever, right? Like you're not going into these projects assuming that they're going to be huge sellers. You're going into these projects ideally at the right budget and sounds it like some of the budgets on these games maybe didn't stick to where they needed to be. I don't know, you know, if there was a number going around for south of Midnight saying like one hundred million dollars, which seems a little too much money for that game. But, you know, sometimes shit happens, like we've also been through the pandemic through some parts of this stuff and that's fucked up a lot of budgets and you know, like yeah, some games take took longer to make and you gotta pay your people . So yeah, you know, sometimes that shit happens. But that's not something that happens on every single game. So like, what are you? What are you doing? So yeah, I don't know . I look at this and and it makes me think of a couple it makes me think a couple of things . Obviously, I think that this leads to a Microsoft that is very focused on like big games, blockbusters, triple, you know, whatever you want to call them that they want to focus on the hits , which is not a super effective way to run a business . I feel because you can't guarantee that those games are going to hit. And so if your entire portfolio is made up of these super expensive games, then anytime one of them doesn't hit, it is a huge problem . When you have a few smaller bets mixed in there , then, you know, you can kind of float through some of like, oh, this one didn't hit as much, but we got we got, you know, this is sustainable and this is doing this. And the other thing the other problem I would say that they have there is they don't have hits . They have forza horizon and they have a bunch of games that used to be some of the biggest games in the world that aren't anymore . And so they don't have, you know, halo is not the halo it used to be . Gears of war, the new game looks very interesting , but is that going to be some massive mainstream appeal? Is that especially now that it is not coming out on the PlayStation? So one fewer platform, one fewer addressable user base for that thing okay . Is that going to make it some money back ? Probably not because that game's been in development for fucking ever and that studio had another game that got killed at some point and so you know those people have been getting paid for a long time. When we extend it out a little bit, you got Minecraft, you've got Call of Duty, which sounds at least a little bit promising this year , considering last year's game was a disappointment . You know, Starfield didn't hit the way you wanted wanted it to , but you still have like Indiana Jones. That's really solid. They should make another one of those . You know, machine games will eventually make something ? Maybe unless it gets killed this week? Like think about this. They're out there, you know, like we're out there talking about Ninja Theory like they might shut down. Ninja Theory's new game was just announced on the fucking Xbox showcase . What the fuck are you doing ? Like it just like it feels like these are a lot of bad decisions or, you know, potentially like sensible decisions, I guess. If these are the pressures on the business , you've got to make some moves and so maybe the move is to shut this down. But I don't know, yeah, maybe this is like, okay, we're going we're going to announce this game here even though we know we're going to divest of this one way or the other. And if we announce it at least that will give us a better chance to sell it to somebody or something like that. I don't really know which leads me to kind of the other my other kind of big thought on this, I suppose is what is this like is game pass over? Are they are they going to wind down game pass they've talked about? Oh, we want to have more options for game pass. We want to have more, you know, kind of different scenarios and maybe you mix and match maybe there's something like that. Like at what point do they just say, Okay , that's it. We're not putting first party games onto game pass on day one anymore ever again . We are walking away from that . And much like they gave the line of like, hey, we think our single player games are going to stay exclusive to our platform and multiplayer stuff will go everywhere , which is Sony's exact strategy . Will the Brain Trust at Microsoft also say, yeah, we're thinking about moving to more like a three tiered approach of subscription services and you know none of them are going to have day one games on them, but some of them have more games than others . Like are they just going to look at what PlayStation is doing and go, yeah, we should probably do that . Hard to say , but the pressures are different now, right? The pressures for Microsoft as a company, the pressures for Xbox as a division of Microsoft, I should say , are very different now . When GamePass was launched, when GamePass was conceived of and launched, you had a CEO of Microsoft that was getting out there and saying, Oh yeah, we're not a software company. We're a services company. We want to subscribe you want to subscribe to office three hundred sixty five. You want to do this. We're going to make people subscribe to this like subscription subscription subscription. They were all about that service life, son . And so if you are Xbox and you are struggling to fucking fight in the hardware fight and you're dealing with the Xbox One, which is really shit the bed in nine different ways , and you've got to find a way to keep the division afloat , you're going to come up with something that aligns with what your CEO is going out and talking about non stop. You're going to go, yeah, services, okay? And you're going to craft game pass . And it made perfect sense at the time. And it worked for it worked until it didn't, I suppose. And it worked as long as it was growing. And then they acquired more stuff because a subscription service is nothing if not extremely hungry for content , a constant flow of content. And Microsoft has not had that from their first party studios certainly through the pandemic as soon as twenty twenty hit, a bunch of their games got delayed, like they got fucked over by the pandemic worse than some other companies. I couldn't tell you why. Maybe they didn't just adapt as well to work from home. I don't know the particulars of that, but it really feels like they took it on the chin during the pandemic during the pandemic, whereas PlayStation's gap in their release calendar happened a little bit later . And so now we're at a point where like, does PlayStation have anything? Like there's still kind of something weird about the cadence of releases on PS five , but that happened a little bit later. Microsoft kind of stretched out in this very awkward way, but happened really kind of immediately . And so it makes perfect sense that they would come up with game pass, and then they run into trouble because suddenly they don't have the content to fill that pipeline. The first party content that is the major driver , at least in mind share of like why you would sign up for game pass, that idea of I'm going to get all their biggest games on day one is a very powerful thing until you realize they don't have any big games. What the fuck am I paying for? Like all of that stuff starts to crumble. And so that leads to a knock on effect of like, oh okay we got to get out there. We got to spend we need to provide more money to the third party side. We need to get day one indie games. We need to get more day one third party releases. We need to go out there and pay Atlas to put persona games, like whatever. They're out there doing game pass deals with third parties, which then has the addition al knock on effect of some Japanese third parties seeing Microsoft open the wallet a few too many times and going, Oh, dude, don't announce an Xbox version. They'll show up with a checkbook. Don't worry. And so you see how GamePass starts to spin apart as a business a little bit through some of these situations, right ? And so here in twenty twenty six, you know, almost a decade later GamePass is, you know, like the world is very different . It's nice to think that a subscription service for gaming could work , but ultimately with the budgets for new games going through the fucking roof , game prices have increased, like all of the pressure that that puts onto every single new game that comes out , game pass needs to be holding up its end of the bargain by growing and growing and growing and growing and grow ing. And as soon as that thing stops that path of growth , the whole thing fucking falls apart . And I think that's the situation that they're in right now. It's the situation that led them to put games on PlayStation because the exclusive that they were selling, you know, you've heard their strategy guy get out there and say like well a console like if you want to buy a console you need to have a reason to buy it, which is yeah, no shit dude. The thing that they were selling as the exclusive as the here's why you should buy an Xbox was game pass . You know ? It was like, hey, yeah, you can you can definitely go buy if you want to go pay full price for these video games, yeah, I guess you go get a PlayStation . But if you come over here , you only have to pay us, you know, twenty three dollars, you know, whatever it was, twenty dollars a month and you get all of it and you don't have to worry about it . You're like, yeah, okay . That's a reason to choose Xbox over PlayStation . For some, not for everybody, you know, depending on what types of games you're into and how dedicated you are to play for paying for this stuff and all of that. Maybe you go like, yeah, you know, hey, it's time to get in on this generation of consoles. I'm going to go buy an Xbox series S and I'm going to go get game pass and I'm going to play a bunch of video games because there's a bunch of video games. There's a ton of third party stuff in this and that. But when the bottom drops out on the big first party tent poles, suddenly that subscription service does not look as rosy and as fun as maybe it initially seemed . And then you raise the price on it because suddenly you put like you put call of duty on there thinking , well, this is going to this is going to stoke the sales this game passed the knock on eff ects of this and maybe we take it on the chin this year, but as we go forward , we're going to get there and this will all work out at the end and it didn't. Call of Duty came out. It was not a good year for call of duty, which certainly doesn't help this case , but you had, you know, some rough fucking years for call of duty alongside these like, okay, yeah, these are the contract years baby. This is the pressure situation. We need call of duty to provide a bunch of , you know, game pass and it didn't . Even Black Ops six, which is a great game . Great game . Did not make those moves. And so now you've got some reports claiming that because they put game pass or rather because they put Call of Duty on Game Pass, they lost like a billion dollars , which yeah, yeah, probably. I don't know . But this, you know, the other thing to kind of en capsulate this, you know, as we kind of move forward through time, right ? Game pass made a lot of sense when they did it because of what the company was promoting, what the company was pushing, all of that shit. Um , now that same CEO doesn't talk so much about software as a service, now he just talks about AI all the time . And now Microsoft is throwing as many resources seemingly, as many resources as it can muster into AI . And this has had some knock on effects on different divisions of the company. I think Xbox certainly, but also Windows . You know, Windows eleven has taken a turn. Windows eleven has it's not quite gone to shit, but Windows eleven is in is in such a bad place that they had to get out there and say we're going to fix it . We got a whole we got a strike team, you know, like these articles that are like, we hear that Windows eleven. We hear that they're focus ed on fixing Windows eleven and doing this and because the worm has turned on Windows eleven in a lot of ways. The people are done with it. People are like, I fuck this. You've got more and more people thinking about if not switching to Linux , which is unheard of. This is ridiculous . You know, because of Windows eleven getting stagnant , and some of that is presumably due to the number of resources being funneled into Hey, could you pump a bunch of AI shit into this OS because that's what matters now. Much like Xbox being good soldiers and saying, all right, here's game pass. You care about services here we are. We got a service. We got a subscription service. Let's fucking go . You've got the Windows team similarly putting co pilot buttons into fucking apps where it doesn't belong. And now they're scaling it back and they're like, oh shit . Yeah, turns out this stuff all sucks. We knew that going in, but that was the mandate. So here we are. And now they're going to try to fix some of that stuff . And so Windows has taken a bit of a reputational hit along the way . And you know, Xbox has taken a pretty large reputational hit as well. The kind of other thing that happens when you build your entire console around a subscription service is that third parties who want to sell their games for full price and do not want to be a part of your subscription service or want too much money to be a part of your subscription service . They don't sell games on your console either because you've trained the Xbox audience to not buy video games. And they gave data on this a long time where they're like actually in our findings Game Pass subscribers buy the most games because when games go away from GamePass, they get to buy them at a discount and buy the third parties have not has not have not really signed up for that story. And every game's going to be a little different and what have you. But like there's been enough cases of like, hey, these third party games just didn't sell on Xbox. You just look at the trend and go like, yeah, I mean, yeah, you're training Xbox owners to not buy video games and wait for it to come to game pass if it isn't there already . And that can't be good. That's not good for your relationships with the rest of the video game industry. That's not good for third parties who are spending significant resources to make sure that the Xbox versions of their game work well , especially in a situation where they have to account for the Xbox series S, which results in some amount of additional work . You're finding, you know, and this has been going on for a couple of years, you'd find third parties that would be quietly grumbling about Xbox in the way of like I don't even know why we're fucking putting our game on Xbox. Like no one's gonna buy like no one buys this version of this game. It's just a waste of fucking time . We have to do it because that's just the way of things but, like really, we should stop. And you had more and more companies starting to think like, man, we should stop. Like these are relationships that now have to be repaired. And so when you add all that up , you could probably build a pretty decent case for walking away from the game past as we know it today and walking away from it as a carry all. It's got all the first party games, all that other stuff and say like, hey, actually we need to make this a smaller service and yeah, we're going to lose a bunch of money on it. But for the overall health of our platform going forward, we need to make this move. If they were to do that, I would not be like, oh my god, I'd be like, yeah, I guess I see why they would do it. Strategically, I think maybe it makes sense to steal Sony's, you know, idea, which everyone gave Sony non stop shit the entire time when Sony said, like, yeah, we're not putting our fucking no. You want our video games go buy them. Fuckers? Like what you want Oh yeah yeah, we're just putting in our subscriptions for free. Everyone called them clowns . Myself included . But who's laughing now ? It's Kratos and his dead wife . That's who anyway, that 's that's kind of that's it. I don't you know, there will be and so people have brought up some other studios and like, oh what's going to happen to this studio, this studio, this studio? We don't know . The only talk that's gotten out there because it sounds like the employees of these studios have been informed about it are are double fine, ninja theory and compulsion games . But like I, you know, I would not be shocked to see, you know, fairly dramatic layoffs across the board . It sounds like these will be pretty deep. I imagine that like I said, you know, are you know, Rare has had some layoffs already. Like it's not like Microsoft has not laid people off . It sounds like they that may be laying off in the marketing department, which is , you know, they don't have a lot to market right now . They don't need they don't really need a marketing department until until they've got a new console to sell . Would we see cuts across the call of duty organization potentially? I don't know. Yeah, the head of Trearch just left after like twenty years. So he's out or eighteen years they had a pretty long tenure . And so you have some departures like that, but you wonder, you know, hey, yeah, if You know, if Starfield, I don't know, yeah, you know, like how well did a vow to do? What's going to happen to Obsidian? I think there's a lot of other studios obviously in the Xbox Game Studios family of companies that you wonder, yeah, Arcane. Arcane's name has been thrown around a number of times, I feel like over the last six months or so. People seemed to think that the blade game was dead because it didn't show up at the showcase , which then that sounds like that was refuted and say no, this game is still in the works, but like I don't know , you know , there's a scenario where all of this works out, right? Like if you if you look back over the last handful of years, like there's a scenario where like Starfield's a better game and it does better because it's better received or whatever, right There's a scenario where they say to Obsidian, yeah, make that fallout game . You should do that and that they, you know, maybe don't ship two games and instead are ship one of those games and are deep in on a fallout game while people still care about fallout because of the popularity of the television show there's obviously there's different choices you could have made. There's a scenario where you buy activision and they continue to make great call of duty games instead of disappointing call of duty games, right? Like when you go into these situations, you look at and go like call of duty is very big. And we think it continue'll to be big and it is still big. I mean it's not like it's not big not big but ultimately They bought them at the exact wrong time . You know ? They bought them when Call of Duty was entering into a pretty down period . And I think there's a lot of pressure on Infinity Ward for this year to perform or to develop a fucking great video game. I don't know. Like there's a world ye,ah, there's a someone brought up Redfall. There's a world in which Redfall got the oversight it needed to either be canceled earlier or delayed and made right , which I don't know which one would I don't know which one costs more money and yeah, I don't know. There's there's there was that last round of cancellations when they canceled contraband and that other game was happen thating at Zenamax online that sounds like it was a heartbreaker for everyone involved and and yeah, so I don't know. There 's when when you look at all this stuff and the way it played out , it's very easy to say they shouldn't have bought these guys or they shouldn't have done this. They shouldn't have done that. But like in a world where you're looking at it on the front side and going like, yeah, I don't know. We're going to ship this thing and then also Todd Howard has a whole team working on like a crazy space game like a you know, it is an elder scroll sized adventure, but it is a sci fi space feature and you're like, yeah , like it's very easy to look at that and go like, yeah, dude, f . Let's go. They can't buy these fuckers. Like, yes, let them make that game. That sounds like it'll be awesome . And then it came out and it's not, you know, like just sometimes games don't pan out. And so that brings me back to what will hopefully be the final point . If Xbox is going to shut down these studios or sell them off or whatever and really focus their first party efforts on making big games , massive video games . Sometimes that shit doesn't pan out, and if you're putting all of your eggs into those few baskets , there's a scenario there where none of that shit works out . And then you're just done because what else do you have ? Do you go back to Microsoft leadership and say, hey , you need to give us some more money because we need to buy some more games for game pass. Like they've done all that. They 've they've I feel like they've done that they've gone too that well too many times that at some point you just go nay Nadella was out there doing a New York Times podcast or something and there's a, you know, he's kind of they're talking a little bit about the Xbox stuff and he says, you know, hey, you know, YouTube has done a better job of monetizing Xbox games than Microsoft has . Like, yeah, I don't know I guess that's probably not actually true. But also YouTube it doesn't have to do R and D and develop fucking video games. They could just put up videos of them and make money that way. So I don't know. It's a fun line , but dumb. He talks about, you know, wanting to, you know, like Xbox and we need to, you know, we need to better monetize Xbox and whatever else. And I say like, yeah, dude, sure . Like this is what everyone's been trying to do for all these years. And yeah, I don't know. Maybe you didn't have the right people in place. It's always, you know , it's it's always tempting to think that a change of leadership is going to change the fortunes and and you know, like turn things around or whatever . But there's some fundamental stuff happening over there and the direction that they seem to be pushing in does not seem like one of like strength. It seems like one of we've got to clear all this shit out and see what we have left and then if we want to build from there we can . But to do that in the middle of like a generational shift and you're going to launch this new console and what does that mean? Like to have a bunch of people in these positions that are just like upending years of strategy, which, to be fair, that strategy was not working the way that they wanted it to. So yeah, I guess at some point, might as well do it now like we got to, you know, chase a losing strategy all the way down the drain . You know, you gotta, you gotta make those changes . And so it's tempting to look at it and go like, you know , well, okay. So the conventional wisdom would be like, hey, you need somebody that has experience in the video game industry to run this shit because the video game industry is fucking weird and crazy to deal with. And so when you deal with all of these moving parts, whether it's, you know, securing parts to make your consul or third party liaison, you know, like or first party portfolio management or what have you, like there's a lot of stuff that benefits from a lot of experience , but they've had a lot of people with that experience in those positions for a long time. And so I see at some level where you might just say, Hey , let's bring in some people that don't have that experience, but have some experience doing different stuff and see what the fuck happens because it's not like it's going great now . So yeah, bring in this analyst, have him be our chief of strategy. Like what? I guess I don't know . Either way they will figure it out or they will shut it down . I don't think there's any real middle ground where they limp along here. I think they either find a new way or Or it all goes bad to a degree that you're just like, okay, wrap it up . That's it . You know, these games can still come out of windows and we still have, you know, there's some still some , there's still some division called Xbox . There's still something somewhere, but it's not, you know, you're not like out there like trying to build the leading company or whatever, whatever it is that they're saying they're doing. So you know, either way it,'ll probably be interesting to watch , but they need to get moving . And that's going to lead to a lot of a massive loss of jobs that probably didn't need to happen if some of this stuff was done differently, but you see how they got there . I don't know . Feels bad. Speaking of bad feelings , electronic arts has launched a new division called EA advertising . And EA advertising is where brands come to play . This is about in game advertising and trying to bring more things into games. When you consider that electronic arts makes a ton of sports games , ad placement and that type of integration, I think, kind of makes a lot of sense . But they are they've got like a picture of like the soccer game and everyone's wearing jerseys with the Visa logo on it and then along the edge of the field there's like visa logos all around it . In game integration, custom vanity kits, ultimate team packs, branded challenges and live events across EA sports, and clothing and furniture drops in Sims . So licensed clothing in the Sims , stuff like that. Like this is a weird line, right? Because this is stuff that people in theory want because you're kind of in a situation where you're trying to make these sports games as realistic as pos sible . And if you could dress up your Sims in licensed clothing, there will be people who want that. They won't want to pay the prices that you want to charge for a fucking real licensed pair of adidas or whatever but it's it's not like the fucking worst thing in the world here . They've also got a little video of , you know, sponsored replays , branded overlays, or video spots inside the broadcast layers. So they've got like a lows logo in the bottom corner of a of like a and I guess not a FIFA of a soccer game thing . Exports presents Mad and Bowl in partnership with Visa is on the third slide because this can go IRL and experiential. This is all stuff that has been done. This is all stuff that games did a while ago. You know, I mean, they put the Barack Obama billboards into burnout paradise and so EA once had a I'm not going to say thriving, but they definitely were selling in game ad space for years and years. And you know, as games have become more online and connected and dynamic, there are more opportunities to slide stuff in because you don't necessarily need to patch it in . You know, it's stuff that you could auto download like oh here's this week's sponsors for FIFA replays or whatever Yeah, Battlefield twenty one forty two had a bunch of stuff. Yeah, there's been yeah , yeah . So this is I don't know, this is more of a renewed and refreshed pitch for for this type of cont ent that they have been doing. Like they said they did a state farm campaign in the soccer game . They did coach like the bags or I guess the clothing and bags for the Sims . And they actually site skate here because they put vans into skate. Skate season four just started. They put a bunch of thrasher stuff into it finally . I don't think that they have the haul of meat in there. In fact, I tried to load the game up and it completely broke on two PCs . I tried it on two PCs and it broke in both spots, finally managed to get the game loaded , and it was a mess.. I don't know It's just didn't was not beaving properly. I'm going to reinstall it or something, figure out what the hell's going on . But this is stuff that they've done, you know, but and it really feels like this is something that they are trying to build on. And so you know, this announcement or the news of EA advertising has been met with a lot of ro ellyse and what have you , but I think for what it's worth, EA makes the types of games where this stuff can be put in in a relatively non intrusive way . You know, like if you if you think about the sports games that they fucking make and the way that I don't know if you've watched a fucking sports broadcast on TV lately, but it's that times a hundred . If anything, EA is offering a scaled back experience right up until all the prediction market bullshit gets worked in. Once you can gamble inside of fucking EA's fucking games . Once you can push a button and it'll fucking put up a QR code that you can scan with your phone because the console manufacturers are never gonna let you directly bet on fucking Hollywood, whatever the fuck these bullshit sites . You know , like naturally like that's probably where we end up, right? I mean, it makes it makes a disgusting level of sense. It's it's not good, but it at least makes some kind of disgusting level of sense . But yeah, like, I don't know, sports broadcasts are rotten with this stuff already and putting some of this stuff into EA's sports games doesn't really rub me the wrong way . I think it's when you know when we talk about in game advertising in games where you can't have a natural fit , I think that's where that stuff starts to get scary. When you know people talked about like, you know, the idea of an ad supported Xbox, like, oh, what are some ways that we can make the Xbox more affordable ? And in game advertising was one that came up . And I think that that, you know, like you can't treat this stuff as like a blunt instrument , you know, there's a like it or not, there's you have to finesse these ads into the games and put them in the right situ ations to where they it makes them feel more real like, oh, okay, it's cool that this brand is here because that kind of sets this, you know, like when you when you do that in sports gam es, that's easy to do. When you do it in non sports games, it becomes a lot trickier. If you've got custom characters, you can dress up, then you start to do licensed clothes. But think about gears of war . What do you what do you do there as an as an in game integration? You could yeah, so the bluntest of those instruments JT Rules says or you could do pause screen ads . So that is the bluntest worst way you could do it . You know, like, oh, hey, you hit pause on the game and it shows or on the loading screen is going to show you this ad or whatever. Like that's not an ideal way to do this . Ideally you are doing the product integration stuff that movies do . Like look at that James Bond game . And this is something that James Bond does every time out because it's just kind of how, you know, the character has evolved and like what is James Wand like? He drives a fucking Aston Martin. So put the Aston Martin in there and like oh we got these omega watches in here. We got this and like that game is relatively rotten with brands . Yes watch Sam Bridges slam a monster . When Sam Bridges slams that monster, it's fucking awesome . And it's weird because like it doesn't it's not an amazing fit because you're like , would this world have monster energy drinks in it? Would monster be a brand that exists here? And that's where the problem you run into with gears . Look at gears. It's not set on earth . You know, look at the scenes that they showed for gears where they had like them the drinking in a bar. That could just as easily be a licensed beer that could very easily and that licensed beer could change every six months depending on who wants to pay, right? Just change the texture out. That was always the dream of the in game advertisers when they were doing that stuff like twenty years ago or twenty five years ago . Like there were PC games that they were trying to do that stuff with. Like I remember It's the there's like the picture of the vending machine, right? Or like but you saw there was like a first person shooter that just had like mountain dew posters on the wall or some like really corny shit but it's supposed to be stuff that you can switch out when a campaign ends and when another one starts and whatever, right? And so there were always reasons for that, but like I think there are tasteful ways to do it that people have already accepted in other mediums , right? When you see a lot of product placement in films , when you see too much of it, it starts to stick out, but just the right amount of it grounds everything in the same reality that you are in. And you go like, oh yeah, I don't know, they're using fucking skippy peanut butter. I used to love that shit. Or you know, I don't know. He's driving a fucking port like Leon S. Kennedy, Rookie Cop is driving this fucking portche SUV . That thing looks like a real piece of shit anyway . So like, yeah, I don't know. I think there's there's a way to do that . But if you're trying to subsidize an entire console and not just an individual game, then you get back into that blunt instrument territory of like I hit the pause button or I went to the home screen and it's got this. And then at that point you're starting to wonder like , damn dude, I'm already blocking ads at the router . What's gonna happen in these games ? What's the fallback texture when the beer can doesn't load properly , you know ? Lastly in the news , Commodore is making a phone ? This is the new kind of reborn relicensed commodore that put out the C sixty four Ultimate recently, which is the FPGA based C sixty four . They are putting out a cellular telephone . It's a flip phone and it is called the Commodore Callback eighty twenty . It is not quite a dumb phone . It is not quite a feature phone. It is running it does seem like it is running Android or it's running Linux, but it sounds like it will run Android app s. They're putting up a store that is called the comma store , which is terrible . And they are saying that they have patent this acc isording to Artstechnica. , who has a quote here from the guy that is currently running Combatore, I guess. We've also developed patent pending technology that will prevent these apps . Okay, so sorry, I should back up a little bit. They are going to prevent you from installing social media apps onto it. And so the examples they give is you will be able to use like WhatsApp on it , but you will not be able to look at Reddit or Twitter or any of that other stuff. As a result of that, they also prevent the installation of web browsers because obviously once you've got a web browser on the device , you can look at whatever um and so when it comes to, you know the whitelisting that they were doing for their store that's on device . He says this. We've also developed patent pending technology that will prevent these apps and only these apps from being sideloaded on the device . Users can sideload nearly anything else if they want if it isn't available on the comma store , but we've drawn a firm line in the sand around any apps that drive doom scrolling . On the off chance that someone finds a way around that, we've also blocked access at the DNS level. So even if you manage to get TikTok installed, you're not going to be able to reach its servers . So your so your phone that runs Linux , no one's going to ever be able to figure out how to get around your patent pending technology. No one's going to be able to figure out like, man, how do I change DNS on this thing? How do I get around to the weird blockers they put in? That doesn't okay sound.s That like an interesting ch allenge except for the part where the phone is going to be between five hundred and six hundred forty dollars depending on which color you want . This seems like a phone that should be about fifty bucks . Like what the fuck are you doing ? This ties into the mentality. So this was something this was a weird line in the sand they tried to draw around the release of the Combodore sixty four Ultimate. It was funny because it came with software that got around it . But like the box for this thing, where I have it somewhere up there . The box for this thing even was just like no social media, absolutely no social media. And they were like promoting that as a feature. Like, hey, look at this old computer. It does old computer stuff. And so you can't look at fucking Twitter on it , which is a weird way to kind of promote a rereleased Commodore sixty four . And also not true because it came with terminal software that would let you telln that into a fucking BBS that had a news feed. And so within like ten minutes of unboxing that thing, I was looking at like horrible headlines about fires around the world and all this other stuff and I was able to doom scroll through it by hitting the cursor down button. So they fucked up on that one I don't know who the fuck this is for. This is, you know, like they're trying to call it like this is a phone where the consumer is not the product. I'm like, yeah, guess man, I don't know. Like yes, data collection's a massive problem, all of this other stuff, sure . Trying to sell people a five hundred dollars phone that it's only feature, it's only interesting features that it does less than real phones is stupid because you could go buy one of those old phones for old people that they sell for way less than this and achieve the same goal and it does not look enough like a commodore. They're like's, going It to come you know, you can list, en to music on it . And it will come with some cyd, some cyd stuff, which is probably just pre rendered out as MP three's or something But yeah, it's it's kind of it just seems ridiculous. They're going to put some C sixty four games on it in some capacity, which sounds like a terrible way to play those games . And it's a flip phone. I don't know. Do you want to do WhatsApp video calls on a flip phone? You can. That's the that's the use case they're advertising Um and and I I'll put it okay, I'll put it this way. When you if you want to know where they're coming from on this, this was the thing that struck me as well Well, I just found something else that struck me as pretty dumb. When you click through to their official website for it , the headline is Welcome to the Inter not Not smart phones too smart. Dump phones, too dumb. We built the phone in between . There was a so there's there's a picture I can't find it right off the top of my head, but it was a picture of the phone with like, you know, pointing at the features and it was talking about the quality of the screen and the chips inside and whatever else . And then it pointed to the antenna and it said it's got an antenna away from your head . Yeah, man, thanks . Thanks for not letting the fucking five G worms get into my brain Commodore . Fuckin' Jesus Christ . So yeah, I don't know. These people are fucking out of their mind . It's neat that they made that Commodore sixty four. That thing is expensive for what it does , especially considering what a mister does for a much lower price and all that of stuff, just even just as a Commodore sixty four and not taking into account the other things a mister can do crazy . Good on them for being completely insane, I guess. I don't know, like good . Good . You would have to be out of your fucking mind to bring Commodore back anyway. I don't know. Like that I say that as a Commodore fan . These people are fucking out of their minds . Good on them, but this is dumb. This is real dumb . All right, what else is going on? I think maybe we'll get into some emails here . Assassin's Creed Shadows is receiving its final update and it is including a quest that crosses over with the Black Flag remake. So it's some kind of final update quest that will point you in the direction of the upcoming remake . But this is the last of new content for that game and and yeah . Oh here it is, the technical overview and specifications for the phone Stub antenna away from head . Yeah, I don't know. It's an LTE phone . Like this thing just looks like I mean, when you look at the stats on this thing, it just seems like shit . Secure GPS . thirty two gig microSD included with free albums and more. Sorry, know you too fuck off . I mean don't get me wrong, I fucking hate you too . I fucking hate you too but But stop it stop it all right . Let's get into some emails. Podcast at Gard. Bike is the email address send in your emails to me then I will read them on the program Um , Devin in Houston writes in and says, If Microsoft one day gave the directive to Sunset Xbox, how would they do that? Do they keep the servers up for X number of years to allow people to keep downloading their own games and what about continued online support ? Five years ago, everyone assumed the big three players would remain in business long term. However, if Xbox gets separated out from Microsoft, all of a sudden people's digital libraries falling back on the you own nothing EULA becomes a bigger concern for people buying games today So I think they would run into a lot of legal problems if they sold this to someone that wanted to , um that, you know, that then eventually kind of shut some of the stuff down and we'll see how that stuff goes. I think it is probably easier for them legally Legally to just keep those download servers up even if someday they they turn off the ability to buy games , right ? Because having the ability to buy games meaning means you are staying up to date on security around credit card usage and so many other things. So if they were to shut down the business end of it, I think it would make sense for them to continue to just keep those servers up indefinitely because to do otherwise, I think would invite a lot of trouble . Now maybe they sell it off to someone that is going to commit to running those servers, you know, and and that's that's kind of the best The best you can hope for in a lot of those cases. So I guess the answer is we'll see. If we have to find that out, we will, right? I don't know. Maybe this is something we'll never need to know Um , but also you know, Microsoft is a company that delivers software digitally pretty recently and pretty frequently. If they sell off Xbox, it's also safe to assume that a lot of those downloads have slowed to a trick le, and so it might not cost them all of that much money to maintain downloads for those games. Servers for online games and that other stuff, you know, that kind of that's not a one size fits all sort of answer . That would all kind of depend on any kind of individual games popularity or whatever. But if they've reached a point where they've hit the skids that bad to where they are sunsetting Xbox as, you put it , usually that also means that the number of players that are actively seeking those things out are relatively low, which means it's not that high cost to keep those downloads available . That is that is probably the direction I would I would think about there Ooh , okay, that's an interesting okay . All right, um Let's see here Cody in Orange County writes in and says, Like you, I use a dual sense edge as my main PC controller. Unlike you, I have my PC hooked up to a one hundred twenty hertz OLED in my living room, which makes playing through a wired controller wired connection unfasible. I'd been using normal Blueto oth until last week. I came across a quick DIY solution on Digital Foundry to make a wireless dual sense dongle. It only requires a raspberry pico two W and the dragging and dropping of one file , it's quick and easy after pairing a fired up returnal and now had full rumble enabled, an active three point five MM headphone jack and controller speaker capabilities, features that are typically lost when wirelessly connected to a PC . I remember Sony selling a similar dongle for the DualShock four forty bucks. The Pico two W can be had for six dollars ninety nine cents, I believe it's around fifteen bucks on Amazon. Just wanted to share this device with you and your audience in case it wasn't already on your radar. It's been a nice and cheap upgrade to my PC gaming experience. Yeah, there's yes . So that is that is kind of the thing you lose with a wireless dual sense edge is that you lose the cool things , the cool things that a dual sense edge can do in the games that support it . And so it's cool that you can use this to get it back. There's also there's a piece of software that I believe is on steam called DSX that is designed to kind of bring some of that functionality out as well . So I don't know the specifics around does that work wirelessly or is it just something that gives you more options when you're wired or what have you. But yeah, there's a couple of different ways to kind of tackle that from the looks of things. And that sounds pretty cool. I don't know. Yeah, you can get a pico two W and turn it into your dual sense edge kind of shim your middle hub thing and and go that way with it. Yeah. Kind of cool . Kind of cool, kind of annoying that this is something that needs to be done at all. This seems like something that Sony should have just done the work to make this work, but I guess Bluetooth would not be able to do it all on its own so they would have to release a dongle and maybe they just don't care. en Iough mean, certainly these days , but it seems like something that they should have cared enough about at some point to do it. Let's see Let's see here. Let me filter by this and all right Anna from south of Southern California from south south California, I guess, at that point . Anna or Anna writes in says in an attempt to get away from traditional smartphones and the implications of being so connected all the time , it sounds like you're in the market for a Commodore callback. I acquired a modern flip phone running Android. The phone kind of sucks . It's a CatS twenty two flip. Yes, it's in Caterpillar the Construction Company, but it sucks in a good way, frustrating to use, which means it creates a good amount of friction. Anyway, sometimes something I did as a goof was installing a J two ME Java ME emulator on it since I figured that was the perfect form factor for this kind of games . I ended up being fascinated by this specific era of shitty janky games. A surprising amount of original games from well known franchises were released on this platform . I enjoy them in the same way I suspect you enjoy Super Mario Brothers special. I got so deep in this rabbit hole I ended up buying some Western phones from this era and even importing some Japanese feature phones with the intention of sideloading games onto them. Specifically with Japanese phone games there's a sizable scene emerging around preserving and documenting pre iPhone mobile gaming. I've even gotten into speedrunning some of these nonsense games, fuck yeah The meat of this question is regarding the level of interest towards this kind of games in mainstream video game media back when these kind of games were contemporary . Did they ever get any attention? Did they ever get covered in any outlet you worked for or knew of? What was the general attitude surrounding mobile gaming back then? Did you ever try any Java phone games Yeah , so yes she says I'm not old enough to have any meaningful experience with feature phone games back in their heyday, but I'm in the process of writing something about this topic and would appreciate the perspective of someone who was covering games professionally when these games were relevant. So yes , Gamespot bought a phone site, a site that was devoted to reviewing phone games , I believe it was called Mobile game review Wireless Game Review WGR MG anyway. Um Yes, we bought a site that was devoted to reviewing games for those phones and the people that came along with that purchase reported to me . And so I had to spend I've told part of the story before, but yeah I had to get up to speed on where phone games were at and and what they were what they were capable of and all of that stuff. And so I spent a good long time getting deep into this stuff . And I reviewed this was around the time when like the Doom RPG was coming out Um , but the general attitude about mobile gaming back then from me , a person who had covered a lot of Gideo games over the years was that most of the stuff didn't need to be covered . And that the way that the phones themselves were built and distributed and whatever made it a gigantic hassle to cover those games because different feature phones would get different versions of games depending on how capable that phone was or wasn't. And so you had some phones that were perfectly capable of running DOMRPG or yes, Orcs and Elves, which was a heck of a game . And then you had phones that could barely run blackjack, and different carriers had different phones and different phones had different games and different carriers had different games. And for a while their carriers were negotiating exclusives where like Verizon is the only place. You can play asphalt fucking whatever, you know? And so you would have a dozen different games all called Blackjack and they were all made by the same company, but they were all fairly different games with like dramatically different feature sets because one phone, you know, just the programmer for this phone. You know, it was not entirely unlike when you saw like Apple two games and Atari eight hundred games and like that era of computing, sometimes the ports of those games would differ fairly dramatically for one reason or another . And so in phone games of that era, you saw that to a ridiculous degree And the thing I, you know, it was funny, like the clash, the initial clash I had with the people who were now reporting to me and reviewing phone games was I was coming at this from a very they were giving very high scores to a lot of these phone games and those reviews started to run on gamespot . And so they would be writing reviews for these phone games and trying to give them like eight point five and stuff and then I would play it for a while and be like, dude , you cannot we can't we simply we simply cannot give this game an eight point five on the site like it is it is just not going to like there's no it would not make sense compared to the thousands of other reviews on this website , the standards for games that have been established editorially here for you to say this game is like a fucking great game or whatever. And so that was kind of the initial struggle , but I needed to play a ton of those games to be able to say that credibly, right? If I was just coming at it looking down my nose at them and going like these fucking bullshit games like I had to really immerse myself in that shit for a long time. I actually still have a bunch of feature phones sitting around that have games on them because that's how they used to distribute review copies of games is like Verizon would send you a phone . You can go here these games are installed on it already. And then that phone would also have service. And so for a long time, I had like fucking four phones that were all hooked up and all had phone numbers and I could just roll around with all these burners that were owned by , you know, Verizon or a singular wireless or whatever . And I could download whatever games to the phone that I wanted to because they were hooked up to money . They didn't have in game purchases or whatever, so it wasn't like thousands of dollars, but like I could try out any game that was on that phone. And so that was a lot of fun to have access to that many fucking phones . But yeah, you know, it was a lot of questionable driving games and a lot of just there was just a lot of stuff that, you know , the games were simply not very good by the standards of gaming, you know ? If you were looking at it through an absolute lens of like what's up with phone games? Then yeah, I mean it's a much lower standard and any I don't think that's crazy to say but that's just not the situation we were in editorially. And so it became a difficult thing to navigate. And also the other thing is no one cared . No one wanted to read that coverage to any degree. It was clear and when they purchased the website, it made a lot of sense because you're like,, well these phone games seem like they're going to matter more and more. And I think realistically the reason they bought it is like, hey , there are companies that make these games that have ad dollars to spend, but we don't have a product that they can spend those ad dollars on . So if we buy a if we started covering phone games, then they would spend the money , which is disgusting, but that's the way of things, right? And so that lasted for a little while and that was kind of pre iPhone . And then obviously the iPhone came out and the first iPhone didn't have an app store and so it really was kind of a weird mid period there where like these games just stopped mattering even to the degree that they did then like they felt like they were already falling off and then when like that iPhone three G came out and it had an app store built in like the feature phone game thing just like for as little interest as there was to begin with , the rest of that stuff just fell apart. And this is something that we ran into with iPhone games too. You know, in terms of how do you cover iPhone games? Why do you or why do you review a game? Why do you cover a game? What is the what is the what are you hoping to provide to your audience when you cover those games? That was what we were left to kind of pick up the pieces on because like clearly they had bought this and like, oh now since there's some mad money and I'm kind of left holding the bag going like well now we got to review these fucking games . But like these games are a dollar . They're four dollars. They're two dollars, you know, and like, you know, the idea of reviewing them when there's barely any money , like people just didn't want to read reviews for games that were that cheap and that were that throwaway . And when the iPhone came out and a lot of the stuff became free or whatever, and you know, like that blew it up even more, like the audience was not interested in coverage. The audience that was playing those games was not dramatically interested in coverage of those games and the audience that wanted coverage of games did not want coverage of mobile games . And they would viol ently let you know that whenever you wasted any time talking about an iPhone game I don't know . And you know, so we didn't really cover a lot of phone games and I remember getting a really angry like frustrated is maybe the word. He was not necessarily angry with us per se . It was more something that I think he was frustrated with the media at large. It was a time , a long time public relations person who, you know, he was every I saw him at Summer Game Fest for the first time in a very long time. I caught up with him very briefly . And he was like, You guys are missing the boat. And he was representing companies that made phone games at the time, to be clear. So I believe he had something of a vested interest. You know, he was hitting his head against the wall of like , hey, these games, millions of people are playing these games, these games are becoming massively popular and the traditional game games media does not want to touch them with a ten foot pole. You guys are going to be irrelevant. You guys are going to be dinosaurs. You guys are missing the boat on this, you guys are fucking yourself by not covering these games and and all of this, you know? And I was like, I get it. Like, yeah, you know, because I could see it from that side but like, yeah, there are a lot of people playing these games, but the thing I don't think he was accounting for was like, dude , our audience, as it stands today . And I think the audience of people that are playing phone games , neither of those two audiences want the coverage you want us to write. You want to go write a preview of an iPhone game? No one fucking cares . The best thing you could say about an iPhone game is this game is good. You should check it out. It's out right now . That was the only thing, the only type of phone coverage we could do that would ever be like, oh, okay, cool, thanks. I checked this out. This is actually really good. It's not a review. It's not like here's fucking fifteen hundred words about dungeon raid , which is which is a which was a great game in its day It's Hey, Dungeon Raid is out, it's really cool. It's like a match three do this and it's really neat . And so like there was just never any interest there. And the audience of people that were playing these games, especially as and more games became free , you didn't need to review them. They're free. It's faster for people to download the game and try it for twenty seconds than it is for them to read your full review. And so it was just fucking pointless. And so yeah, it was it was always kind of a waste of everyone's time . And I think that, you know, like as Anna is getting into here , you know, some of the Japanese scen e around what, like I mode or some of the other , some of the other feature phones that were out there and some of the games that were coming out of those seemed crazy at the time. And you have games like, you know, there were Final Fantasy games and mega man games. There were things that were like deemed like kingdom heart shit, right? They're like, this is officially canon to this cluster fuck of a series and it's a goddamn phone game. I guess they re release some of that stuff for like PSP or something, right? But a lot of really crazy situations like that in Japan fewer of those here , but DoomarPG was cool . What is it? They did DoomRPG and then they did Orks and Elves and then they did Doom RPG two or Doom two RPG or something, I think . And those were like they turned Doom into like a turn based combat game. It's ridiculous and kind of fucking cool. But and then those got rele reased on I think you can find PC versions of those at this point, but yeah, there's like yes, nine thousand different final fantasy spinoffs that are only on phones or something. Um , but yeah let's see Stefan from Adelaide , South Australia . I feel like if someone writes South Australia, the undercurrent there is fuck North Australia, but I don't really know. I don't really know. What I do know about Austral ia? They got some of them kioala bears . I had this question rolling around in my head for some time now and was hoping you'd be able to weigh in and let me know your thoughts. Do you think that Sega's success in the arcade contributed to their downfall and exit from the console business I may be wrong, but it feels like the first party published content on Sega's consoles has heavily skewed towards arcade ports and games that have more of an arcade feel , i. e. shorter games designed to be replayed from the start. I can't help but wonder if Sega's success on the arcade side led to more emphasis on this sort of game design internally at a time when games were largely moving in the opposite direction, developing much more cumulative progression. At the time, I certainly viewed this style of game as feeling distinctly old and being a poor value proposition. What do you think? Obviously, there are a heap of factors at play, but this is one I think may have been pretty significant that I haven't heard discussed very much . Sure . Yes. I think that yes, as Sega's reliance on arcade games on the Dreamcast, I think is something that led to a handful of games that are incredibly well regarded now, that were kind of slightly rough value propositions back then. I think crazy taxi really comes to mind . And it was kind of the weird thing about seeing a new crazy taxi was this feeling of like, man, I don't like this seems like a little too much like you're just making crazy taxi . And so when you bring Crazy Taxi to the Dreamcast, like, okay, they added original mode, they added crazy box mode. And so they're trying to build that game out a little bit , a little bit to give it more than the arcade version had, but I don't think they really achieved that goal. This is something that numerous companies I think dealt with when it comes to just like game design and what kind of game are we making and what the fuck is going on. I think everyone went through this transition and some had easier times of it than others . But you know, the thing to remember is that like Sega was making a wide variety of games on the Dreamcast . You know, like they put out Fantasy Star Online. They put out Shenmu. You know, they put out 's a lot of stuff that they developed and that they had had a lot of years in the game of developing for a console. You know, they put out sort of vermilion. They put out all the fantasy star RPGs. They, you know, like they had a well rounded catalog , I would say , over the years. The Dreamcast, I think skewed a little further in the direction of the arcade stuff in some ways . Certainly more so than I guess like when I think about the Saturn, it feels like there's not as many arcade. I mean, that you' knows, it's you know, they had like Virtual Fighter one and two and Sega Rally and some stuff like that, but obviously, you know, like they had burning range. There's again, Sega was better than most, I think, when it comes to putting out a variety of games that some of which were arcade ports and some of which were, you know, wholly new experiences that were the appropriate length and value for a console release . And so I don't really think that Sega's success in arcades if anything, I don't really view it as Sega having a success in arc ades . When we think about that era when we think about the Naomi and whatever , like that was coming out at a time when arcades in the U. S. were not really a factor . They were they were dwindling. It was harder and harder to find arcade machines. The main place I saw Sega arcade cabinets in the nineties and early two thousands was the lobby of Sega of America up on the sixth floor when we were in the same building because I never saw that shit out of arcades because there weren't arcades anymore. And if there were, I was certainly not going to them. And when I did go to them, I was going to play fighting games . And so , you know, crazy taxi is an arcade game . I didn't really see that much of it . That game is mainly a dreamcast game as far as I'm concerned. And everyone's going to be a little different in that boat, but like you just You just didn't see a lot of that stuff out there . You just didn't see a lot of that stuff out there anymore And so, you know, like they their design aesthetics certainly existed. They were continuing to make those arcade games and all of that, and they would they would bring them home because why wouldn't they? And they would try to do things to blow them out a little bit more and try to do their thing. But yeah, I don't know. Like Grandflyer says they were always at like movie theater lobbies and stuff. I feel like most movie theater lobbies I was going to at that point did not have sega arcade cabinets. They had pinball machines and fighting games . Old fighting games by that point, but you know, they had like techn ique you know . And I remember talking to a guy who owned a movie theater and then got into arcade distribution as a part of that. He kind of just like realized like oh, we got, all these arcade machines. I could put them all the movie theaters in this chain and I could have a couple of laundromats and do this and that. And I remember he was pissed. He was like, I'm never buying another fucking technology again. I'm never buying any of these fucking games because they come out on PlayStation and people don't want to play them. People don't want to come to an arcade to play these games. They just get them at home. And so it was like a, you know, it was a version of the like streaming window that movies have now of people just going like, yeah, dud , I'm not gonna bother spending thousands of dollars on a tech and three cabinet because people just want to play it on PlayStation. Like the PlayStation is destroying my business. And I was like, yeah, but you know , it was getting destroyed anyway, so I don't really, you know , like I felt for him, but also I was like, yeah man, you should get a playstation. It's awesome. They're great. They're fucking they're fantastic . And so our kids were already on kind of a downward swing here in the States in a variety of ways . And that was kind of the fun thing about going to Japan is you saw this alternate reality where that just kind of didn't happen the same way and that people were more willing to, you know, run an arcade, run a game center and have machines in there and be like, Oh my God . I remember there was an arcade near the hotel that we stayed at all the time that had a typing of the dead cabinet. And it was being like, oh, shit, and then realizing oh, it's the Japanese version, like we're fucked. I can't fucking play this. What are we doing? But yeah, this is, you know, I talk about this is the problem that like Midway ran into in a lot of ways. Midway had a hard time making that transition from arcades to home . Definitely in this era . You know, you look at Midway's output on the on the dream cast. You look at NBA on NBC, you look at I mean even go back to N sixty four , you go back to like Cruz and USA and you look at the N sixty four version of Cruz and USA and they added some unlockable vehicles and it doesn't look as good and the music's not as good as the arcade version . And it's just kind of a bad value . I think NBA on NBC Showtime, NBA showtime is a great game . But at home, you know, the value proposition is different. I felt the same way about NBA Jam on the Genesis and Sness, you know, just like, yeah, this is this is technically the game, but like, dude , I don't know why, you know, this there's just not enough here. Like the idea of like, oh I guess you can just play through all the teams and hey we put the beastie boys in it and you're like, oh that's okay. That's fun I guess . But it's lacking the immediacy or I don't know it.' Lsike lac, king the depth of a console game and also it's not as good as the arcade version. And so it kind of gets squashed in the middle in these home versions of NBA Jam. You're like, I guess these are fine. That's the nicest thing you can say about it. I'm like, these are right . And so yeah, I think a lot of companies had this problem of trying to figure out what types of games they were making and what they were bringing home and whatever. And just some companies just had longer times to spend on it. You can go all the way back to Capcom on the NES. I mean, they had a really pretty varied output there . But you saw what they were trying to do when you look at like a commando for the Nintendo Entertainment System , you discover that like in that specific version of the game they added all of these hidden rooms and extra bonus power ups and like all of this stuff where they tried to turn it into a different thing. You look at Strider on the NES where they said fuck it we're making a completely different video game than the Arcade version. The arcade version is a straight shot, straight through, beat it in an hour and you're like, oh, fuck , which is why the Genesis version of Strider is such a fucking bummer because it's just the arcade version. And you beat it and you're like, that's that metal monkey was neat . That guy went , that's cool. But man, I'm never going to play this game again . Whereas the NES version of Strider has levels and fucking, you know, you're going getting items and returning to earlier areas to access new areas and doing this, you know, like it's a much different and much more console friendly game. Bionic Commando is another great example of that, where the arcade version of Bionic Commando, no one even talks about it it 's this like straightforward run to the right shooter that you have your grappling hook in, but like there's nothing to it . And it's dumb It's kind of a crummy game . But buying a commando on the NES, they turned it into a full fledged adventure, they fleshed out all these mechanics, they gave you all these bonus weapons and all this it's a fucking amazing video game . And so yeah, I think this is something that companies struggled with for the better part of fifteen years . Let's call it twenty years. I mean, in a lot of ways we're talking about, you know nineteen eighty five to two thousand five Um , where the bulk of this happened, you saw some things happen earlier and later, you know, in some of those windows, but like generally , you know, that's that's sort of the time frame we're talking about that you saw. A lot of this kind of like, what the fuck is an arcade port and what are we doing? And how is this, you know , like is this a good value or whatever, right ? And yeah, it's been one of the really fascinating things about going and playing all of the NES games and doing the science there has been has been really thinking about a lot of that process and really thinking about the state of the world at that point and the state of arcades and where people went to play games and hey, we got this really advanced arcade hardware , but now you need to scale this down to fit on an NES and the things that get done to make that an effective version of the game or just like hey a totally different version of the game or whatever . And I think that stuff is really compelling . That's been one of the most entertaining and interesting things for me personally in going through those games is really thinking about all of that . And so it's not just Sega, you know , but you do see even in the latter days of the Dreamcast, like I think cosmic smash is a fucking fantastic video game . It is the it is the it is so stylish . The controls so fucking neat and the structure of that game is kind of wild in terms of the different pathways you can take through the environment and whatever. Cosmic Smash is like a very late is a very late dreamcast game Um , and it is an arcade port like almost exactly, you know, the arcade version of Cosmic Smash is really not dramatically different and And yeah, I don't know. I love the style of that game, but also and at the time, you know, I had never seen the arcade version of that game at all. And so to me, it was just this dreamcast game that was, you know, kind of short and the value is maybe a little weird on the like replayability or whatever at the time , but you know , over the years the hidden depth reveals itself and you're going, yeah, cosmic smash, pretty fucking rad . Also you get further away from the purchase of the game and the value proposition starts to fade away over the years. But you know, there's a lot of stuff there as well. So yeah, I don't know. It's certainly a problem the industry had to conquer and some companies did it better than others, and some companies did it earlier than others so yeah . Um let's see here . Ethan writes in it says,ll Heo a while, ago , you mentioned a theory that gears might be used as a sacrificial lamb to justify putting it back on PlayStation again . But recent comments by Satya about Xbox needing to generate profit and the looming layoffs around the company make me think that some hard decisions will have to be made. Do you think that it's possible that they will simply stop putting their big inexpensive games on day one after those one hundred days of resetting their business or something smaller in the scale south of midnight might still come to Game Pass on day one, assuming they're willing to make smaller games. But as the recent news indicates, this might be basically asking do I think that they will retool game pass to get away from the day one games. I think that's a that's a I mean if your Xbox everything's on the table right now, right ? If your Xbox, you have to look at the entire business and go, okay, we can't sit here and be like held down by the decisions of the past five, seven years, ten years, whatever, because those were made under duress , those were made at a time when those things sort of needed to make sense or whatever . And so I think for them, everything has to be on the table. And so ultimately, I think they will do what they think is right for the business at that moment in time , which is what everyone's always done . Will that turn out to work out this time? I don't know . I have some doubts . But also there's a lot of that needs to be retooled. And so I think if you put everything back on the table and go, Hey, man, we could throw all this out tomorrow if we wanted to and say like, hey, we're going to actually shut game pass down completely . I think that would probably be a bad move from a revenue perspective, and I don't think they would actually do it . But they have to be like in order to truly succeed, they need to be in an environment right now where if they felt really that was the right move and could justify it that they would be able to do it . They need to have full control over this thing to be able to kind of move it forward or reset it or whatever you want to call it . So I think there's a very real possibility that, yeah, with the way things are shaking out. So the thing about the sacrificial lamb about oh gears will be sent out there to die and then they will put it out on PlayStation after some period of time. They closed that door at the showcase when they said, hey these, are not timed exclusives, these are exclusive exclusives . Or I guess they said that after the showcase, but you get my point. So I think they shut the door on some of that line of thinking . But as far as it being a sacrificial lamb, I think the thing to remember is that this is a really bad time for them to be doing that Because who's buying an Xbox or like, you know, as these consoles are super expensive and everyone is starting to talk more and more about the next generation of hardware , putting gears on just Xbox, no one's going to play it . Or fewer people are going to play it. I don't know, maybe it probably wouldn't have been a massive PlayStation seller either . But we're at the end of that generation. And so like as far as like, hey, here's our new policy and these are decisions that we're going to benefit from, I don't think they benefit from putting gears onto just Xbox. I don't think they benefit from by pulling it from PlayStation five monetarily , but it does give them data that they can use to inform decisions they will have to make over the next couple of years when it comes to Project Helix or whatever . And so when they say, hey, we want to get back into exclusive games and we're doing gears and the other one clockwork revolution . I think that that ends up giving them it's a hearts and minds play for the people that feel like they've been wronged which I don't think that's a significant portion of the audience, but you know, it's the audience they got better for better or worse it's an, a udience that chose Xbox . And so at some point, you know, maybe you realize like, oh shit, we better hang on to these guys because we don't we're not making a we're not building a good case for new people to get on board. And it's a bad time for new people to get on board right now , right? I'd say the same thing about PlayStation five, you know, like we're coming up on , you know, these are weird times. The consoles are super expensive, they're, you know, they're not getting any newer . And so like , it's just sort of a weird time to make this sort of move because these are the sorts of moves that you make around the start of a generation because that's when people make these choices about which console they're going to buy one or the other or what are they buying instead of this or you know like whatever But if they waited until then they would have zero data about how it's going to go. And so I think it's easy for them to take a couple of games that they look at and go like, hey, the sales potential for these games on PlayStation probably not amazing anyway. The gears reloaded, probably didn't move a lot of units there. And so if we need a test case to figure out how the fuck is this going to work and how is this exclusive thing going to go down, gears is probably the right game if we need to pick one right now. Clockwork Revolution may be in the same boat. I'm just like , you know, maybe that game you look at it and you're like, yeah, I don't know. Looks okay. But it's not some smash hit, whatever, and so it's a game that they can probably afford to take that kind of risk with because the upside of that game maybe isn't going to be dramatically huge anyway, I guess. I don't know. But that's what that tells me. And so this just these seem like guinea pigs, these seem like, okay, like we know we're going to take a hit on this and we know that you know, like we're internally, there's going to be a morale , you know, I guess like initially when we were talking about this stuff, I was like, man, it's really it really must suck to have spent a long time working on a PlayStation five version of that gears game only to be told at the last minute, hey, by the way, we're not doing that anymore. That must really suck . I bet morale there is really low, but then everything else happened over the last few days, and I'm sure morale is even lower across the entire Xbox suite of company, whatever , because of all the shit that's about to happen , right? And so the gears coming out on PS five, yes or no is kind of like the least of the problems they're facing right now, I guess . So I don't know. I look at it as like they probably need to, you know, they they've called it resetting the business and I think that they're probably right. It's interesting that they're taking it with such There's such a willingness on their part to say that out loud and to really kind of shit on the existing business in the process . And it part of it seems like there's something real about it, but also it comes across as a little classless, a little tacky in some spots considering like it's a new regime that is coming in and basically spending all the time all this time shitting on where the business is at. Like that's the reality of it. The business is in a shitty place. They need to fix it . But normally you'd put on a bit of a brave face around it, but obviously they're about to drop the hatchet on a fucking large number of people and there's only so fucking brave of a smiling face you can put on that shit. Before you go like, yeah, dude, this company is in fucking bad shape. I don't know certainly not in as bad a shape as the number of layoffs will indicate . That's the thing. Like when you look at the books and you know, when you look at what Microsoft has had to say about Xbox, it's not that it doesn't make money, it's that it doesn't make enough. And you know, like they've had some mistakes and some missteps and whatever and some bad situations that they've stum bled into . But it's not like the business is fucking like dead man walking . They'll turn it into that if they're not careful . But anyway, yeah I think that's the situation with gears . Carl from Sweden writes in and says didn't intend to avoid showing the Ocarina of Time Remake because it doesn't look very good . This might be a bit of a provocative question, but the mixed reaction to the Starfox sixty four remake designs makes me wonder if Nintendo decided to not properly show the game off despite it coming out in a few months. I highly doubt the remake will be straight up bad, but it might be not up to Nintendo's usual first party quality. Personally, I was not impressed by what little they showed , but I'm also a bitter millennial who hates voice acting in Zelda. Sure, dude, I mean, it was a teaser and but there's a very real possibility that like they don't have the assets to make a full on trailer That maybe they're not happy with where it looks right now and it's still coming together. Like there's any number of reasons why a video game might not have a trailer's worth of material to show right now. Maybe they're knee deep in it and the game doesn't run well and there's a bunch of fucking shit. Maybe it would take too much time and effort that would take away from the actual development of the game to cobble together some kind of trailer . But I don't think it's like it's bad and it's gonna stay bad. If you're like, you know, you're putting it like oh maybe they know it's a bad thing and they don't want to show it because it sucks. Like no, like maybe right now with where it's at in development it looks fucked up . But yeah, I highly doubt that they would that they would leave it that way. Let's say But also yeah, I think what they showed didn't look especially great. And I think that link design for as little as you see of it, you look at it and you go like this something kind of gross looking about this So so yeah, I don't I don't really know . Let's see here . Another one here, Brandon asks, how wild would it be if they gave the Ocarina of Time Remake the Final Fantasy VIII treatment? Is there any chance that Nintendo actually adds to or expands the remake? Yeah, it's going to be three games . You know it would actually be interesting and would I would be in for this despite my disgust . It would be kind of cool if they actually made three games , if they did a three game tri logy out of this , but the first game is Ocarina, the second game is Majora's Mask, and the third game is an all new game that ties it all together That would be kind of cool. I think they will make changes. I don't think that they will make dramatic changes. I don't think that there's, you know, like look The story of the legend of Zelda is not like super fucking deep, right ? Gannon this fucking elf is mur goingder to the pig monster and he's gonna save the princess . That's it . Fuck your high role historia and all this timeline shit and all like fuck like fuck what you hurt. None of that shit matters . There's a pig man 's stole the princess, he's trying to get these pyramids and and Link has got to stop him and this time this time he 's a boy and a man because that's a cool thing to put in. That's it. It doesn't have to be more complicated. It's not more complicated than that. Don't let these maniacs try to convince you that there's some deep fucking thing with Zelda , like grow up . But yeah, I think it would be kind of interesting if they, you know, yeah, there's other story stuff they could do and expand upon if they wanted to, but it's that 's just not Nintendo's way . You know ? So I could see them making minor changes to the individual quests or individual like the over you know, what are they going to do? We rewrote the whole story . Lazea dies in this one. I don't know. Yeah, it's just not there's just not that much to fucking change in any of this in any of those games Fungo Bungaloid writes in with important question here or important seeking information, which I can always appreciate . Hi, Jeff, I've been seeing a lot of talk about gas station fetish piss recently. I thought you or your listeners might know something about this. Do you know how they get the piss? Is it a gig job or more of a steady employment situation with a central office or factory or something? It's surprisingly hard to find this info online. Well, Fungo bungaloid, I do have some answers for you that may not be the ones you're looking for , but gas station fetish piss is not genuine real urine . I know . I was shocked to find this out yeah, I know . This is if you're not familiar with this, they sell fake urine at gas stations because gas stations have become like the lawless like the wild west of product sales in the United States . I don't know if you realize that like the it's not the name it's a lot a lot of like name brand gas stations are not going to be super deep into this. You're not going to walk into a chevron station and find this stuff as often as when you walk into like fucking mort's gas hut or whatever. But like the stuff they are selling inside of gas stations these days are it's disturbing . It's frightening . And dare I say it, it should be regulated . But yes, they are selling fake urine that you can use to pass a drug test , but you can't write on a box Hey , this is the fake P for your drug test. Comes with a heating element so you can get it to the right temperature. They're not allowed to write that. That would the government would step in at that point. Sort of like they would sell poppers as like this is a head cleaner for your VCR . If you need to open up any holes in your VCR you need to relax your VCR This is gonna do it. But like, um, yeah, so they they write fetish urine on the package as if you're like, oh off to the party, need to get my fake pee . Which I know, I don't know, I feel like if you're that's a really specific fetish if you have a fetish for fake urine because I feel like the real stuff is so much easier to come by . But I don't know maybe you need a lot of it. I don't know . And so yes, that is sold in some gas stations. It's some kind of concoction theoretically passes tests as real urine . And so you have people that will like they've got like a water weenie full of urine, full of fake urine strapped to their leg because people are checking them and patting them down and trying to make sure that they don't have any fake pee on them . And then the pee the fake pee has to be the right temperature so you got to bring a little heater in there to heat up your fake pee . And the formulas are probably always changing too because the tests are probably evolving to detect fake pee . I mean, yes, it would be much easier if you just like, I don't know, just stopped doing drugs, but people get it sprung on them at the last minute and they're then like, oh my god, I gotta take a test . And I'm high right now. What am I going to do ? That's relatively harmless, I guess. Well, I don't know, maybe maybe people who can't pass a drug test getting jobs that require a drug , whatever. There are plenty of jobs that require drug tests that like who gives a shit . Especially , you know, weed . It's legal here. What are you testing for? But like, I don't know, the gas stations are also becoming hotbeds for really sketchy shit , cratom . And what is that derived derived is like was it 's like DHO seven or I forget what it's called? Well you have your delta eights and nines you also have y,es, a large quantity a large variety of of dick pills . And the thing they're finding more and more with some of these erection drugs at the gas station that are totally unregulated is that they're chopping those up and getting them tested and discovering like yo this just has vi agra in it . These are just the actual drugs, but in like unsafe quantities and mixed with God knows what and that's terrifying . It's like , you know, like you just like t you'reaking this stuff and you don't even know what the fuck is in it and it turns out it's like the real stuff so I guess it works but also like it's a weird quantity and it's weird this and that like there's there's a bunch of it's really it's it's It's a little terrifying how widely available some of that stuff has become. And I think that that is not good not good Yeah, I'll say it 's not good Carey from Glendora writes in and says I've been inspired by your adventures with the Nintendo entertainment system, as well as some other journeys with retro libraries . I still have my first system a blue sega game gear, as well as all the games my dad got for my sister and I when we were kids. My sister's system no longer works, which I believe is due to the capacitors dying, and my system works albeit with an extremely washed out screen. Do you think the analog pocket with an adapter is the best way to revisit my collection. Have you ever repaired or had a handheld system upgraded ? If so, how do that go? Yeah . So game gears are notorious for falling the fuck apart yeah, whether the caps die or whatever, but the screens on game gears will eventually die on you . You can replace that with a totally different and much better screen . And I bet I would not be shocked if that new screen actually was less of a battery hog than the initial screen that came with that thing, but I don't know for sure . I would not I don't know . I feel like you would know if you were able to do that work yourself or not to replace , you know, replace the capacitors on your game gear as well as potentially repl acing the screen . That's not work I would ever be able to do . So that would be something I would send out. I would try to find someone who would do that work and I would go like , can I just send you my game gear? And then you make it go and then you send it back to me and then I pay you because I'm not going to solder this stuff. Analog pocket with an adapter is an expensive way to go , I think. The analog pocket is okay . I don't really use mine all that much. The adapters are back in stock or at least they were very recently . And that was like it was like a hundred dollars for all the adapters. And so that's like game gear, lynx , NeoGeo Pocket and turbographics I think is what it is if you but you know, if you are really bent on using your original real cart ridges again then those are the sorts of I think those are the sorts of limits you would run into is like hey well the analog pocket with an adapter is probably Probably the way to do that . But if you're willing to set yourself free of the physical world, the physical realm , then yeah, I don't know, there's a billion handheld devices. I'm interested in trying out in the Ein Thor , the dual screen Android handheld that they are selling . I'm very curious to see how that thing works . But there are a billion different retro handheld emulator boxes that you can get your hands on that are all perfectly viable ways to play game gear games . If you want to play on a TV screen or a computer monitor, there are a trillion more ways to do it. So I might recommend going that route with it unless you are very dedicated to the those specific cartridges . And then I think, you know, there's there's some hoops you'd have to jump through to get there . Let's see . Land from St. Paul, Minnesota writes and says recently I fired up crackdown and I was reminded how much of the game rules. It got me thinking what happened, to the B tier of open world games like crackdown mercenaries and Red Faction Gorilla? Do open world games fall into economy of scale issues? Did AAA just swallow up the space entirely? I missed open world games built around a singular fun idea . Yeah, like a just cause . Just cause was cool at its in its day. I think that those games don't necessarily sell super well, but also I think yes, there is something of an economy of scale there. You know, the asset generation is more expensive. Building a realistic looking world by today's standards is a much more difficult process than it was when crackdown one was happening, you know ? And so I think that that probably led to fewer developers . Also it became a very crowded space. You know, you had Grand Theft Auto and then you had all of these other, you know, your Saints Rose and all of this other shit happening along the way . And Um , you know, those games weren't always super expensive and you could get your hands on them and and it was fine. They were like fun times, but fun little times is not what the business is going for these days , especially someone who's big enough to, you know, like make a full on open world game and all of that stuff . Yeah, I think that just development of that type of game probably just got a little too expensive compared to the player base that really, you know, Ubisoft and some of these other companies that there's a lot of open world fatigue that was very real , very, very real . And so I think the whole thing kind of went out of style. It's kind of the interest ing thing about GTA six . That's one of the interesting things, I suppose, is that no one really makes games like that anymore . You know ? And that'll be interesting to see as well . Let's see here . If we have anything else or if that's gonna do it do it . Sean writes in and asks about disk drives for the next generation. With all the talk about architecture and strategy for the next generation consoles, I haven't seen anyone speculating on the inclusion of a disk drive. Shipping a console has always been a practice in cost optimization, but with it being worse than ever, I have a hard time seeing a world where the PlayStation six and Helix ship with a disk drive in the console. Even though the parts to include it aren't exactly the most expensive thing in the box, saving even ten dollars in parts has to be a big win , especially when they could turn around and sell it individually for eight times that price. I don't see them complete ly phasing out disks yet, especially for PlayStation who definitely want to remind users in as many ways possible that they're already tied into the ecosystem. There's no way the PlayStation seven generations you're being I admire your optimism that there will be a PlayStation seven. The ships with a disc drive in the box . So how long do you think external ones will keep being made? I could definitely see a world where the external drive has some FPGA in it or something so they can be sold with the promise of playing any game ever released for that brand's older consoles without them having to do digital licensing deals . Throw some AI up scaling jargon on there and all of a sudden it's two hundred dollars. No , well okay, so I agree with you that they're not going to they I think what Sony is doing right now with with having a removable drive . And like, hey, you know, if you want to buy a bundle of if you want to buy a drive , if you want to buy a PlayStation five that comes with a drive, you can, but really it's just the drive is just pre installed on there and it's the same it's the same as the other thing, just a little bit cheaper. I think that will maintain through the PlayStation six. I think that they will continue to sell those external drives. They will probably at launch sell bundles that are like, this one comes with the drive, this one doesn't . Well, you know, or maybe they don't. Maybe they just sell the drive separately. They probably have data on their side that says that most players don't need the drive , and the people who want one will buy one. The people who care about that shit, you sell it for them and they can buy one and that's that. I never did end up buying a drive for my PS five Pro . And so that one still doesn't have a drive on it and I've never missed it a single time . But I feel like I should buy one while you can still can in case the supply drives up at some point because you never know, I guess . But yeah, I do think that I would I would I still would think that Xbox would move to this model as well because I think it's a pretty effective one because it means you don't have to make two separate boxes. It doesn't mean you have to go, okay, this one has a drive slot in it, this one doesn't we need separate production lines for this and that. Like if you can just build a thing that you just bolt a fucking drive to plug it in USB, which is maybe weird because it opens it up for I think if you had a USB drive, it would be a vector for hacking or there's potentially something weird there, the thing. They could be worried about there . But I would I would not be surprised to see Xbox move in this direction as well of like, hey, we're going to sell these boxes and you if want a drive, you can get one, but it's the same unit just with or without the drive bolted on. I think that just makes sense from a manufacturing perspective. Like they're going to try to find the costs they probably want to save is like, hey, we just want to have like one assembly line making these consoles. We don't want to do like oh well here's one for the high end unit with the drive. Here's the one for the high end unit without the drive. Here's the one for the low end unit that doesn't come with the drive ever. And here's this, you know, like they want to simplify that as much as possible just so manufacturing can cost them less money . So I would assume that that process just makes sense . And I would expect them to both do it going forward . Unless there's some problem with it that I'm just not privy to. Like it seems like it's worked out well for PlayStation to do that . And and yeah Zadoichi asks, will the PlayStation six have a bold design like the PS five or will they just go for a box this time? I think they will continue to have bold designs . Because that stands out , especially in a world where like let's say that you know the Xox is coming out the same three month window as the PlayStation and you need everything that you can make do to make it stand out and look futuristic and you know, like you're selling a very expensive thing. It needs to look that way . And there's something expensive and powerful about the big black rectangle that is the Xbox series X. I think they do a pretty good job with that fucking crazy thing . But I think another way to do it is to make something that looks like nothing you've ever seen before. And I think a PlayStation five achieves most of that goal and I could see them doing something potentially similar , I don't really know, you know? You know, maybe you know, design language and design tastes have certainly changed over the years. So I don't think they make one that you look at the PlayStation six goes, Oh, it's curvy, the same style of curvy as a PS five . Like I would like to see them take a fresh crack at it and do something weirder, but I want to see them do something weirder that sits on a shelf more easily instead of the rickety fucking clips and fucking bullshit things that the PS five had to try to make it stand up horizontally that shit sucks. The PS five Psro cl'ips are better than the regular PS five , which had that stupid plastic circle with the clips, the clip on the back, and it's always fallen off any time you need to push the PlayStation back in your entertainment center or turn it around to plug a fucking cable into the back, it's falling off the stupid fucking stand like that shit sucks, dude Ethan writes in and says, Being a twenty nine year old, I barely missed the era of when games like Prince of Persia were popular. I still got to play those games, but only after they sort of faded away , so my question is, were games like Prince of Persia any good when their prime time was around the modern era Prince of Persia games were pretty well liked . Modern era seems like a ridiculous thing to say about Xbox games, about original Xbox gam . But so the original Prince of Persia, the actual original genuine article, the fucking The Real Deal, Prince of Persia is a is a landmark moment in gaming and it's a tremendous like it's a beautiful game and it got ported to so many different platforms and it was a big deal the actual original game . When Ubisoft got a hold of it and started making Sans of Time and all the other stuff that kind of came along. Like people were into those games. They were they were maybe B games in a way with the possible exception of Sans of Time, which is, you know, maybe the best one of those if I had maybe it's been too long since I've played any of that stuff. So I don't I don't remember for sure, but Sans of Time was definitely the one . And that stuff was very well liked. It was , you know , certainly not something you would put on the level of like what other games of the day like a halo or whatever in terms of just like mainstream popularity. But yes, those games were solid video games that a lot of people liked. I was not I was not I was never so window but yes , people dug them . Um Let's see . Adam in Connecticut writes in . This is, you know, I don't know, this is this question is disrespectful . Who sold out more Snoop Dog Flava Flav or ice tea ? Which one of them was actually the most talented? Are there any other favorite sellouts of yours? A few years ago I saw Flava Flav on a billboard for a local ambulance chaser and I think that fucking rules. My sister used to watch a lot of MTV and VH one. So when I got into rap music, it was very weird to learn that the guy from Flavor of Love was in one of the most influential and radical hip hop groups of all time Flavor Flav or Flav always just seemed like he was doing his thing. I don't know . Like I don't think I wouldn't I would never I don't think I would ever classify Flavor Flay as a sellout. I mean, you know, he did some some television he worked in television I think he was always true to himself if nothing else, but yeah, I don't know . Flavor Flav is in a unique position because, you know, his role in public enemy was not necessarily like, you know, like he was not the lead rapper in that group and he was kind of a he was the jester of that organization, you know And so he was always kind of the lighthearted hype man of the crew anyway. And so, you know, when you saw him kind of doing other stuff that, you know, you might have been like, that's a little weird. Like he's like, it's flavor. It's you know,, he's doing his thing. And he seems like he's in a good place these days. Ice T. I don't think I think Ice T I don't view Ice T as a sell out at all. You know, Ice T got into acting and I think he's been very credible in that in that domain . You know, some, you know, some people are like, Oh, Ice T plays a cop on TV and you know, like, yeah, but I don't, you know, like it's not he's acting. It's fine . You know, Ice T was in the tremendous Dave Chappelle Chappelle show Hater's Ball bit . He's also in Pimps Up Hose Down the documentary Talking about selling hand grenades which is incredible . It's an incredible thing. You know, I see, you know, IC never really seemed like he was, you know, and, you know, you can find we were talking about this a little bit last week about the Snoop stuff and about the two box stuff specifically is, you know, Ice T's in interviews and saying like, you know, he's never really like purely gang affiliated and you know, he just kind of did his thing and made his music and, you know, like I feel like ICT has been pretty true to to himself . I mean, the thing is, you know, like IT also fronts a metal band . It's weird , you know, like IT has done a lot of stuff and that was in the nineties, you know, when body count became a thing. And so I think that Ice T has just been a very varied individual and I think that I haven't always loved everything he's put out . But yeah, yeah, I think that he's he's had an interesting career for sure . Snoop Dog . You know, like Snoop Dog has been so focused on products and all this other stuff and NFTs and this and that, you know, like all the way years ago he was doing he did a thing recently where you know there was some shitty marketing campaign where you know he, was on social media going like, I decided to quit smoking weed and then all these reports Snoop Dogs quit smoking weed and then it turned out to be some ad for something , you know like all this shit with Martha Stewart is like funny but, like hm the Snoop devil, the snoop de grill , the various business ventures that he would he was trying to fucking get into or the ways he would use his his fame, the business things that he would affiliate himself with never seemed great . And so yeah, I don't know, Snoop Dog , you know, hey , get paid, I guess. You know, I can't, you know, like how mad at it can I get it does definitely impact my thoughts on his musical output all these years later in terms of like because I think the quality of that has definitely faltered and Yeah, man, I don't know. Like I think that, you know, it's it's if we're picking, it's it's Snoop Dog for sure . And like, I good on him, I guess. I don't you know, but yeah, definitely. Yeah Rooseer two one asks is and M a sell out or does he just suck at music now? I don't know Eminem is also somewhat what is a sellout? I think is kind of the, you know, and I think the definition of that has changed a lot too, right ? I think Eminem has been very selective about when he wants to leave the house, let alone lend his likeness to other shit. He's only in the best video games Quake three and hit Man and those fifty cent games , I suppose . Eminem grew up. Now maybe didn't grow up, but Eminem got old and stayed inside all the time. And so, you know, the things that made Minem's music so vital and ridiculous and shocking is that he was out there living a real specific kind of fucking life . And he had a lot to say about it . And then he sobered up and had a lot to say about that that was really good . And then after that, just kind of like, what else you got to say? Like, I don't know, I wonder the things that rhyme with orange. I can break it down as fine ange, it's easy pour ridge. It's easy. He's right, it is. But you know , it's just, you know, kind of at some point people run out of stuff to rap about , you know . But like sell out is such a fucking weird turn, you know, and this is something so you, know, I grew up in the area where Green Day played shows before they got famous . And when Green Day signed a major label deal and Dookie was released , people were pissed . People were fucking pissed because they all thought like, oh, well green day that those are I mean those guys grew up fucking Gilman , they around' allre the time doing this and and you know Kirplunk was such a great album and whatever else . And then when Dookie came out, everyone turned on them, locally. Everyone was like, fuck these guys , these fucking assholes, these pieces of shit . And people really fucking really were pissed . And I think that's how it goes, man, especially in punk or punk adjacent music mus,ic or whate is you have these kids that are really get hooked on that fucking sellout thing and I think it's also generational . Like if I was born ten years later , would I take ads for video games on this program ? Right? Like there's there's a generational thing about selling out, about keeping it real , about all of that stuff that like people don't really think about that shit the same way anymore. And so it's like a specific generation of people that got really, really hung up on it and now everyone these days are just like, yeah man , get that bag and like no one has any real integrity about it anymore and I don't think that's a good thing, but then I would say that because I am from the fucking generation that specifically got very fucking angry about selling out or keeping it real or whatever the fuck that shit meant . And so Yeah, I think it's it's kind of hard to even, you know, it's navigating this space or any space like this with any kind of advertising or sponsorship or anything like that is always kind of a weird thing because everyone has drawn so many different lines and everything else. And so I think, you know , I'm comfortable with not doing ads for video games . That's what I like to do . And you know, and there are plenty of people are that don't view it the same way and they take whatever they can get and they and I can't I can only get so mad at it for that yeah Nirvana, people were angry at Nirvana when Nevermind came out I'm sure like yeah anytime a band blows up out of a scene someone somewhere is mad whether it's out of jealousy or whatever because their band got signed and this band didn't, then someone's going to be pissed and these fucking sellouts are doing this and you know that's that's always going to be the fucking case and that's the one of the shitty problems with band scenes and local music scenes and everything is that it's just a bunch of fucking snakes , bunch of fucking jealous fucks that are all trying to do whatever desperate move they can make because they'll think that they think that that'll get them some label interest. Obviously this is ancient history now because that's not how any music works anymore anyway. But like that's a lot of the bands around Petaluma, I feel like that was there was a lot of hate for the bigger bands like a Sky band called the Conspiracy. There was a lot of people who would love to shit on those guys because they got big and they played elsewhere . They kind of played outside of Petaluma a little bit. That was enough for you to go, they fucking they forgot what they come from or whatever the fuck . And so there's just, I don't know, there's a lot of fucking weird shit like that and yeah, well see if we can find one more here before we get going and And uh and yeah and then we'll we'll move on uh let's see here I had one and I lost one . Oh, let's just take this one. Jeff from Delaware writes it says, and sure if I Not missed your thoughts about it, but will you be jumping into Marvel Tokon? Also, what have been your favorite controllers to play fighting games with? I'm loving the Kitsune Razor Leverless Hitbox , but I know fighting game fans have a variety of favorites . I quite enjoy the stories of folks with Frankenstein controllers that they beat ass with a divo. Take care. Marvel Tokon, I thought the beta felt kind of rough. The process of assembling your team and just like the number of systems and stuff in it , I found to be really cumbersome and I found that to be pretty off putting. So I'm very interested in trying the full game and seeing how that came out , but the beta didn't really do it for me for me. I like the look of it a lot, but I've heard people complain yes, a lot of the complaints have been about the game being shallow as well. And so I don't know, I don't know how that game's going to net out it seems like it could be a game that ends up being a little too complicated for novice players that just like the Marvel guys and then and then I don't know we'll see, but yeah, sounds like they've made changes since the beta so you know they were really they sent out a lot of surveys and stuff about that beta and so they it really felt like they were trying to get some genuine feedback and we'll see we'll see where that thing lands. But yeah, as far as controllers, I don't know. Like I'm not playing any fighting games seriously enough right now to really bother like grab a controller, pull it out, hook it up. I have a lever list that I really like that , you know, that now it's been a pretty long time since I've used it, so, you know, I'd have to kind of redo the learning curve on it to get used to it again . But I but, you know, like a standard regular ass fighting stick is usually fine, you know, nothing nothing too fancy. I don't really have I don't really have crazy needs for a fighting stick. In fact, I just play with a pad most of the time. Like I've been playing a little bit of Street Fighter Six lately and I've just been playing with the pad because I don't want to go grab a fight stick or whatever and hook it all up and go through like I'm probably just going to load it up and play like three fights anyway. So you know like fuck it I'm not going to pull all this stuff out for that . If I was playing anything more seriously or more regularly then I would certainly I would certainly probably do that but But yeah , that's where I'm at with it. We'll see. Barviltokon . I really, really , really love the look of it, the art style, everything about that aesthetic and the kind of like, you know, that Japanese take on Marvel, I think is really fucking killer . But the game itself didn't did next to nothing for me in that beta. So we'll see what changes they make and see how that goes. That's going to do it for the program. Come through on Friday, especially I mean I'll be here tomorrow . But Friday we are truly going to wrap up the ranking of Nintendo Entertainment System games . There was one final game that slipped through the cracks that we did not get to, and so we will be taking a look at that. I imagine that'll probably only take like twenty minutes or something. So you know, we'll probably spend the rest of the time talking about , you know, the list in general and and where a lot of this stuff , where a lot of this stuff fell and I don't know , maybe there's if I learned anything along the way, I don't know . So come back on Friday and we'll talk about that as well as what's next. And Wednesday we'll hang out and do some stuff as well, of course . But yeah, have a good rest of your week and I'll be back with a podcast on Tuesday, of course . And I'll see you then . Bye . When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry. So I went on to better help to try to look for a therapist to help me with that. My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help . I was ruminating a lot. Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing. Discover what better help online therapy can do for you visit betterhelp. com today . When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry, so I went on to BetterHelp to try to look for a therapist to help me with that. My relationship with my family and with my boyfriend and with myself were suffering. I really needed help. I was ruminating a lot. Really getting those thoughts out to a therapist and getting feedback was just life changing. Discover what betterHelp online therapy can do for you. Visit betterhelp dot com today