Modern Warfare 2019 Legacy

Hey everybody I welcome to the show. It's Tuesday june twenty third , twenty twenty six. This is the Jeff Gerstman show . It's a podcast about video games. I'm your host for this week's installment of the program. My name is Jeff Gerstman . We have a lot to we have a lot this week. We have a lot this week. I don't know. There's a lot there's a lot going on in video games . New and old Last Friday was the end of ranking eight bit Nintendo games . We finally we got them all, we caught them all and put them all on a list and yeah, I don't know. It's it is still I'm trying to think about like things I think what I probably I probably will write out like, hey, what's, you know you know, what are the things I learned about this? And most of it is like very kind of normal stuff like or I guess like the in it's not like amazing insight in a lot of cases there's some of that too but it is stuff like wow rare made a billion games for this thing and a lot of them are bad . They are I would be I have not run numbers on this, but I feel like is Rare the most prolific publisher on the NES . Is this their most prolific phase of all time? Prolific doesn't necessarily mean good . But yeah, there was there was a there was a whole lot of stuff that they signed up for on that platform you know, wheel of fortune games or whatever like game show games and all sorts of stuff time, lord , battle toads , a lot of a whole lot of business and most of it not great . I think for me the exciting part about all that was really, you know, experiencing all of these games that came out much later in the system's lifespan . It really kind of post Super Mario Bros. three , I think is sort of , you know, where my was probably one of the last NES games I played upon release or whatever and and it, you know, had basically had moved on to , you know, the Genesis and stuff like that at that point. And and so there's just this wide range of games that hits in the nineties when the system is extremely popular. The install base is huge, huge, huge. The cost of the console has come down a couple of notches by this point. And so it's a very affordable thing. And so you have a lot of publishers that are just like trying to cram as many games onto shelves as possible to take advantage of those conditions. And that's sort of up until right now, up until today , this is sort of how consoles operated, right? Is the install base would grow, the cost of the console would come down, causing it to grow even more , and you would have more and more publishers able to make more money on the console later in its lifespan. Also development would mature and they everyone would get better at making games with this particular hardware. They would know more of the tricks to get things done . So they'd be able to squeeze out more impressive technical performance and things would generally kind of push in that direction . And I think we see some late era NES games that are like technically impressive, but ultimately I think the best games on that platform are , you know, you know pre nineteen ninety , you know, and and so it is it is sort of a weird a weird kind of reversal of I think what we would see with a lot of platforms that would hit in the years ahead. But yeah, you get like Kirby as a late era, like really technically impressive, really great game . And you know, you get you get a lot of stuff of people kind of trying to kind of cram it through the door. And that's it's funny when you think about that in terms of like what Nintendo had to do to get the platform on shelves in the United States to begin with, you know, and the uphill battle they were fighting against with retailers who were still feeling against video games as a result of what happened with the Atari twenty six hundred , where a bunch of developers crammed a bunch of garbage onto the platform and flooded the shelves with trash and but in that case, you know, Atari themselves were also maybe to blame with some of that stuff. I don't know, ET for the twenty six hundred gets a lot of flak . But I bet if you were to rank, I bet if you were to scientifically look at all the Atari twenty six hundred games, ET would probably be a roughly middle of the pack to maybe like lower middle of the pack compared to some of the junk that came out there, you know I don't know, maybe that's a that's a different conversation for a different day. It would be it would be fun to rank the twenty six hundred games and I bet it would not take very long. So maybe that's something maybe that's something we could tackle at some point here, but like I don't know. What the what's the best atari twenty six hundred games? I feel like the answer is probably pitfall, right? I mean , like if you if you're really trying to , you know, if you're really thinking about like the games that were that really took that console by storm and push things forward visually , it's probably p itfall . It's probably pitfall, right? I mean Pitfall two is crazy in its own way . And maybe Pitfall two is better. I don't know. I always have a soft spot for the Atari eight bit version of Pitfall two because it has an exclusive second quest in it. But you know, you go back and look at the early games there, the seventies era, twenty six hundred games, your space invaders, your combats and what have you . Like that stuff is, you know, like a lot of those games are just like flickery messes , you know, like Donkey Kong is probably a pretty good twenty six hundred games, but it's not it's not good it's not good . Yeah, anyway, I don't know, that's not the direction we're going in ob,viously if you watched last week, you know that we are going to embark later this week and begin ranking every game released in the United States for the Nintendo sixty four which is a total of what is that two hundred and ninety six games two hundred and ninety six games , I believe is the number there . Some people listed as two hundred and ninety seven , but they're usually including an F one racing game that only came out in Brazil . And so they're building a list of like every NTSC game, which is not what we're looking for here I was drawn to this for very similar reasons as the origins of the NES list, but I think it coming from a very different from a very different angle . The Nintendo sixty four which turns thirty today as it turns out, which is a weird coincidence here, but today is in fact the actual thirtieth anniversary of the release of the N sixty four in Japan and and that's really crazy , but crazy that that all worked out. I don't know . just Everything lined up. It was it was meant to be, some would say . The Nintendo sixty four I think is thought of as this like iconic platform. You know, I think there's a generation of children or whatever it is that put the N sixty four in a real lofty place . And speaking of someone who was there covering the launch of the N sixty four and was covering the end of the N sixty four and then some the Nintendo sixty four has a lot of terrible video games on it . It is the time when third parties stopped bringing their best to the platform or at least bringing their best ports of their best. You know, there are a lot of games that came out on that platform that were better elsewhere And it's looking over the list of games and the number of games I remember from, you know, whether it's reviewing them from that era or a lot of stuff like the N sixty four, I think more than most . And this is something we can talk about because it's before we've really engaged in this in a scientific way, but you know, kind of where I'm coming from on this is the The N sixty four is a game with like three great games. Three like or two games that changed video games forever , and then maybe like four games that are cool past that and then like a sea of fucking trash . Like an absolute mess . And I want to put that to the test . So that's why we're doing this I want to put this to the test and really kind of revisit revisit a lot of these games because By and large, the N sixty four felt like it was getting worse versions of PlayStation one games that then as we got later into the generation , you had third party developers having to adapt games that were built for two analog sticks to a controller that only had one . And you know, it covers a lot of weird ground, you know, it covers a lot of eras, you know, the sort of the first person shooters that are available on this platform are really all over the place. You get some ports from PC , like Quake and Quake two and like Duke Nukum, right? Like there's a Duke there's a Duke Nukem on yes. There are two there's there's Duke sixty four which I think is just a port of the actual game and then Duke Nukem Zero Hour, which I assume is one of those shitty third person games that Endspace was making for a while for consoles. You know, we get the entirety of the relevant Turk series here . We get great games like Forsaken sixty four, which is a game I remember fondly as hey, this is a pretty good alternative to descent. If your console is not going to have descent on it, you could at least have Forsaken. This is pretty good . But like they put hexin on this thing all from a console that started with an announcement of project reality and the announcement of a partnership with Midway to create a driving game which turned out to be Cruz and USA as well as Rare's Killer Instinct . Both arcade games that were originally supposed to be built on the same hardware that the N sixty four used, which ended up not really being the case , especially for cruisin . And so yeah, it's a really strange it's a really strange thing. I should find well I guess I guess I think I gave it to the video game history foundation, but I have a t shirt from the event where they announced project reality when all of this started , I was I was there for that . And it took years for that to materialize into a console Yeah , it's it was a really it was a really crazy time, especially for an industry that was pushing in the direction of optical storage and pre rendered cutscenes and and a lot of that sort of thing for Nintendo to say no, we think this like , you know, they tried to make a case that cartridges were going to be faster than CD ROMs and the load time of these CDs is terrible at all, you know , and then N sixty four games still kind of have load times . It's a it's a truly cursed platform that also managed to change video games forever So I'm I'm very interested in kind of revisiting this entire library there's a handful of games that stick out at me as like things I want to like look at and that's not for the right reasons in a lot of cases like there's stuff that I really am curious about to see like Armorine's project swarm which I believe acclaim put out and I remember being fucking terrible . But there's also stuff like what? Like space station Silicon Valley and like body harvest You know, chameleon twist one and two . Oh god, I'm gonna have to play Jet Force Gemini. This was a terrible idea. What the fuck am I doing? All right, well lookook , we're strapping in. We're strapping in for a couple of years of this . And we'll see where this goes. They can't all be Pokemon Snap , unfortunately , some of them have to be shadow man . And I'll get to finally answer the question as someone who's never really played it seriously , what's the deal with Superman sixty four? What's the actual deal with that Superman game ? Like it gets put on this this you know it really you know like people really take that game to task . Is it going to be as bad as people say it is? I'm very curious about that . As someone who has not played Quest sixty four since probably the week it came out . What is that going to? What is that like you know they put ready to rumble boxing on the N sixty four. I forgot all about that . Those are dreamcast games if you ask me . Oh yeah, there's there's a rich story to tell, a lot of wrestling games , a questionable port of wipe out disgusting filth like banjo toewy Yeah . Shadows of the Empire, right? I mean, that was a game that everyone was like falling all over themselves about when it was released back around, you know, the launch and everything. So yeah, there's there's a there's a lot to get into and so, you know, every Frid we'll charge forward through that list and experience the games like Tiggers Honey Hunt which just sounds like a pornographic game. I don't think it actually is unfortunately . So yeah, that's that's going to be happening. It's going to start this Friday. So happy anniversary to the Nintendo sixty four, I'm pretty sure it was terrible . I'm pretty sure it was terrible . Barrio sixty four changed gaming that doesn't make the Nintendo sixty four good . Zavraam asks why did you have to start the new science? The day Evo starts. Oh, don't worry. No one entered Evo and no one was watch ing Evo. So don't worry about it. It'll be fine. Let's take a break. We'll come back. We'll talk about the incredibly stupid controller I purchased . And more . One of the reasons I bought an Apple Watch was sleep tracking. I wanted to see, you know, hey, how much sleep I' amm really getting ? Am I getting decent sleep? 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Support the show and let them know we sent you have to check out Lisa. com The promo code is Jeff This is also the thirtieth anniversary this week of the original, I guess the shareware release of Quake , which is much a much more interesting anniversary, I think, in a lot of ways that the I think Quake holds up better than the N sixty four as I played a bunch of Quake one yesterday both the remastered version that's on steam now and then I grabbed the source port and launched that has a bunch of high res textures and stuff that looked really crazy, but yeah, quake fucking rips, man. It is it runs at such a high speed. You're just like moving all like the movement is so good. It's crazy to think about how far just even the Quake one has come because when Quake one was released man like no one had the no one had the band to play it online the right way because broadband had not really swept across the nation yet. And also no one knew that you needed to play that game with a mouse. Eventually people it took a little bit a few months here for people to realize like, Oh you like this is what mouse look is and this is why it's going to change everything about gaming for the rest of forever . And so my first time, my first time through that shareware episode of Quake, I played it keyboard only because that's how you played Wolfenstein and that's how you played Doom But you needed to look up and down and aim. And so you're like getting the page up page down keys to tilt your head up and down trying to aim at these floating dipshits that were that were above you and below you and and it very quickly became like I don't really understand. I don't really get quake. I don't really understand like it doesn't I don't really know , it's hard, man. Like it looks great. It's really cool, but like it's really fucked up, man . And then adding mouse look to the game and using a mouse and a keyboard at the same time was a huge a huge learning curve after a good chunk of time playing first person shooters with just a keyboard incorporating the mouse into it and having one hand on the keyboard. The WASD thing was not the default control in Quake . It eventually became the like oh here's how you should set up your keybinds for Quake and you should put it on W and A and S and D and then a shift key for this a space bar to jum p and like, you know, a lot like that stuff was not a day one thing and yes you had to turn on the crosshair for by there was a lot of stuff there that was like really kind of community led and it's funny to think about how standardized that stuff has become across all of PC gaming, you know, that kind of m ouse and keyboard hand configuration and everything , but really it was it was people playing Quake and realizing that they needed to redo the controls and not sticking with the defaults and all of that that got to a point where that that made sense, you know, the game would come out in June . And I don't think I started playing Quake with a mouse until I started at GameSpot in October . I guess I had been freelancing for them right around that time I started freelancing for them and it wasn't long after that until I started going into that office fairly regular ly. But so maybe it was sometime over the summer and then I went from being hourly to being a full proper employee in October. I think that's what it was. But I had been there for a few months prior to that. But getting there and they were all playing quake against each other and seeing all of the control schemes and the way people like someone sat me down and said, No, here's what you need to do. And then and then there were people there. I was told the story before, but there were people there who they would bind run forward to the space bar instead of W . And then they took a coffee cup and rested it on their keyboard so that they were always moving forward , which was truly fucking bananas. Like way fucking like, what the fuck is going on here? I got to get out of here. These people are out of their mind . But that was where I kind of like finally realized like, oh, this is what it means to play Quake This is this is how you play, you know because Quake world and the online stuff was really impressive but again I only had dial up at home and so I couldn't really , you know, this is only so good you can do on a dial up connection, especially when you know kids at college are sitting on their T one lines and just fucking you up . Quake W wasorld a revolutionary piece of net code in its era, but it uh you know, like its it was tough stuff and so Quake, you know, Quake obviously changed the gaming in numerous ways over the course of its over the course of even just the lifespan of Quake one, I think, you know, between its friendliness to multiplayer mods and skins and like, you know, no one used the word skin until Quake came along . And so much of modern PC gaming owes owes itself to the success of Quake . It's really kind of it's mind boggling to see how many of the things that again weren't necessarily in the shipping game , but between mods and community improvements and everything else that would happen as that knowledge began to spread , you know, that kind of codified and solidified everything from control schemes to terminology and everything . And so Quakes the shadow that Quake casts upon two PC games is I mean, we are still in a lot of ways under that shadow . And it's just a it's a it's a truly it's a truly wonderful game really and it's still fun like it's it's still it's still a really great time. So yeah, I don't know . It's it's a great it was a great, great landmark event there that pushed things forward all over again after Wolfenstein did it and then doom kind of did it again . You know, it software was on just an unfucking believable run that helped usher in the idea of the three D graphics accelerator, you know , like Q oneuake certainly, you know, the release of the voodoo and getting a voodoo two card so you could see the colored lighting in Quake two like it helps, you know, the popularity of Quake helped to standardize three D graph ics architecture in a lot of ways as well from the weird the different manufacturers and all this other stuff, like the voodoo was so successful, I guess, that you know, that's kind of the direction everyone pushed in. And and yeah, I guess, you know, and here we are today . It's weird to think about all these years later , you know, just how how how important that stuff ended up being because it all seemed so silly and it seemed so independent at the time. It seemed like, you know, it's software just seemed like a group of people like a you know, they didn't seem like a major company , you know, the same way that I don't know, what activision or like whatever whoever was in Nintendo, like all these companies that were putting out games and you thought of as like these are video game companies . Like it seemed like this upstart insane thing even still by the release of Quake and they really did come across as with that kind of rock star sort of feel because you knew their names as individuals, you know, you knew who John Romero was, you knew that John Carmack was doing all this stuff. You looked at their plan files to see what they were working on and, you know, And it was very I don't know, it was refreshing and it felt as independent as it as I guess suppose it was, you know . And then it would all fall apart not long after that. Obviously, like, you know, Romero would go his own way and, you know, like things, things would obviously occur there. You know, shit happens . And it wouldn't be too much long after that that John Romero was at ION Storm trying to make Daikatana, Daikatana another video game that was ported to the Nintendo sixty four . The release of Quake and the community that surrounded it is also probably indirectly responsible for a lot of what became modern games journalism at the time . There was not a lot of it out there in a multi game capacity like GameSpot, which had launched in May of nineteen ninety six . And what was there, you know, you had like happy puppy Uh there was, I guess the imagined games network was technically still some kind of thing . Was this before they were snowball or whatever? But you know, you had all the planet sites like Planet Quake , Blues News still exists , which is fucking crazy , but it really, you know, it started both, you know, the you had to go to these sites to know what was going on with Quake. You had to see like you had to go to Redwoods to find out when the fucking jail break up date was, you know, what ever fucking mod was coming out , you needed to see what was happening in the world of Quake . And you know, the the more professional like video game outlets at the time hadn't really formed at that point. You know, when I got the game spot, they had taken over a travel agency on Clement Street in San Francisco and you know, it was just a handful of people there making a website and they had big ideas about how it was going to be this commercial success and all of this and they had a sales team that was selling ads and, you know, like it was it was a as serious it was a more serious operation than the print magazine I worked for before, but that says more about the print magazine , I suppose than , you know, the seriousness of GameSpot . But, you know, it was people who had come out of the world of print and felt like they could make a dent and that they could do something commercially on the internet , which was not something that was being done to great effect at the time . And you know, those trails were still being blazed by a variety of companies, you know? And yeah, I don't know. It was a it was a it was a very interesting time. ninety six in a lot of ways really kind of set the stage for for a lot of the a lot of where we're at today like a pretty important year. ninety eight would be the year that would get all the credit for the actual quality of games , but ninety six is the year that kind of laid a lot of the framework for a lot of the stuff that we still see today, which is which is interesting. But yeah, happy anniversary to Quake. I hope they make another one , but all that shit is owned by Microsoft now , so too fucking knows . Um I took the plunge on a controller as I occasionally do , I see a controller on the internet and go that looks dumb as hell dumb as hell And so I picked up. I went to Ali Express and I ordered a package that included the base controller and a bunch of attachments for the Baitong Pangu . I think I'm pronouncing that correctly It's a controller. I don't know, like by default, it doesn't necessarily look dramatically different from your standard kind of Xbox era kind of game pad shape and what have you . The crazy thing about it is that it has buttons on the front of it that you can use to unlock the four kind of touch points on a controller and pop the modules out . So I can remove the analog sticks, I can remove the buttons and I can put them where I want to or how I want to . And I got a bunch of different if. So you want basically this is like if you want the kind of PlayStation style low analog sticks, you can put the analog sticks in that spot down low . If you want the like offset one up high and then the right one down low the way Xbox Controllers do it. You can set it up that way , but also, you know, you could really just kind of do whatever you want. You could just go get extra modules for this thing and plug them all in until you have four analog sticks on one controller . And and then you have, I don't know. Then you have four analog sticks on the face of one controller . You can also obviously, you know, you could put all buttons if you wanted to . It's a really obviously a very modular set up . This thing ran me about two hundred dollars for the controller and all of the and like way too many add on modules . And so I have the ability to put all analog sticks on it. I don't have enough button modules to go all buttons, but I can go three buttons and one deep pad . And they make different modules for it as well. So like, you know, like there are different types of buttons and there are three different types of analog sticks and there are like three different types of button modules and there's two different D pad modules and it's it's a real ridiculous sort of setup here. You can also the buttons come in in like switch style , you know, button labeling as well as Xbox style if you like your BA's instead of your AB's . So you can make a really hellish you can make a lot of really hellish controller configurations and it's it's got four back buttons. You can also swap out the back module for one that only has two buttons if you like. It's got its own dongle for low latency connections as well as I think it'll also do Bluetooth and stuff like that. Or you can plug it in . It is a really hellish controller that kind of got me thinking about the future of controllers and what this is something I'm thinking about a lot lately is like, what are we going to do with controllers going forward? And is anyone going to be dramatic and make changes to how their controller feels or where the buttons are or whatever, selfishly as someone who likes fighting games, I would love to have six buttons on the face, which you can sort of do with this thing, but they're separated just enough that it doesn't really feel right or good. Obviously, the limitation here when it comes to the Beetong Pengu is video games . They're not meant for this. No one's making video games that are built around you having four analog sticks , you know ? It would be really cool if someone did , but like ultimately X input and a lot of the technology that is connecting controllers to PCs and other such devices , none of them are built around the idea of you having more than two analog sticks. None of them are built around the idea of you having all of these buttons and oh you can map all these buttons to whatever you want because we just see them as buttons. And so you have to download Beetong's specific software package to kind of map the controller to what you want. And this is really where the heart of the controller lies. This software is a mess. Everything is in Chinese, every single instruction manual I got there's an English translation of the manual online on their official site , but everything I got in the mail was all in Chinese. And so you can basically map everything how you want , meaning you can map individual buttons to keys on your keyboard , which is sort of that's where this starts to work , but then you're limited by games that might block that. Call of Duty, for example , will not let you use a keyboard and a controller for input at the same time , which I suppose means you could just map everything on the controller to a keyboard button and not use any of the built in controller functionality . But you know, that's that's also crazy . But this is like, you know, if you needed to use like I think about stuff like Marathon, like I was having trouble with like it has a added a flashlight to Marathon this season they added a level that was dark enough to need one and by default the input is like you push right on the D pad and the X button at the same time and so it's like two buttons. You can map it to whatever you want on a keyboard and so you could map that to whatever key and then map it to one of the back buttons. You could map it to pretty much wherever you want. It's, you know, the Pangu software is maybe not as fully featured and as well thought out as steam input and as Steam's input mapping stuff , but you can map it pretty much how you want. You can map an analog stick to the mouse, which is a way to kind of like shove in a third analog set of analog axes if you want to have both analog sticks plus of translated mouse. So I'm trying to think of ways you could do all that. But again no games are built to take advantage of this . You know, but at the end of the day no one's making a game that needs this. And so it really comes down to your sick imagination , your dis gusting brain . Can you do trigger access on the stick? I don't know if the top of my head. I bet you can . I bet you could put like a trigger button on an analog stick if you if you so des ired , but I don't I don't know off the top of my head . It's a really interesting controller. A lot of it falls apart because I don't think any of the button modules feel good and I only like one set of the analog sticks and it turns out they're the like alps like the they do they have capacitive sticks which I think are these I think are these red ones red ring here on 'em . They have TMR sticks and they have kind of traditional, you know, like pots or like sticks that are eventually probably going to drift on you. And those are the only ones I like. Those are the only ones that are tight enough to for my specific needs. I like a tight stick. I don't like it loosey goosey. I don't like it flopping all over the place . And so like some of these modules are just better than others . And it is a fascinating glimpse into what is possible, I suppose , while still looking like a regular controller. Obviously if you, you know, anything is possible if you want to build it all yourself and build something completely ridiculous and bespoke and what have you. But as far as something that comes with a software package, the less you map, you know, all of these insane inputs in all of the ridiculous ways you want to, they pull it off . No one but no one but no one needs this again unless you've got a specific where you're like, oh I bet in this specific game or for this driving game or this flight simulator, you know, like if there's something weird where you just need extra something , then maybe you could envision a layout that would make sense on this controller. It has a gyro on it also. So if you want to do that, that's another analog input at your disposal. I think ultimately I just think that a lot of default control schemes are actually quite good all these years later, you have some outliers obviously, right? And that's where we kind of brush up against the possibility of the steam controller, right? Where the idea is like, are there mouse and keyboard games or games with a lot of mixed inputs or whatever that I could just map all to this one device and the Steam Controller has been really great for that with its trackpads and all that sort of stuff . This stuff, I don't know. Yeah, arcade rhythm games. I thought about that too. I was like, oh well I could make a pop and music game pad with this. I could put enough buttons on this to play it that way And and yeah, I don't know. It's it feels mostly well made. It's got a weight to it that you can reduce if you want because you can actually slide the backs of the controller off and remove the rumble motors . You can just yank the rumble right out and get a lighter controller as a result , which is kind of silly, but you can do it And yeah, I don't know. It's a really neat thing. It's neat it feels like well, it is very cutting edge. I'm not going to say it feels very cutting edge because I think a lot of the D pad and buttons in a lot of that stuff feels sort of cheap to me . And so there's there's stuff there that I go like eh yeah there's like if this just all felt a little better if they had higher quality modules or if I could adjust the tension on these sticks myself that maybe that would be cool. But like you see some pretty cool possibilities with a device like this . That's my I'm not so I guess like ultimately like from a recommendation standpoint, I'm going to say you don't need this , but it pretty much does what you want it to do. My worry is that I would get this and then realize like, oh, the software is terrible . So as a result , you can't map this the way you want to for analogs, you know, whatever whatever nonsense idea that you have . And so I'm at least pleased to report that the software seems to be largely up to the task , but ultimately it's it's silly and as such becomes a little difficult to recommend unless you're unless you have a real specific sickness. Sagashi Snakes asks, do you know if this thing only has X input drivers? So it has a switch here on the back in addition to the on off switch that lets you switch it from pairing to the dongle . It has a switch mode and an Xbox mode sorry it has Bluetooth , Nintendo Switch and then one that just says app, which is for phones . But in my experience, a lot of this stuff all just kind of rings up as X input when you pair it to a computer, at least when you plug it in wired , it says, Oh, you got an X input controller. And when I use the dongle, it says, Oh, check out this X input dongle. You got plugged in. So on PC, you might not be able to use these other modes directly , though I have not tried to pair it through Bluetooth to see how it works that way and maybe over Bluetooth it works a little differently . But yeah , a very interesting device . It's a real hell it's a real, it's a real hell sort of controller . But at the same time , that's kind of awesome . But I suspect you know again, the software that they provide for it knows exactly which modules you have in which space. And so when you remove modules and plug them in, it goes Oh, you've got the TMR stick here and you've got the buttons here. And so it becomes very easy to visualize your controller and map the buttons accordingly . So that seems like it is the best way to do that . It's a really ridiculous thing . And I can at least appreciate that. But again, for the price and it's not you don't have to spend two hundred dollars on it. You know, I wanted a bunch of extra mod ules . And so like that was the kind of the driving factor there is I wanted to have a ton of different buttons and weird stuff to mess with it because that's I don't know that,'s kind of the whole point , but there are importers that are starting to sell it directly here in the States for less than the money I paid for it on Ali Express, but not much less. So consider that in mind. How does Steam's Controller settings work with it? Again, the dongle rings up as an X input dongle when you're plugged into a PC wired, it sees it as an X input controller . The only thing I haven't really tried there is to do it over Bluetooth and see if Bluetooth rings it up as I don't know maybe it would be direct input at that point, but that's steam is probably still not my guess is that nothing is ever going to truly see the actual analog axes and buttons, you know, like whatever modules you have plugged in at a given time because the software is there to facilitate the mapping of all of that . And so it doesn't invent more buttons for you to use, but it is possible, you know, if you can get it , you know, to ring up as a D input device, maybe it does see more, but I have my doubts. I will try that. I found a Bluetooth dongle the other day, so I will at some point try to pair it over Bluetooth and see what happens but I, suspect it will not give you the true freedom that you would actually want in that case. What else is going on? Let's take one more break. We'll come back. We'll talk about goblin America . Are you experiencing a little bit of hair loss or maybe a lot of hair loss? Do you want to do something about it? Because hair loss doesn't fix itself. The earlier you act, the better. HIMS makes starting simple with a one hundred percent online process and personalized treatment pl ans delivered straight to you. IMMS offers convenient access to a range of prescription hair loss treatments with ingredients that work, including chews, oral medications, serums, and sprays. 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That's hims dot com slash Jeff for your free online visit hims dot com slash Jeff ured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality prescription required, see website for full details, restrictions and important safety information, individual results may vary based on studies of topical and oral monoxidal and fasteride . Goblin America is out in early access. This is a game that has been on my wish list for some time now. This is from Gil Lawson, this I think I stumbled upon this on TikTok originally . And I was like, this looks like an absolute hellish video game . And it is first this is how that's the best way to describe this for people who don't want to go to the Steam page and look at it. Though looking at it I think will give you a good indicator of what you're in for. It is not quite a cruelty squad level of let's say it's cruelty squad adjacent. It's not something that is ripping off a vibe from that per se , but if you looked at cruelty squad and went like is this f,uc Whatking weird mess? Goblin America has a similar gives you a similar reaction of what the fuck am I even looking at ? But it turns out Goblin America is a very kind of bouncy , air like movement first person shooter, where each level is you reliving something that one of the American presidents did . And so you spawn into the world as ostensibly a George Washington and then you must go cut down a cherry tree, but also it's a first person shooter . And so you are shooting the cherry tree with your pistol and fighting it and killing it and then escaping and then getting ranked on a leaderboard based on how quickly you did it and getting bronze medals and things . And then the very second level is you are Abraham Lincoln and when you spawn, John Wilkes booth is behind you and you can pick your load out when you go in. So you bring in the pistol that you unlocked in the first level and you turn around and shoot him. And then you have to jump and bounce and you can do bull et jumps, which are basically rocket jumps from Quake where if you aim at the ground and shoot the ground it will fling you into the air. And so you're bouncing around and doing all of this and so it is in early access. There is basically I think where it's at in early access, if I remember the description correctly it's a situation where like the levels that are in the game are pretty polished up and finished it. So's not a case of like you're playing a bunch of early content. It's that there will be more content to come . And ye it's real it's it's a it's a it's a real it's a it's a real mess of a game but also like feels really good . And the air movement when you get flung into the air and the ability to kind of aim some of these pistol shots and you know you're unlocking different weapons and tools and stuff along the way . It's got a it's got a pretty good feel to it between like a really good kind of running slide into a bullet jump for sky stuff and kind of coming up and down and dodging some of the shots that are coming your way . And all of it is , you know, built around the idea of, you know , these are all timed runs and there's exploration to do and things to find to unlock and stuff. So you're kind of trying to get higher and higher on this leaderbo ard and running these levels over and over again. So it's it's kind of it's not quite a CS surf at least input wise, it doesn't necessarily feel like a counter strike kind of surfing thing or at least I don't think it does because I was never able to surf properly in counterstrike. So it's, you know, it's easier than that at least. But it's yeah, goblin America is a real silly mess that I that I think you should take a look at. Someone in the chat was saying the James Ferrari was game supposed to be out. Yeah, is that, um Is that desolation? What is that? Desolation seed, right? Did that actually come out? I know it was like the countdown on it but was it like the steam page at one point for that said that it was releasing in five hours, but no, desolation seed has not launched and now it all just says coming soon. So I don't know what the hell is happen ing there . But yeah, Desolation Seed is probably another well I don't know, like feels like it's potentially in the same boat, but maybe could be something else entirely you never know . Goblin America is neat. You should you should go check out a trailer for it. But with it with and keep in mind what I told you about what the game actually is because I don't know that the trailer necessarily prepares you for the actual like the hows and why's of that game . It's a pretty wonderful little mess. Speaking of messes, the steam machine announced a while ago and pricing obviously has been something of a conversation for the last several months here, and now it is upon us they are taking reservations for the steam machine And it's expensive . You know, I don't know. The pricing here actually is about what I thought it was going to be and that which is to say it's a very high price. I think when you look at what has been happening with console pricing and especially when you look at what has been happening PC component prices and how expensive all of that stuff has gotten, people are being shocked by the steam machine price and I think that that is indicative of people not paying attention to how fucked this has become over the last six months year, whatever it is. And so being faced with this , they are reacting in ways that I find interesting. The base model, which is five hundred twelve gigabytes of storage and no controller will be one thousand and forty nine dollars . If you want a controller, that price goes up to eleven hundred twenty eight They also are selling a two terabyte model model that will be thirteen hundred and forty nine dollars. And if you want the two terabyte model with the controller, that price goes up to fourteen hundred dollars I'm sorry one thousand four hundred and twenty eight dollars When you think about the specs of this machine and the kind of custom build that they're doing, when you look at like a lot of pre built PC pricing and what have you this is not that far off. If you wanted to like go buy parts and build something yourself, you could probably build something that is marginally more powerful for this amount of money . It would not be silent nearly silent the way that this is the thermals, the design. So, you know, there's there's aspects of it there that you know, you could kind of cut some corners on it and whatever if you again, if you were willing to build it yourself which kind of says that they're not going to make money on this thing. They will, you know, obviously if people are excited about games on steam, they will theoretically buy more games on steam and so maybe Valve makes something up on the back end . But as far as the raw the raw price to component pricing and what have you, this is not a this is not something that Valve is going to be like cleaning up on. They are going to be selling it in the United States. They're going to be selling it as a lottery . So anyone can go to Steam and join the queue for this . And then on Thursday , june twenty fifth at ten AM Pacific time , they will close the list , randomize the list, and they will send you an email with your results . And that will basically tell you when you will be allowed to buy a steam machine if you are interested in buying a steam machine. Obviously price point of this is going to cool some of that off . But when we consider that everything they've been saying about manufacturing a steam machine and everything like that . They're probably I don't know how many of these they're going to be making for launch day . So which is to say I suspect they will sell out . In Japan, they just opened up sales and sold them . So some people in Japan already have orders in that will be shipping according to the website within like five business days. So it sounds like that when this happens , you know , when the list is closed and when the sales start, it sounds like that they have them pretty much ready to go . So I don't think it'll be a situation where they go, you are allowed to buy one when they come out in six months or anything like that . This sounds like something that they will they will turn around pretty quickly here . The two terabyte model looks like comes with extra faceplates. There's a red fabric and a solid walnut . And yeah, I don't know. Like this is I guess I guess the the line on this, the sensible line on this is if you look at this and think , man, this is too much money. Boy, you're really going to hate the next few years of fucking hardware launches because it's not going to change . Valve is in a bad position here for , you know, as a hardware manufacturer or whatever , because they're not manufacturing in massive quantities. This is not a company that is getting breaks on RAM. There was some I don't know if it was in the Virgin's report ing or someone else but basically Valve said like, yeah, we're getting we're not on some long term RAM contract. Like every month we're told what the RAM prices are . And so they are basically coming at this the same way any kind of medium sized OEM PC builder would. And so they're not getting the price breaks that Apple or Pl ayStation or even Xbox might get because of the , you know, the quantities that they're looking to build . And that's a fucking bad place to be . I don't know that this is, I mean, you know, like, I don't think that any angle on this you look at and go, well, this is actually good and here's why. Here's why it's good . Anyone saying that is a fool , but But the ways in which this is bad are very easy to explain because when you look at the price of all of this stuff and what has been happening across the board to computer opponents , you kind of look at all of it and go like yep , yeah, pretty much pretty fucking much . And we'll see how many more of them they can make and how rapidly they can make them or whatever, but you know, like Valve ultimately is not a hardware maker, you know, like they are making hardware, but it is not their main bread and butter . I think the steam machine incredibly important for a variety of ways for a variety of reasons, but mainly that importance I think is more about Steam OS and more about proton and more about the work they are doing on the infrastructure that powers the steam machine and the steam deck that will benefit people if they want to build their own as part of the release of the latest version of Steam OS three. eight. ten . They are saying alongside that, hey, we are kind of paving the way for more people to build their own if you have parts laying around and you want to put Steam OS on stuff , do it and that they are continuing to work on support for a wider range of GP GPU's because obviously the steam machine and the steam deck both have AMD parts inside of them and so they are built around that. But they did say that they are the quote is they're collaborating with NVIDIA very closely to bring support for NVIDIA's hardware into Steam OS, which that's as someone who is running BASIT, which is kind of based around a lot of the sort of Steam OS and prot on stuff that's been happening, like their support for NVIDIA hardware has been , let's call it a little iffy and not as robust as the support that exists for AMD's parts . So that is very exciting to hear. And I think that that is ultimately the real thing that Valve is doing here. Like the steam machines, it's a pretty PC. They're making a cool looking computer. It's a tiny little cube that plays your video games . And you know, you can hook it up to a TV . But also they're saying you can hook it up to a TV and also saying this is really good at fourteen forty p. Like, okay, no one has a fourteen forty P TV. They're all going to be running these games at four K . Or they're going to try to run them at one thousand four hundred forty p and then the TV will scale them up and that'll look how it looks , which , you know , is probably okay I love fourteen forty p here at the desk. I love it. fourteen forty p is an amazing fucking sweet sp ot. It looks great. This monitor is like fucking a foot and a half away from me. It fucking rips . So I guess like that's it's sort of you start to back into a conversation about like who is the ideal person for the steam deck because you know the steam machine rather like here's this thing. It's like it's kind of consoleizing the PC experience . It's still a little finicky, still twiddly, you know, on some games depending on what you're doing . And and also, you know , people say, Oh, well my TV does fourteen forty p just great or I can set it to fourteen forty p. Like wouldn't these be sold to people that are not necessarily technically minded because they would want something that's a little more consoleized and and wouldn't they not know to do any of that ? You know ? But also, is that audience willing to spend this amount of money on anything for a video game machine? Or is that also the audience that's going to go , Hey, yeah, fifteen hundred bucks, let's do it . So yeah, you run into immediate conundrums across the board with this device just because of the environment it is shipping in. It's a really cool machine that would have been a lot cooler at the price that they originally wanted it to land at, which some people have kind of walked through that. It's like, oh, you know, this probably would have been about seven hundred fifty bucks if the world hadn't gone too sh it um and and then you know and then there would be much rejoicing and what have you, I'm sure but um but here we are this is the world in which we live . Don't worry. Once all the data centers get built, it's gonna be worth it guys. All that stuff's gonna be super cool . You're going to be able to run all sorts of egentic loops for all the cool things you do in your life . It's gonna be great. It's going to be sick as fuck man. You'll see, you'll all see . Yeah , so you know, I assume these will sell out. The Japanese allotment already sold out . And yeah, I would not be shocked. I think that's more of a factor of they're not going to have a billion of these out there on day one and who knows how quickly they'll be able to build them. They're also trying to build a VR headset at some point here too . So I don't what are the you, know , Killinary Disaster says, My company just dumped all our agentic shit because it sucks. Yeah, well yeah, yeah, some companies need to kick the tires on that stuff before they realize like, oh this, shit is shitty. This is shitty shit . You know, there's in some of the reporting, there's been quotes from Valve saying like, you know, hey at one point we flo ated the idea of shipping one of these without an SSD and without RAM in it and we still might do that someday . So that might be an option for you. I don't know like you know your price the price you pay for RAM is not going to be better than valves . So that's really for people that just happen to have some parts hanging out. If you're just like, Oh, well yeah, I've got some RAM sitting here . And yeah, you know, I think the steam machine is exactly what they said it was going to be. You know , as far as the device itself and the unit itself, I mean there's still work to be done. It sounds like over the last few weeks of people using steam machines for some of this like review cycle stuff . It's been like , you know, a lot of very frequent updates and modifications to memory allotments and what have you just from one kind of firmware update to the next , if you want to call it that . And so that's pretty similar to how the Steam Deck launch went . Obviously they have a lot of experience with the Steam Deck they're able to draw on here. So I would expect that the launch of the Steam machine would be much more robust and ready than the launch of the Steam Deck was originally, so that's that's good news. I don't know, like all of this is good news. It's just not right now. Just no one has the fucking money for it. Or not enough people have the money for it , which , you know, if you were PlayStation and you were in this boat would be a real problem because that's the only thing you can do . Valve can sell these games on any PC , so it's not something that is rocking their boat all that dramatically. And you know, it's it's an unfortunate situation that they found themselves in with trying to launch hardware as this stuff was going to shit. I think everyone knew that this was going to be something that was going to be over a grand and is actually I don't know, this is this is like probably a couple hundred dollars less than I thought it was going to be because I figured we would be coming in around twelve hundred for a base model and more like fifteen, sixteen , if not seventeen for an upgraded version. But here we go. There you go. We'll find out Thursday who wins the lottery . Which this seems like an okay way to do it. I don't know. Like I think as someone who got in early on steam controllers and got one really quickly and got in on the Steam Deck OLED and was able to order one without much hassle. I now feel like they have kind of fucked me over on this like, well, I guess I'll just enter this lottery and see how it goes by making it truly random, but considering scalpers and a lot of the other bullshit that has befallen hardware launches similar to this that this seems like a potentially decent way to do it . And you can sign up for multiple lists also . If you're just like, I want one of these. I don't care which one it is. You can opt in for all four if you are a true maniac . I guess you could always just replace the hard drive in it and I mean it's a computer. Do what you want with it. It's a fucking computer or go build your own. I've got a fucking full on PC with a four thousand ninety hooked up to this television that is like an order of magnitude more powerful than the steam machine , you know, maybe maybe you have something like that laying around as well or maybe you have half the parts for one that you could cobble together something like this, you know ? So I think that 's , you know , that's all fine and that's all normal, I guess that because these are just computers . And I think some people are Making a bigger deal about this than it probably needs to be , you know, because they're treating it like it's some sort of console launch and you know, you see people, oh, the steam machine is dead. It's just fucking dead. This whole thing's dead dude . The Steam machine's just a fucking computer, man, and they're still doing all of the fucking Linux work to make this stuff work on more and more PCs as time goes on. Like the long play of this has very little to do with valves shipping you a box in the mail . You know, that is something that like if this ecosystem continues to be healthy , then yeah, they would continue to offer something like this as they go , right? Like, oh, well here's, you know, if you just want a fucking box and you don't want to think about it and you want all the stuff pre installed, we'll sell you one of those . But dude, if you have a computer , just fucking download a copy of Rufus and put this ISO on a fucking USB stick and then follow this step by step process to get this shit on your shit. And then your shit will be running our shit. And our shit's great . That's a lot of hoops to jump through for people who don't know what any of what I just said means , but it's actually not that fucking hard Um , so yeah, I don't know, like for me the most exciting bit about the bit of information that was released alongside the rollout of the steam machine is is that Steam OS three point eight is available and and a lot , you know, they are they are kind of continuing to work harder on making Steam OS compatible with more different types of PC hardware. That's where this starts to matter. When we talk about like, oh, Linux runs these games better than Windows does, that's where this starts to get super fucking interesting , right ? Is because if you can just take your existing PC, which maybe has an NVIDIA card in it like mine does , you will theoretically eventually get to a point where that works too . And if you have AMD stuff right now , then you might just be good to go today if you wanted to run this on your existing PC. Obviously, you would not be able to play marathon anymore . Bad fucking damn it . That's ultimately that that's the future I hope we get to is I want Steam OS or just Linux in general, you know, Steam OS seems like it could potentially become the dominant gaming version of the OS if things continue in this way, right ? I want to get to a point where developers have to consider this and they have to consider this audience and they have to take this audience seriously when it comes to multiplayer games and anti cheat and all of that shit . You know ? Like I want to get to a point where this is like this, hey, we've got full compatibility. Like this just stuff just fucking works , you know ? Steam OS is not currently built for dual booting, but that is something that they will probably get to eventually according to them. But right now it is primarily meant to be the main OS installed on your machine . I suspect that means like, yeah, you could duel boot it, but it's fucked up . Everything's always a little fucked up, right? So yeah, I don't know. Like the Steam machine is a really cool device , I guess, but like the what it represents on the software side is the actual interesting part. So the idea that like, hey, the steam machine is one thousand five hundred dollars or whatever. Like, yeah, whatever, who cares? Don't buy it. Just don't buy it. Like you don't need one . You know, it's a computer . Do you need a computer Because by the way, this is pretty much how much computers cost now. If you need a computer, you're already going through this and going, fuck because computers are super expensive now . You know ? So getting specifically angry about the price of the steam deck seems kind of foolish or rather foolish is maybe a bit harsh, but it just means I think a lot of people have not been paying attention to just how bad it's been getting and it's not getting better . I went and priced out a computer . I was just curious I went to the place I bought a pre built last time because I was like, you know what ? I just don't want to fucking deal with this right now. I need a computer soon because I'm having a stre likeaming problem like I need I just need someone to send me a fucking computer and so I will pay the additional money that a pre built a pre built runs. And the prebuilt the cost increase of a pre build is actually kind of changing as well. But like building something that is like largely top of the line, meaning like I went and said like put a fifty ninety in this, give me sixty four gigs of RAM, you know, and what have you . Like that computer became six thousand five hundred dollars after like a couple of clicks . And last time around building that same machine was way more like four and even that was expensive for the time . And so like it's it's fucking bad . Like if you're if you're looking to like build out a computer with the newest latest , like that number has gone up thousands of dollars since last time, and the parts haven't changed that much. So it's it's bad out there period . And I don't know , I you know, that's some people are saying that this is going to be bad like this until twenty thirty. Some people are saying like, oh, it's only going to be another couple of years and then, you know, some of this more some of this RAM, you know, more, more of this Chinese RAM will come out, but like that's not I don't know, like it's going to take I think it'll take like work from all sectors, right? I mean, you know, you hear from companies that have kicked the tires on AI have been like, Hey, this shit sucks. We don't want it. And so you've got like more of that rejection that is going to fuel some of this. You've got people that are taking a stand against data centers being built . And you know, the pressure there probably needs to increase, but like, you know, you look at the world around us and can there be any kind of organized fight against all of this? It's hard to imagine organized anything with the way shit's going down right now. So it's like fucking got Bernie Sanders out there saying like the public needs to own some portion of these AI companies. And like I get it, that's like a very Bernie Sanders thing to say, but instead he should be saying, no one should own any of this because this shit should fucking go away because they've stolen all of our fucking intellectual property top to fucking bottom to fuel these fucking engines in the first place . Like the public shouldn't own pieces of this like, yeah, here yeah, the public should own parts of these fucking companies that are going to fucking fall apart like great yeah good call man good call this shit no one actually fucking wants yeah the public should own some of that good call God damn it man . Um Unreal Engine six, we talked a little bit about this last week . Some of the good news around last week's batch of Unreal Engine updates , Unreal Engine five point eight was released and includes a pretty sizable performance boost via light version , a lighter version of the lighting system of Lumen that makes it more performant and so they're able to get sixty frames per second on Switch two games with this update . Games that rely on global illumination specifically . This is according to video games at chronicle dot com They also talked more about Unreal Engine six, which has developers . A lot of developers really fucking scratching their heads and going, what the fuck is going on over there ? What the fuck are they doing ? UE six. We talked about this on the bonus podcast last week and in the week that's that's happened, you know, we've had more developers kind of weigh in on some of these changes. Unreal Engine six is going to eventually be deprecating what's known as blueprints alongside something else in favor of a programming language called Verse . They are also seemingly expecting people to use AI to do a lot of repetitive coding or whatever you want to call it because they're integrating or they're making it easier to integrate AI into the unreal engine . Blueprints are a kind of visual scripting language that is very easy to learn and I've I've heard like blueprints are the core of that. Blueprints are the things that like that make the unreal engine accessible for people. Like people have learned how to code and started with Unreal Engine's blueprints and eventually gotten dee per and deeper into it to where they could code for real . Blueprints are a visual system that like people who are non coders can use to kind of rig up things in an unreal engine game. And it's been kind of the secret sauce for a lot of years that makes that engine so widely known and so widely knowable and learnable is my understanding of it. And so they have said that the early versions of Unreal Engine six will support blueprints, but they will be deprecated in favor of Verse , which is a programming language that they are building alongside all of this stuff . And I have not seen a single person say this is a good change. I've seen some people go like, there's some stuff about Verse that is interesting, but it's not necessarily replacing this for this and that they're going to be shutting a lot of people out . A lot of the, you know, like it's the sort of thing that like, hey, a designer, like someone who's not necessarily a coder could get in and understand Unreal Engine's Blueprints enough to kind of use it and do some things and contribute in that specific way without having to turn to a coder and say, Hey,ing can you do this ? And you know, obviously, it seems like the workflow that they are envisioning at Epic is instead of doing that, you will ask an AI to do it for you , which is seems like a very fucking terrifying way to go again considering how expensive AI, you know , as token based pricing becomes more of a thing and and as people start paying true prices to use AI, that sounds like a very ineffective way cost wise to do this . On top of that, the reliability of that output is not always great , especially if you're not a coder because you're not going to be able to go in and fix it yourself because you don't know what the fuck it just wrote . So that's fucking crazy. And so there's been a lot of pushback here along the way from I've seen developers big and small saying this seems like they are fucking killing their engine. This is like what Unity just did with their licensing model stuff, but worse, they are killing their engine with this stuff . And so that's it just seems like fucking insanity . There's a good long breakdown of this stuff from Joe Wintergreen, who's been a systems designer and you know has worked in a lot of different games and he kind of went out of his way to break this stuff down over at Joe Wintergreen. com if you want to see his take on it from a developer standpoint. And he was I believe one of the first to point out that there was a departure from Epic recently. I'm not going to pronounce his name right . Siord Dung maybe SJ OERD is his first name has left the company after twelve years at Epic and over twenty years of being an expert at the unreal engine and being something of an evangel ist for it, he has departed the company . He then later would update his LinkedIn and say , After twenty seven years of unreal engine and twelve years at Epic Games and a real engine, I've decided to move on. This has been an awesome ride that has been truly life changing in so many ways . I didn't have an easy childhood or youth and things weren't going anywhere, but all of that changed entirely when I discovered unreal engine, unreal engine one, two and three put me on a very interesting trajectory for life, which in turn had a profound impact and you know to get to the But all that being said, I feel like this era has come to a close and it is time to move forward. The industry is in a very interesting place The games industry has always been an industry where change is relentless and inevitable, but it feels like we are reaching a pivotal point now and a potent mix of things. As much as I love the old way of working, I think it would be strategic to come to terms with where this is heading and to work out how to adapt and excel at solving the challenges and opportunities that we face. Let's see where we end up. The thing I've seen about this individual, this guy's departure specifically is a lot of people who are aware of him, you know, and the kind of respect that he that he commands in a lot of these unreal engine circles is that his departure from Epic is that canary in a coal mine like oh, if he',s leaving this is fucking bad like if this guy is out this is fucked so So you've got that kind of out there as well . The uproar is to a degree that I would not be shocked if they bent on this and said, okay, we won't deprecate blueprints. Maybe that's impossible with where they're going in the engine. I got it, maybe that's a gigantic undertaking for them to do, but that seems like the largest the largest kind of friction point right now is like, hey , this is the thing your engine does that makes it the engine well this is why we chose working in this engine to begin with. And so if you're taking it out, like what the fuck? Like why are we using this ? We can't go to unity because they already fucked their shit up or what's up with Goodo lately. You know, like it's a lot of it's a lot of that type of talk and they've made it clear and I think Tim Sweeney has made this position clear on this shit time and time again and he always seems to it's a shame because you know, I don't I don't necessarily think that Tim Sweeney is a dumb man. I've, you know, I've interacted with a lot of people who work for him, and I think I've been in the same room as him, but I don't know that he and I have ever spoke over the years. But boy, whenever he seems to grab his phone and start posting to Twitter , he sure seems like a fucking idiot . Um and so, you know, like I don't think that any of this is surprising considering the positions he's been taking publicly over the last handful of years here . And it's unfortunate. I don't know. Like it just like even it's one thing for games and game companies and stuff to all be lighting themselves on fire, but for the engines to fuck everyone over along the way . It's just a real fucking like what he what the fuck ? What are we doing? What the fuck is happening Yeah, I don't know. Incredibly sketchy times, incredibly sketchy times . Of course, you could always just keep using the last version of Unreal Engine five and just forgo all of this shit, I suppose, there's nothing stopping you from just not migrating to UE six I don't know how long that will be viable for, but yeah, people still use old versions of the Unreal Engine all the time. It's not unheard of . But that's a that's a bad way of working. You know, you're kind of like building your game on legacy software and you never know like, oh, something changed that broke the engine and Epic's not going to fix it because it's legacy software. So now we're really, you know, there's sort of some potential frustration down the line there with with that sort of stuff. So yeah, I don't know. Once again, much like when Unity changed its licensing stuff and really fucked a lot of people over, I'm not envious of the people that have to sit down and decide what engine they're going to use for like a three year project or whatever like the, you know, like what they're going to do going forward because this is kind of like one more layer of shit stacked on top of the process for people to have deal to with. It's it's unfortunate . And we'll see if they stick to it. Like I said, I think there's been they had to they had to have expected some amount of pushback for this , but I don't I wonder if they expect it as much as they've been getting. I don't really know. I don't really know . But it feels bad feels bad Some other kind of small stuff that, you know, this is kind of confirming something that I think we all already knew , but Steven Tatilo looked over Sony's most recent annual report that they filed with the SEC and noticed that it doesn't really have any language about games coming to PC And so this is sort of the , you know, as close as we've gotten to an official statement. I don't think Sony has said anything on the record saying, hey, we're not going to bring games to PC, but obviously that is, you know, between internal communications that we've all been privy to one way or another . Obviously, these are changes that they have made and are making going forward . But their annual report does not mention any sort of PC stuff. Tatillo Tatilo is really good at doing these year over year comparisons about these annual reports to figure out what the companies are still reporting and what they were cutting and all of that . And the line from twenty twenty five's report that said Sony plans to continue its efforts to deploy its first party titles to multiple platforms such as PC has been cut from the twenty twenty six version of the report . So then there's a new chunk added that says Sony is utilizing AI to unleash the creativity of studios and further enhance the PlayStation experience, which of course . Of course, of course . That's , you know, again, this is something that I think you expect every single company to say in one way, shape or form , because you have to remember that these sorts of statements are investor focused and investors right now are the thing to remember is that investors are fucking idiots and they have no fucking idea or they're not they're not approaching this from like a reality of like, hey, what's the most realistic way for you to make games that make money and spend the least amount of money possible. Investors are instead approaching it from what are the number of buzzwords I read about that sound like they make a lot of money ? Are you Are you doing the thing that where all the money is? You are good. You're doing the AI thing. We're on top of the AI. Great. They're doing AI. Good. I feel good about my investment in this company because they're all about future the, just like I am because I'm so plugged in. And so it's like catering to an audience of fucking dip shits that don't give an actual fuck about anything with regards to like, hey, how are these games made or these games how can we make these games more effici ently? Like that's they're not into that. They're like, what the fuck is the same way , the same way people would ask me in the, you know, mid two thousand s like what's your mobile strategy? What's your strategy for covering mobile games? And you had to have an answer for that because that's what the investors wanted to hear, that's what the business people wanted to hear because the business people that you worked with turns out , dumber than the investors in a lot of cases. What are you guys doing with phone games? They're huge. It's like, yeah, they're huge and no one cares . They didn't want to hear that. No one wanted to hear the actual truth about like, yes, they are huge, and we don't really play a part in that because there's not really an audience for reading for coverage of those sorts of games. And we've experimented with this with this and we know that that to be true. They don't want to hear that . They want to know like, oh this, is where video games are going. It's like, well, I'll tell you, no, they're not, at least not yet . So , you know, I don't know. P feopleucking suck people, don't fuck don't live in the fucking real world when it comes to this shit . And so like what I mean that how I mean that is like, yeah, there are probably studios within the PlayStation family companies that have used AI that will use AI that are experimenting with AI, but nothing about the statement that they issued here is representing a seismic or strategic shift . This is not PlayStation saying we're going to fire everybody and let AI make the games they may still do that , but this is them saying, Oh, we need to put a sentence in here to shut people up because it's true. We have studios, you know, like again , everyone does. Even if they're kicking the tires on it and they decide much like the person in the chat who said that their company abandon ed that stuff recently, like they're all going to try it out because they have to because they have to have an answer to the question, much like I had to play a bunch of games on phones when we bought the company that reviewed phone games if only so I could answer quest ions like yeah these games are not worth covering or hey we tried this and it doesn't really fit into the way we make games or it doesn't you know they need to try that out and maybe they will find ways that AI can help them make games . I don't know anything's possible, right? I mean, some folks are using it and shipping games with it. I don't know how much time it's saving them. I don't know how much money it's saving them . If it's worth it from a business perspective, especially as the business of AI seems to be getting worse and more expensive as time goes on, maybe this reaches a point where it's like, Hey, yeah, for the handful of things we were using it for, it's no longer cost effective to do any of this. Let's just how about we just have a concept artist do this? Like why don't we there's no need for this like we don't need AI to fill out a fucking for m for us, you know, like it's just make the form easier. Like it doesn't need to be . You don't need to fucking blow tokens on filling out paperwork. Like it's just come on . It's not worth the money you're saving or 'cause you're not actually saving any in a lot of these cases. But hey , I guess what I mean is don't necessarily take that as doom and gloomy as you may want it to because every single company is going to say this in one way, shape, or form , because they have to fucking figure it out . But this doesn't mean that they're doing full rollout, it doesn't mean that they're like , oh AIs were demanding that AI be used in every single game. Like it's just not the case. And it's unlikely to become the case . And if you ask me, it may never become the case, but yeah , we'll see how the rest of the world shakes out, I suppose . Also, Bobby Prince passed away. Bobby Prince composed the soundtrack to the original Doom . He was eight one years old . And the music for Doom is incredible. And it's in the library of Congress. It's, you know, it's like a literal audio treasure He was eight one. Claude Guillamo, one of the co founders of Ubisoft , died in a plane crash over the weekend He is one of the five brothers that originally founded the company . We mainly hear about Eve, but there is this was originally some sort of family operation and, you know, the gamers do still control do still control some part of that company. I obviously like they did that spinoff and ten cents involved and some of that other stuff. But yes, it was a light aircraft according to video games chronicle. com it is a light aircraft crash that left with two casualties, he being one of them . Um and that is it for the news . Why don't we get into emails here . Podcast at guard. Bye is the email address send your emails to me and I look at them Um , Super Mario sixty four, Clayton writes in it says Super Mario sixty four released in Japan thirty years ago today. You have the story of locking yourself in a room to make the guide? No, I did not so that was we imported a Nintendo sixty four in the early days of GameSpot and and Ryan McDonald sat down and like sat like locked himself in a room and made an entire guide for that game before it was out in the US and so we had that ready to go . And so we had one, but I didn't really have a ton of opportun ity to play the Japanese stuff because he was I think we eventually got a second Japanese N sixty four because he was so focused on that And we yes, and we eventually and Nintendo eventually sent out a US you know, this is like there's three months difference here. It's like June in Japan and it's September in the US and so So Nintendo sent their stuff out pretty quickly the Japanese release if I remember right . And so we had Mario sixty four, but I had not had the opportunity to play that much of it until I went and bought one and was able to take it home and sit down and play. Like I had touched every single one of the games, but it was just , you know, we were busy with so much other stuff that he was working on that Mario sixty four guide. The review I think was done by someone. I think we freelanced out the review to someone else and And yeah, I ended up reviewing some of the third party stuff. I guess it wasn't out until December, but I ended up reviewing like Cruz and USA I think Glenn reviewed pilot wings , but I don't know. Yeah, you know, we were also focused on separate stuff at the time that it just there was not there were not enough systems to go around for all of us to just spend a ton of time with it. So I didn't play and finish Mario sixty four until it came out in the US and I bought one. I ended up walking into a best buy by the on launch day and said, Hey, y'all got those Nintendo sixty four's and there was a lady there and she said, yeah, we have one, but it's reserved by someone. We have one left . And I don't know how I fucking pulled this off. I don't know how the fuck this worked . But I just said, well, you know, you could always sell it to me and she did . I don't know how the fuck that happened and so I came home with, I guess it was it was I mean, it was it just was Shadows of the Empire a launch game? Because I feel like it was it was Mario sixty four and Pilot Wings and I guess Wave Race For first party okay, no Wave Race was november fourth so I guess Wave Race was technically a little bit later and then Shadows the Empire was also Shadows the Empire was in that same window as Cruz and USA. It was December . Um and so I guess it really was just fucking pilot wings and Mario sixty four which is a silly a silly lineup . A you know, well, I don't know . I don't think pilot Wing sixty, I don't remember pilot wing sixty four being an especially good game . As a fan of original pilot wings, I remember thinking Pilot Wing sixty four was not as good as original pilot wings , but I don't think I've played Pilot Wings since then . And Mario sixty four is Mario sixty four, man. I don't know, what do you but you know, it is one of the most important video games ever made . So so that's cool. But having an N sixty four at launch felt a little weird , you know, because it's like, oh yeah, this is this Mario game is really transcendent. Like this is like it was immediately apparent like oh Mario sixty four is fucking amazing . Like holy shit, this is incredible . But like then you were sort of like, well kind of weird that I just have this box here and the only thing worth playing on it is this one game and there's really only one other game. You know, it wouldn't take too long for other games to start coming out but ultimately it was a very like a strange launch . I suppose, you know, the story goes that maybe they tried to rush it out a little bit in the US specifically to kind of because the obviously the PlayStation had launched a year before and they didn't want to miss one more holiday season . And so they felt the need to get out there as soon after the Japanese launch as they could Which is, I guess probably the right move, but then you have a launch where you're only shipping like a couple of games. I don't know. That's sort of a that's it's sort of a weird sort of a weird thing . But yeah, I guess I was there. I don't know . The thing with Mario sixty four is I, you know , they had shown it. We had seen it, you know, you went to like whether it was E three or whatever, like I think the I guess my thing is I don't remember like having my fucking mind completely blown by Mario sixty four when I got my hands on it. And I think that's probably because they had shown it a couple of times beforehand at various trade shows or like we had had access to it I think before the Japanese launch once or twice whether it was at events or whatever. So it was kind of like okay, cool. Now I'm playing this for real. You know, it was like, okay, now I have it. This is my save. I'm going to play this game for real and play through it and it's really good . But I don't like I guess like what I'm saying is I don't remember feeling like, oh my god they've changed all of video games. You know what I mean? I don't remember playing Mario sixty four and being like this changes everything. This fucking they have completely fucking written the rules. I think it wouldn't that wouldn't really that feeling wouldn't really take hold until, you know, you're kind of looking at it in retrospect . You know, and yes, and people love to bring up the croc game for PlayStation one that's, you know, kind of similar in some ways, I suppose . But But yeah, I don't remember it seeming like it was like this that it was changing the world . And you know, part of it was because we had other consoles on the market. I mean, they were they were third to market in that generation, and so we'd already seen a lot of Saturn stuff come and go . Now, keep in mind, the release of the N sixty four only took place about two weeks before the release of nights for the Saturn in Japan . So even from a like analog controller perspective, like everyone was already headed in this direction of giving their games analog controls. Sony wouldn't ship an analog controller until the following year . And they would be the ones to get it right by having two analog sticks. Like they were the ones that actually knew what this needed and they were one hundred percent right . And so a lot of people will talk about the N sixty four controller in a way that they go like they changed everything. They had an analog stick and they did and like yeah, they were first to market with a console with, you know, an analog controller, sure. Like that is unmistakably true . But everyone was already moving down this path. It's not like, you know, again, Saturn Sega ship's nights two weeks later. They had had that controller in the works for months . You know, PlayStation may be a little late to the party, but they ultimately were the ones to get it right because they were like, What if there were two analog sticks ? You know And then the dreamcast would come out and they would go like, No, we think one's the right answer. It's like, well, okay, you fucked up, congratulations. You fucked up . And so yeah, I don't know. Like the N sixty four controller I look at it more as this is the this is when Nintendo first started saying we need to make a game for a controller or a controller for a game, whatever the chicken and egg scenario is, but like this is where we kind of this is where we hit upon this and this is where they go from there, you know , and what can they put in their controller that makes their games unique or whatever Obviously the Wii would see a ton of that . The gamecube would see a little bit less of it, I suppose, but you know, you do click in the analog the analog triggers with the click in them is sort of sort of the thing that makes I don't know, like Mario Sunshine would be even worse if the controller didn't have that in it . And you know, important to note that as soon as they got away from the N sixty four and made another controller , they were like, yeah, we need two of these analog sticks. Turns out, turns out we need to'.re going We to make them. We're going to call it the C stick and, you know, good. It's we're going to say it's like the evolution of the of the C buttons on the N sixty four, but yeah, we yeah, we need to we need to do this. Let's also make this se sticka one of the worst feeling things a controller has ever had in the history of the world. Can we do that too? So yeah, I don't know. Like I think the, you know, whatever. We'll look at we'll look at it this week . We'll get into the science and figure it all out. But I think a lot of people kind of lay kudos on the N sixty four that in some ways it doesn't quite deserve , especially when talking about the controller . The controller is the right controller for a very small handful of N sixty four games , and a very small handful of N sixty four games cannot be played effectively any other way . They've tried . But ultimately Yeah, kind of a thing's rough . A controller . It's bad . Mike writes in and says, had a question in light of the new gears game shifting to be an Xbox exclusive , I would imagine when that when deciding the budget , the fact that the game was going to be on both Xbox and PlayStation played a big part in that. How does that work for the studios or publishers when a game is now only going to be making money from one platform , especially when that decision is made while it's still in active development . It just seems like pulling the rug out from under them to a degree if they were counting on the extra sales to be viewed as profitable . Well, so I mean, you know, anyone making that move, and any studio, any leadership , any Microsoft leadership making that move has to make that move knowing that they're doing that, right? Knowing they're like, okay, this game will probably bring in a little less money than we thought if we do this. And so that's what they're weighing, right? Is the, okay, there's a loss in money if we're not multiplatform that maybe more people are excited about it and so it sells more Xbox copies than it would have otherwise, but maybe not . Game pass is still factor here. And so that's not a guarantee that they're going to make it up in Xbox sales or in game pass subscriptions. It's probably just straight up lost revenue but they have to look in the other hand and go okay but what we're getting is hearts and minds we're getting more loyalty to the Xbox. We're showing our audience that we care about the console so that they feel good about their purchase and that maybe they go and buy more Xbox games over the next two years as a result. Maybe this helps us sell the next Xbox console when it comes time for people to make that decision. If they see us investing in the console , then they will be more likely to buy the Xbox. So it's not just about the PNL of Gears of war each day, right? That's a lost cause. Like that game, will that game be profitable at all? Like maybe not . But maybe it was never going to be. And so this amount of money that they're throwing away with this supposed PlayStation version of the game . Maybe that just doesn't matter. Maybe it's not enough money to care about. And so they're like, okay, yeah, throw it out. It's not that much money anyway. We're okay losing that extra amount of money because we can then use it as a bargaining chip with our audience to say , look at us, aren't we cool? We care about Xbox consoles just like you do, bro . I five . And that maybe counts for something. That feels like the play they're putting in place there, but this I don't know. I don't think that there's any particular art or craft to anything that they're doing over there with regards to the studios. And when we think about the studios that they're getting ready to shut down , I think it is a look . Like things are probably pretty dire over there in a lot of ways and this is them trying to write the ship in some way to launch a new console and kind of continue forward . And so they may feel that they need to do this . But I don't think you get very far on people to care about your new console by shipping fewer games for said console because you shut down the studios that were going to make those games . And you could argue all day long that like, oh, well South and Midnight didn't sell that much anyway and who cares about we happy few in the first place, like that studio didn't really do it. You know, like people keep trying to bring up those sorts of arguments to which I would say in a world where game pass s, you need a portfolio of games both big and small to keep people on that service. And so those smaller games have a place that they might not have on other platforms, like Xbox is uniquely built to take advantage of interesting smaller games in a way that a lot of other organizations would not be able to. And so their willingness to throw all of that away and also like seemingly make dramatic cuts from even their larger teams in larger studios , you know , that that's a losing strategy as far as I can tell . And if that's if those are the sorts of cuts they have to make in order to survive within Microsoft is like, okay, we got to get this under control and then we can build back up from there. Like then you're done . You know? Like that's That's not a viable you might as well just sell it off now. Like I don't know. Like, you know , happy to be wrong . But boy . Um , Ethan writes in and says, I'm not sure where to ask this. I figure you would be the perfect person to know, but the suffering games that Midway published , what was the common talk about them when they came out ever since I played them when I was maybe twelve or thirteen, I haven't seen anyone talk about them since. Were they any good ? They were fine . I remember the first suffering game game , more than the second one . Midway thought they really had something there. And that's something a good PR organization will convince you that they've got something even when they don't. But I remember those games as being absolutely acceptable and but like not , you know, no one's talking about them for a reason. Like they're just not super memorable games . They came out at a time when a lot of those, you know, a lot of those games existed. They're they're classic examples of a B game type of thing . They're no Syops . That's for sure. I would much rather play SIOPs than either of the suffering games. Well, like it was like the, I don't know if they were both set inside of a prison . But it was like a horror game set inside a prison. So you're running around and it's dark and everything's fucking gray and then you're just kind of fighting shit and then you get some powers or whatever. I don't know it's a mystery no one can ever know . Um Let's see here . Mason, Virginia writes in about steam machine stuff. I just wanted to let's see here , recently with a sticker shock on the steam machine's prices, I've been wondering to myself, how can I trust the critics who review it without them paying the increasingly insane prices out of their own pockets . This is down to as games as media continues to put down people who play on consoles and act as if people working for minimum wage work can afford top of the line PC gaming. I know I'm being unreasonable and games media is not a steady job as many of the workers are freelancers and also paid like absolute shit. But to me being given a PC or a steam machine while living out in LA or San Francisco seems to be against the point that they are also the every man. No one lives in San Francisco. I don't even live in LA. I live outside of LA . Games journalists are not all clustered in San Francisco the way they used to be either. So I don't know, you know, that's sort of a weird thing. So I don't think anyone writing reviews of this stuff is necessarily trying to be the every man. I think that that's not a difficult perspective to put in because everyone knows what the fuck a thousand dollars looks like. I don't think it's unfathomable that someone might go, hey, this thing's a lot of fucking money and be able to think about it. It's still possible to say, hey, this is a really cool device and it really runs well and this stuff happens . Also, I don't know. The thing that happened over the years is that the value and price conversation had to become a little bit separate because at the end of the day you don't know where your audience lies on that spectrum , right ? Like maybe for them, it's dropping the bucket. Maybe they're millionaires and they're like, fuck it, I'm going to go buy a steam machine and then I'm going to go get an avocado toast, you know, whatever the fuck it's not , you know, like it's not impossible to do that. So I, you know, I've been working in this line of work for a long time and you know, we get consoles sent in the mail and all of that sort of stuff. It is not difficult to look at the amount of money it is and know how much that costs in tanks of gas, in groceries, in all of the other expenditures in your life . And so I don't think you necessarily have to go out there and spend your own money on this stuff to have the real review. That's something people have tried to like levy against reviews since the dawn of time and it's just dumb because it imagines people to be it imagines people to have zero imagination The other thing I would also say is every single bit of coverage I've seen of the steam machine has been people saying it's too much money . So I don't even know that the coverage really bears your hypothesis out in any way, shape or form. It's just like, yeah, man, I don't know . Like it's super pricey. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad device, but like , but hey, everyone is talking about that, that is the lead in most headlines is this shit is expensive . So yeah, I don't I don't agree with your hypothesis here, but you know, as something that has come up time and time again over the years it's just sort of , you know, I don't know, these are sort of costs that come with doing business in a way as well, you know , it's sort of even the people who buy it themselves for review coverage could theoretically write it off on their taxes which is not a one to one hundred percent recovery of that money , but it's some . So is that make it cheaper? Does that make their review invalid? Does that make that, you know, I think that you like you're setting up a really impossible scenario here that also doesn't matter the one thing I'll say and this is something I've noticed myself , I think it's very easy to look at the price of something and know what that means in real money. Like no one is especially in this line of work, no one is fucking swimming in money to the point where like it's very easy for someone to look at the price of this and go like yeah this is compared to this this and this like this is a whole lot of money . Like you don't have to spend your own money to come to that conclusion. It's very obvious . The thing I will say though is that it becomes much more difficult to judge the viability and value of a subscription service like PlayStation plus, like Ubisoft, plus like GamePass , because if you are getting all of these games from the companies on day one anyw ay , which a lot of the people in this line of work are , then game pass you already don't care about it. It's like anything that's on GamePass is an email away. You email somebody going, Hey, can I get a whole over copy of this? I want to do something with it. And you will probably get it . Or you probably already got it when review time came around. And so you already have a copy of it. And so like the The like the individual cost of game pass and what games are or are not on game pass I think that becomes a much more difficult thing to judge and gauge because I look at the games on GamePass and I look at the games as they come and go and I look at it and got to eyeball it and go like this seems like it's an okay deal , but I don't play any of those games because especially for some of the indie stuff that comes to Xbox , I played it six months previously when it launched on steam or for the Xbox first party stuff, like they send that stuff out for review. And so like the actual value of those sorts of things, I think that is actually a little bit more difficult to judge when you are in this line of work because I have been a game pass subscriber since that thing launched , but I barely ever use it . Again, because those games are available elsewhere most of the time and even the games that are debuting on game pass, like, you know, like review codes are getting sent out a week early anyway. And so like the actual use fulness of it is a little bit lower. And so I think that's a very that can be a very difficult thing to judge. It's something I try to keep in mind when we're having these conversations about all these subscription services is like is like I've actually started to use them a little bit more because I'm looking for games for the kids . And looking at what's on those services like can I just grab something from them here? Because I don't want to spend a much money on a game they're going to play for five minutes and then never touch again because they're very fickle. And so it's very , you know, that has been the most I've gotten out of PlayStation plus and GamePass. Was like, oh, this Bluey game is on Game Pass. Let's grab that. Okay , this is let's do that. Let's grab this, let's grab that. And so getting games for the kids from these subscription services has been the most I have used them since they started to exist . So I think that part of it is a lot more difficult to judge and gauge. But in terms of just like getting hardware in the mail or whatever, you know, so I asked Sony for a PlayStation five Pro . I was talking to them about some other stuff and I was like, Hey man, this thing's coming up , I know, you know, you probably have a pretty tight allotment for them, which the answer was yes, they had an extremely fucking tight allotment for them as it turns out . And I was like, I would love to get one and do something with it. And they were like, all right, we will I will look into this for you and see what I can do . But yeah, I'm not, you know, like I know that their allotments for hardware are super, super tight, but I will I will ask . And so the ask went in and I ended up buying a PlayStation five Pro . But I don't . That's I needed one of those to do this job. So like it's kind of it factors into my thinking of just like I never know if I'm going to have to buy this stuff or not depending on how some of this stuff works out, right? You just never know what you're going to get, what you're going to not get. And so part of how I budget for things is like, sometimes I'm going to have to buy some hardware. Sometimes I'm going to need to buy a weird controller because it's just crazy and it'll be fun to talk about and all this other stuff. And so I just kind of look at it and go like, yeah, well, this is the cost of doing business because I'm going to have to spend some money on this shit. But I never think about it any differently than the stuff that shows up in the mail because it's separate it's business money. It's not even mine , you know, and that's a harder separation when you're a one man organization . But prior to that , you know, like if you're at a major publication and let's say they didn't send out steam machines to to some places, but you still wanted to do something with them, you're going to buy that and you're going to expense the company that you work for. Like CBS is going to buy a PlayStation five, not me whatever, like whatever company you work for is going to is going to take that on. You're going to expense it and you're going to use it for work . And so it's not your money anyway . So I, you know, it's I've always just not cared about that stuff because you kind of have to do this, you know, and there's going to be times when you don't get enough playstations or enough N sixty four's for that example to to to cover the launch, which turns out, they're only two games, so not that hard, but you get my point . We had to buy Plations. We had to buy PlayStation two's where there was a mad dash to get enough Xbox three hundred and sixty's in the building for people. Like we had enough to review all the games, but for guides and some of the other work they needed to do, we needed more Xbox three hundred and sixty's and so people had to buy them at launch and use them for work and like all this other stuff. So it's you know, it's an expenditure and it's just the cost of doing business . You know ? Kevin Liverpool writes in and asks the question will controllers ever change ? You think it's likely we will see a serious evolution of the default controller design in the future since around the PS three or three hundred and sixty the design has settled. We see the occasional gimmick like a mouse with a switch two or a trackpad on PS four . But I doubt we see a major design change in the Helix or PS six . Growing up in the eighties and nineties, it was interesting to see what console launched the next controller would be more face buttons, a joystick, another joystick , wireless, etc . But since two thousand six, we've not seen any innovations outside of Rumble . Even when Nintendo goes off the wall with something like the Wii, they still create a pro controller with the default layout. I'm not even sure what I would want, but that was the beauty of that period. I didn't know I wanted a second joystick until I had it. Yeah, it's I mean , so the problem is that everyone is making games for all the consoles , right? And so even if you were to decide, hey our controller's gonna have this other crazy shit on it , developers like EA still needs to make Madden play on that default controller set up no matter what because not everyone is going to move in the you know, they're not all going to collude on controller design and go we're all putting extra buttons on this time around, you know ? And so it's hard for that change to catch on and take hold. Even the PlayStation rumble triggers and the haptic feedback stuff they've done is really cool when it's done well , but a lot of third parties just don't fucking bother. The PlayStation trackpad is like a debacle, like no one uses it all that well . Even the games that do use it I think that stuff sucks like Ghost of Yote does the like swipe up to make the wind blow so you can see which way you need to ride your horse. And I think all of that stuff like if those were just fucking buttons so that I couldn't like swipe up and it goes Oh you swiped left or like motherfucker I did not swipe left, I swiped up . God damn it . Like that shit is bad . And that's real estate on the controller that you could just put like four buttons on and be like, oh, here's auxiliary one through four and one's gonna be your map button. Just have a fucking button marked map at this point. Fuck it . Enough games have them just do it . So I would much rather see like some more kind of buttons there , get rid of the fucking share button or you know, move the share button somewhere else and put an honest to God select button back on these goddamn controllers. What fuck are we doing? This touchpad is a joke . Or yes, or make it a screen. Sure, make it a screen, and then pour all the amiko games to it. Why not? Sure . There was a patent recently, Eric , or Kev, sorry, not Eric . Sony looked to patent a controller . And again, remember that patents don't necessarily result in actual products, it's just crazy ideas they had that they wanted to protect . The idea is that they want buttons that can get softer or harder as you're pushing them . Video games chronicle summed this up. I guess cheat happens was the outlet that originally found the patent here . But the idea would be to change the feel of the controls by altering the way the buttons feel when you push them. So the idea that they could be more squishy or they could be harder to kind of like convey the surface you're pushing in a world or something like that. Like if you're trying to push your way through sand or something, the buttons could get very mushy to reflect that you're standing in sand or they could be rock hard when they need to be stroke the contro ller button and get out of the get out of danger. You know, it's like all sorts of stuff that you could do . I'll just read this directly from VGC story here. The patent also describes how the theoretical controller could create a finger grab effect where buttons soften to let fingers sink in and then harden to hold them, simulating being grabbed in game . So imagine goopy buttons that get hard when you squish into them and then your finger is trapped and then a child gets their finger broken and then sues Sony . So yeah, unlikely that that pans out into something that we see , but it But at least it shows that people are out there coming up with fucking ridiculous ideas. I think it would be a very difficult thing to build. It sounds like it would be very fragile technology. It would be very easy to break . And yeah, I don't know, man. The finger grab stuff sounds like a good way for kids to end up getting like their fingers disloc ated or something like that. There's just some some base level stuff about that they used go I don't think that's I don't think that's something that they would ever experiment with here but you know it as an advancement on the we had we had analog buttons for a brief period of time, you know ? And only Metal Gear Solid took advantage of that stuff. The pressure sensitive thing just kind of didn't really take off and was often frustrating in use. I don't know, because it just wasn't, I don't know, the feedback you got from those buttons whether yeah, I guess Grantorismo used it too sure yeah like that's it's a very fucking yeah I don't know It's kind of cool . It's kind of cool . Let's see what else we got here . But yeah, as far as controllers, I think that again, the problem you run into is that you've got three major players in the console space right now and maybe it won't always be that way. But with that many companies and still a lot of third parties making games and the PC being included in all of that . It's very hard for anyone to say, look at this weird thing we've made and get full buy in from all of these different developers to take full advantage of their controller. This is I mean this is the week for the to talk about this because this was one of the problems with the N sixty four and it was a much larger problem with the Wii is you had a lot of third parties making a lot of very traditional games and then looking at these controllers and going, what the fuck am I supposed to fucking do with this ? And so you have games that barely use the analog stick on the N sixty four, you know? I don't know, just hold it like a regular controller, I guess. It was good enough all those years. It was still fine . And then you get to the Wii and you're like, okay, now we just have to make a dramatically different game and I don't want to do that. So let's outsource our Wii version to someone who will knock it out in six weeks . Maybe not six weeks, but knock it out fast. And I don't know, kids, kids use the Wii. So I don't know, make a bunch of mini, make a mini game collection . And so third parties just got left out in the cold, mostly by Nintendo with a lot of those controller designs . And so, you know, I think everyone's, you know, the standard that we have right now for controllers is fine . Two analog sticks, a D pad, which basically acts as for more buttons in this case in most cases , and then four buttons and then your shoulders or whatever. I think the most we'll see and I would love to see this because I think my problem with a lot of controllers like you can get all these fancy fucking controllers now that do all this weird shit and have all these back buttons or whatever . But like when you get a dual sense edge and you put the back buttons on it, all you can do is just map them to existing buttons. And I don't want to do that. I want new buttons that I can assign different functionality to, I want the console to know like this is a totally separate button. And if you want to map something to that, you're gonna like that, it needs to be by default there . Much like when hard drives were not built into consoles, no one wanted to take advantage of add on hard drives because they're expensive and they look at it and go like who's gonna even have one of these things? You have to build it in at the base level and say fuck you, all of our controllers are going to have back buttons. And so I could see that being a direction we move in because there's been enough experimentation with the back buttons for long enough now that you go like, yeah, maybe Maybe maybe, you know, we could have two paddles on the back and those could, you know, and developers could take advantage of that . But even on the Switch two Proroller, C whichont has f ucking back buttons , you can only map them to existing functionality. They don't act as new buttons in the games. It's not like, oh, well, normally you'd have to go into a menu and do this, but if you have this pro controller, you can just squeeze this and it'll do it. Like that would be fucking awesome. It was like, okay, no, now we have new default control schemes built around all this stuff. Like that would be great , but no . And that to me is the frustrating thing about all controller stuff right now is that everyone has to create a default regular thing and anytime you add weird buttons and do shit, it's just like, well, I don't know, maybe you could set a macro to it. Maybe you could build this and you could push this button and then its just re throw a fireball because you built a whole macro into this one button. Isn't that cool? You're like, yeah, no, not really. Not especially . I have a razor controller that puts more shoulder buttons on the controller. So there's like your fronts and your backs and then in a little bit there's some digital buttons there too . And it's like, oh, this is kind of cool. Oh, but I can't map anything. And in that case, it's actually extra frustrating because the Razor software will not let you map those buttons to the keyboard on your PC . So unlike the Beetong Pangu , you cannot actually map any different functionality to them. It's just like do you want an extra X button? Like, no asshole, the controller already has an X button. Why would I pay you more money for two fucking X buttons? Are you high? Are you on fucking dust? Like this is not some fucking Esports fucking bullshit. Like I need to have my paddles so I can put reload on the way. It's like, yeah sure, that's fine. But no, put extra shit here . Don't give me a game chat button. Give me a dedicated fucking push to talk button. What are we doing? You know , like this should be the obvious shit that we go in in the direction, you know , but I don't think we'll get there. I think the most we would get out of the next generation of consoles is maybe you get two back paddles and maybe we'll get there on that . And developers can take advantage of those. But even that, I don't think is guaranteed. Even that I I know would not be shocked if they just issue the exact same control all over again . Let's see here . Value adds for new consoles, Vince from Cochrane, Alberta, writes and says, since it's all but final that we'll be paying an astronomical amount for the next console generation, it got me thinking about how Microsoft and Sony could convince consumers that potentially spending over a thousand dollars on a brand new console could possibly be worth the money . Free game pass or PS plus for a year, a free second controller, three free games if you're choosing. Although the idea of spending that much on a new console was a tough pill to swallow, I believe that giving away services and products that aren't necessarily affect ed by soaring RAM and HD costs hard drive costs , to incentivize players to jump into your ecosystem seems like a logical carrot to dangle in front of the eyes of consumers. What kind of value adds or free shit would you like to see offered if you had to spend one thousand dollars on a new console? So all money is money, right ? So giving away a year of g ame pass with a new console is fucked because they would much rather like you know assuming everything is as it is today with game pass and they don't just shut it down. You guess who the fuck knows? Um, giving away their primary service for a full year is even worse , you know, like that's that's just cost. That's that's that's a cost that they would have to pay. They still have to pay third parties if you're playing games on your free game pass subscription. And you know, they did the one dollar game pass free trial stuff and people sign up and quit and sign up and quit when they can. Um , but like giving people those services for a full year is actually like that's that would be a that would be a bad outcome for them a free second controller. That's again , that's just cost of goods. Like that's not a free second, that's still stuff that costs money . So you would still be paying that cost. You know, they're just go well, I don't know, it's fifteen dollars instead of fucking fourteen fifty or fourteen ten or something because we threw a second controller in there or whatever . When the launch of the PlayStation five occurred, they had a I forget what they called it . But it was like basically if you bought a PS five, they were like, hey , we're going to give you like nine PlayStation four games for buying this . And so that is the sort of thing they could feel okay about giving away because it's much older games . It's not brand new games, it's not services that they're actively trying to get you to subscribe to. It's like, here's a copy of Bloodborne and I don't know, there's like a fucking crash game in here. Whatever the I forget what the games were, like Bloodborne was one of 'em, but it was it was like eight Sony games that they gave you at the launch of the PlayStation five and they were all PS four games. Yes, the PlayStation plus collection . And so anything they throw in is going to be stuff that's already not selling. Anything they throw in is going to be stuff that they're like, okay, we're going to do this as a limited time incentive for the first three months, for the first year, whatever it is. And it's all gonna be a bunch of fucking old games that you were never going to buy anyway. And games that are probably already on PlayStation plus as a subscription service anyway, so whatever and so it was it was sort of a, you know , it was nice. Like if you didn't own those games, you're like, oh cool or if you own them on disc, it's like, oh now I can just hit this button and play Bloodborne. That's nice . But it was not, you know, these were not top tier brand new full price releases . So I would not expect anyone to do that because that's where they're making money is you buying new video games. And so yeah, I don't think that's that the costs of those like all those things still cost them money, even if it's not physical goods or whatever. So it's very hard to put that in. So I think realistically you could see something like that on the Sony side anyway because they're PlayStation , the subscription service is a little bit different. But if it was going to be game pass or anything like that, I think they have done like, hey, it comes with a code for thirty days of game pass. You know, you'll get like a month of it or something or a month of PlayStation plus on a trial. Here's a PlayStation plus trial before you sign up for it and so you can play online or you know, like something like that would make sense, but they're not going to give you a year , you know ? Unless they're factoring part of that into the cost of the whole box, right? It's like, oh, if you buy the expensive version of the PlayStation six , then we're going to include , you know, it's it's this color and it comes with a bigger hard drive and also we'll give you a six month of this or you know like whatever right so it's you're not you're not getting top tier value out of that stuff because that's the stuff they want you to pay for. Sam from Portland, right? Since I was listening to your shows from twenty ten and you passionately argued that headshots were ruining first person shooters. So where do you think we're at with headshots and the way we play shooters today versus then? It's easy. There are not as many there are not as many campaigns for shooters . There are not as many first person shooter campaigns today as there were then . And so it's not as much of a problem anymore because it's realistically just call of duty every year. Um , but yes, that is that was kind of a problem it was more of a problem then because you had a lot of kind of second tier shooters coming out that also fucking just made it too easy to line up headshots. That's the actual problem with those games of that era and the actual problem with headshots they're giving you a full campaign . They're giving you a variety of weapons choose from , but they've also made it so easy for you to use your controller to line up headshots and murder dudes. Like I was getting the, you know, the achievements or trophies or whatever for get a hundred headshots, get two, you know, like games would have like get twenty kills with this weapon or get two hundred fifty headshots or get this and like you're getting like the headshot achievement within like the first two hours of play because it's just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop and they give you more powerful weapons later on, but why would you bother because you're already shooting everything in the fucking head anyway? And so like they're nifull ying the value of their games arsenal because they've gone and made it way too easy to just shoot dudes in the head from like insane distances , zero re coil assault rifles with like perfect accuracy on first shot where you just line it up at an extreme distance. Like normally you go like this is like if I had a sniper rifle I would do this. But the sniper rifles all had sway because that's what a sniper rifle is supposed to do. The assault rifles don't. And so you just go pop, pop, pop, pop, and you're lining up so many of these headshots one after another that it's just fucking pointless , you know? Like that's the big problem with headshots in shooters. And it was really about campaigns. It's way more about shooter campaigns than it is about multiplayer . Multiplayer, people move, right? They move and juke and they act like fucking humans, right? And so that's sort of the thing that changes that equation quite a bit . So instead, like that was, you know, my argument back then was very focused on campaigns and the difficulty of campaigns and how they were trying to build these hard challenges and whatever and you would just blow through them because you know you're not a baby, you know how to line up, you know, how to aim a gun in a video game . And so yeah, that's that's it's less of a problem today just because there are not as many of those games coming out . It's not to say there are no shooter campaigns coming out, but also a lot of the shooter campaigns coming out these days are trying something like spawn zero. We were talking about that last week. That's not a game you're going to just headshot your way through , you know, like that's a you have different abilities like the layout of it is very different. And so they're not all trying to be realistic military, future military shooters or whatever, like we had then and more of them are pulling from kind of the history of the PC shooter as opposed to , you know, kind of these post call of duty BNC tier games . Um , Will in Chicago wrote in and basically asked like , what do you think about guest characters in fighting games because they just announced TIFA for Street Fighter Six? I still think it sucks. I still think guest characters suck . Let's see Emily from San Diego writes in specifically to talk about how to talk about games for sickos . Your talk a few weeks back about genre names with racing sims and rogue lights got me thinking . I like all racing games and I love a rogue light, but I've been in the game too long and sometimes I just need the hard stuff. Outside of niche communities it can be difficult to talk about those games without someone getting defensive and trying to turn every conversation into a taxonomal debate. So I propose a solution rather than split hairs over what is and what isn't a real sim or a rogue like or whatever. I started calling them sickos variants , sickos racing sims that demand dozens of hours of learning each track, sickos rogue likes that look like unparsable garbage to people that don't play . People would know what you mean right away , and sickos doesn't imply that the broader stuff isn't valid or authentic, so people won't feel attacked when you draw that distinction. Yeah, yeah, that's I think that there's some of that built in already. Like when I tell people don't buy a racing wheel, this is the crux of what I'm getting at here . Don't be a fucking do not be a sickol.ess Un you're gonna dedicate enough time to being an actual fucking sicko, you should not buy a racing wheel . You should not build a rig . You have to be fucking in it to win it in a disgusting way to truly get proper use out of a racing wheel . So yeah, I think but I think that that's sort of yeah, like some of that is sort of built in. I think you would have some people that would get into debates about whether a game is truly for sickos or not . You would probably have some people try to say that Gran Tarismo is for sickos while Forta isn't , which maybe makes less sense these days considering they're not making motorsport anymore anyway, but you would have people that don't touch the eye racings of the world still trying to play in that space or try to, you know , try to make that determination . I think my thing with this lately, the thing I was thinking about today people were talking about I guess I guess the embargo for people who played Star Wars galactic racer is up . There was no embargo for people who stood and watched it. So I told you this three weeks ago or something but people are like, It's a rogue like. And I'm like, yeah, oh yeah , was that embargoed? No, no . I guess whatever . All I did was stand and watch someone play it. I didn't have to sign shit . It was it was out there for everyone to see. Anyway, and it got me thinking because like, you know, looking at the menus in that game and how it is structured, it's like you have a certain amount of tokens almost. You have basically a certain amount of lives . And like when you run out of those lives , you like all your progress is lost and potentially and again, I didn't play it. I only watched it. So, you know, some of this stuff I'm not super deep on. But like the it looks like you'll have permanent upgrades to your vehicles , but also if you lose x number of times, your tour is over and you have to start over . And that's kind of how they're doing some portion of the story mode or I don't know if it's the main mode or whatever, but they're but they're doing it that way. And it's to me I looked at it and said like, yeah, there's kind of like a rogue like thing here, but like looking at the way they're doing giving you a number of lives and all of this . Like it almost seems more like an arcade mode than anything else . And so like I was it was kind of a strange like you know, again, like another taxonomal sort of thing . I think there are a lot of games and a lot of players that want to call anything that is run based, anything that is anything remotely like that. They want to start invoking rogue in one way or another when like what we're really talking about is arcade modes almost , you know ? You're almost talking about an arcade game, but calling something in arcade mode is maybe somehow even more arcane and lost to time than any of the rogue or rogue like slash light distinctions that we make these days. So it's an interesting yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting fucking quandary, I suppose. I don't know is Mr. Dew a rogue light was a question that came to mind this morning as I was sitting there thinking about all of this fucking horse shit in my head . And then I started to realize you know what ? They should make a fucking that's how you make a modern Mr Doo is you make it a rogue light and you spend money upgrading the power ball . You collect cherries and then you spend the cherries on upgrades . And every time you spell extra , you get an extra perk and three perks appear on screen and you pick one you're like, what if I could shoot two balls? What if I had two power balls ? You're like, Oh, what if instead I had a helmet that gave me immunity to one apple. I'll take that this time . So what I'm saying is universal, get at me. I have cooked up the actual sequel. If you want a new Mr. Dew game that is going to fucking tear the world a new asshole . I got it cooking up here now in my disgusting head holler Brayden writes in and says, Michael Pactor, what was the deal with that guy ? He seemed to be in every journalist ear for like three years, but now I never hear from him . It seems he's doing a show called the Pactor Factor. Yeah, so Pactor Factor still exists Michael Pactor does, I mean as far as I know he is still an analyst and he is still doing his thing, you know, but his his beat was not just video games and I think his beat has shifted more, you know, at one point at one point it seemed like Pactor was talking more about Netflix than anything else. I think he was much more he became much more focused on like streaming and and like analyzing those businesses instead. So I think he maybe doesn't do as much video game stuff in his day job as maybe he used to . And he was doing a regular show for game trailers . That was not called the I don't think it was called the Pactor Factor. I think that was the name they changed it to after Game Trailers went under, but he is still working with Shane Solderfield , who was at Game Trailers at the time and is now is running his own operation. And so I think the two of them or I think like Pactor does the show and I think it appears on Shane's outlet . And so Pactor is still out there kind of doing like Q and A type stuff. But I think, you know, like a couple of things happened . And part of why you don't hear from Pactor as much anymore is because you had reporters who were also like, I want to hear from people other than Michael Pactor. And so they started seeking out other video game focused analysts and getting quotes from them as well. Or instead . And so, you know, you have kind of more analysts and more folks like that kind of in the space. And so there's a lot more stuff like that occurring . But I don't I don't know what I don't actually know what Pactor is up to these days. I assume I assume he is still in the same line of work . But just again, like he was everywhere in video games and then he started appearing on TV a lot more talking about Netflix and that other stuff. And so like, I know like his focus was just was never just video games, but I think as Netflix became a bigger deal, like there was just much more he was talking much more about that. Like the stock market was much more interested in analysis of that specific stuff . And so I imagine that, you know, that all just kind of changed. And so yeah, I think that that combined with, you know, just more analysts in the space reaching out and trying to get appear on stuff and get quoted and all the other stuff kind of led to just a larger diversity of people in that line of work. And yeah, so I think that's that's probably what happened. But Patrick Stot there doing a show. It's on YouTube . Check it out . Um , Al from Georgia writes in and it says Street Fighter the movie too . Do you think they got the necessary footage to make Street Fighter the movie too while filming the new movie starring Hiroki Goto . It's frustrating that I never thought of this that this, was the first I heard of like, dude, yeah, what if? Holy shit . They should have filmed a bunch of green screen stuff of all of that cast doing sonic booms and fireballs and stuff so that they could make a sequel to Street Fighter the movie that would be cool . That would be a dumb idea , but a great dumb idea if they eventually made Street Fighter the movie the game too . Only if they put Captain Sawada in it . Only if Sawada's all the it's the exact same sprite like they don't film any new stuff with that dude. They're just like , well, we need we need Sawada in here . That fucking game. Um Let's see here I am looking for yeah James wrote in this is something This is actually something that proved to be very useful when I was making a bunch of appearances in Canadian media last week, whether it was on the television or on the radio . Jim wrote in with a lot of stats about the rankings on the old Nintendo entertainment system . And he sent this in before the last episode aired and so there were still a few games . This was this there were still four games left , but you know, he wrote in with some kind of stats that he discovered as he analyzed footage here , including that it took basically two years and ten months to complete . And the average games reviewed per episode at this point when he took when he snapshoted the data five point one seven games per episode, which is a pretty good clip . That's pretty good . A little over five . It was this number went up because there were still two episodes left to air when he sent this in, but at the time, four hundred and forty four hours of broadcast that includes that basically breaks down to eighteen and a half days of science and that the average playtime per title when so when you break that down and take out the intro and all the stuff it gets, down to about three hundred and ten hours of direct onscreen game assessment time , which then breaks down to around twenty five minutes per game . And yeah , he's got a bunch of other data as well. I just wanted to say thanks to Jim for sending that in because it ended up being super useful when people were asking me questions about, hey, how long did this take? And I was like, dude, I don't know. I just sit down every Friday and do it. I don't really think about it . But yes, I just want to say thanks for the data . Tony from Toddmorton writes in and says I was watching the science live and it got me wondering all the are the All Star versions of Super Mario one through three considered better than the NES versions or just different . How about those GBA games? Yeah . I think they're a little worse . I think the new graphics in the Sness games like they don't feel the same, like they're they're good. Like and yeah, Mario three on the SNES like looks better, but you know, I don't know that it's a dramatic difference there , but Mario one is like feels wrong in some ways . And Mario two, I guess, as a result as well. So that's the thing to remember is that all stars was where the term Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels, I think, first hit the market. It was the first time they had released that game outside of Japan, and so they couldn't just call it Super Mario Bros. II. And so they came up with the idea of the lost levels. And so that was the first time I ever played those levels was when All Stars came out because I didn't have a Famicom disc system at the time and and yeah, so it was kind of cool to be able to play all the way through that game for the first time . But you know, yeah, SNES versions make some, they take some liberties with character movement and just some of the way it feels and it's just not right . Those GBA games are grim , I don't know, man. Like they're not they're the speech they added to them is not a welcome it's not a welcome change And so those are acceptable games, I suppose . But yeah, I don't know . Spring Break My Heart says when did they call Mario two Super Mario USA in Japan . They released that game back into Japan on that hardware. They released a cartridge in Japan , I believe that was called Super Mario USA say let me double check that real quick, but I'm pretty sure that's the case . And so it was like, here's this, you know, and you know, people knew it is dogey doki panic or whatever , but they're like, well, now it's this other thing . Yes, yeah. Super Mario USA was released in Japan for the NES . And it was on the virtual console at some point as well . But it is , you know, they made changes to that game. It's not just a graphic, you know, it's not just a rom hack of the graphics . There are structural differences in how you progress through that game in terms of like you had to like I think you had to finish each level with each character to truly beat that game. It kept track of your progress on a per character basic basis in the original . And so when they made it Super Mario Bros. II , you could just pick a character before every level and play your way through the game. You didn't have to, you know, do it with a specific character . The floating with the princess was a little different in that game and you could not run in Do ki Doki panic. So to make it more Mario like they added the Mario style controls of running as well. So some meaningful differences between those two games. So rereleasing it in Japan is probably slightly more than a curiosity. And I don't know if Dokidoki Panic was sold well over there or not or was it Yume, Kojo, whatever Dokidoki Panic , the full name of it . Those GBA games were not great . They're fine. If you would never play those games before, you'd go like, oh, these are fun . But yeah, I don't know. Su Mario all stars was a cool fucking thing. I remember being very excited for it when it came out and I played through all of those games there because you could save and do all that like it was nice . It was convenient it. was And great to finally be able to play Super Mario Bros. two. Having heard about it and basically knowing what it was, it was cool to finally be able to see it for myself . But then years later when I would finally buy a Famicom twin have the disk system version of the game I'd realize like, oh, dude, like yeah, right, these NES games don't control right at all Yeah . And there you have it. You know, maybe we take maybe take like one more here. Avery from Tennessee writes in, I've been playing call of duty off and on with friends for almost twenty years at this point, and I realized recently that while almost all of my friends have a different second favorite call of duty game, we all have the same favor ite, that being modern warfare twenty nineteen . We all had other games as our seconds, some enjoying advanced warfare the most and a couple of us bouncing between Black Ops two or three and one even having their second as Vanguard . Get that friend out of your friend circle. They're not they're not doing you. They're not they're not sane people . Without fail, though, all of those other games play reasonably differently . Even though all those games play reasonably differently, modern warfare twenty nineteen topped the list. I know from listening to you for a long time that our opinions on what makes a good call of duty multiplayer differ. I being a very big fan of Black Ops two and three, not enjoying advanced warfare and being so put off by Black Ops six that I didn't even buy seven . My main question is this mostly universal? Do the people you talk with about call of duty put modern warfare twenty nineteen on that pedestal no matter, their view on the overall series ? Or is this just an anomaly of my six man group that we all align in this way? Huh ? I don't know. I think you know there's so my so just to correct you here, I don't I like Black Ops two just fine. It's black ops three and four that I think are the problematic games because those are the ones where they tried to make them hero shooters . Also black op s is really good. So I think I think you're crazy, I think you're high on the drugs . You're smoking drugs, man. I don't know. I think modern warfare twenty nineteen is a great choice. Like if you had to pick one, I would not I think that's an acceptable answer for what is the best call of duty game . I would probably choose an older one just because you know they did it first . Like if you asked me what's the best call of duty game and I just had to rattle it out, I would probably say modern warfare two . The original, not the not the rebooted modern Warfare two . But the game has come a long way since then and going back and actually playing modern warfare to now there's some niceties and some controllers stuff and there's some nice stuff that they do these days that they didn't do then you go like, oh, actually it's hard to go home again . But I think Black Ops one is a great choice. I think Black Ops two is a great choice. I think Call of Duty four is a great choice, and I think modern warfare too is a great choice When you get into the newer ones I think it gets a little harder because you know then you're like there's a recency bias or what you know that you're kind of fighting against a little bit. But I do think that modern warfare, that twenty nineteen game is responsible for kind of you know, saving call of duty is maybe a bit strong, but like that's where I was at with it prior to that year of game with where they were headed and the games they were putting out prior to that one , it was very much like, dude, this thing seems like it's just fucking done and I don't know what they're going to do to get it back but it is gone . It is sl ipping away year by year. And I loved advanced warfare, but this is not they are not going in the right direction . And modern warfare twenty nineteen is such an amazing return to form. It is such a great overhaul on the we talked about this pretty recently. This is the audio video like what have you. Like Infinity Ward made the changes they needed to make and they made a fucking great call of duty game and more importantly for the franchise, they established a new base to work from and that's what got them to this point and it's taken a lot less time this time for them to get back in the hole to where now I feel like they're under the gun the Infinity Ward specifically is under the gun in a very specific way to de liver and again save the franchise is a strong term. I don't think it's that make or break just yet, but like dude . This year's game did not hit . Last year's game was a great game that also didn't necessarily hit in the way that it probably needed to . And the year before that was also real bad. I would actually say the that year like modern Warfare three is probably a worse game than Black Ops seven is in a couple of ways . But we'll see what they got this year . I'm very curious to see how they do it, man. Like are they are people going to respond to it or whatever? It's but this year's game has felt very often, you know, and whatever 've signaled enough out there with their like loyalty bonus and their apologies that it's clear that this year's game did not do what they wanted it to numbers wise . But even qualitatively, I think it's way off the mark. It's a shame, man. It's a shame that all these complainers, all these people that were like, we want serious skins in our game stop giving us garbage . It's a shame that those crybabies won in a in a few weeks here, I don't know when the exact release date is they're going to put fucking Nicholas Cage in the call of duty and like they released an image of it as part of the like season four reloaded, whatever, whatever they got, you know, coming up here in the next content drop. Like they're literally putting fucking nick cage in it and it looks good and fuck all you people that want all these series I need. more fucking t axi fucking mill spec fucking fuck shut up . Go buy actual shit. Go Cosmo, go sit on your couch and play as Nicholas Cage while dressed up like a cop if that's what you want to fucking do, man Fuck it . Who cares? I always said the minute they did that commercial that was full of celebrities and this was like years ago. I forget what game it was for but when they were like here's Jonah Hill and all these other fucking people and they're running around shooting each other and like that should be the game . I said it then .'re They like that, should be the game. They should turn this game into just fucking fancy celebrity laser tag or whatever and it should be all these fucking people in it . Like fuck this. Like who cares And they did sort of , but they didn't do it well. They did it poorly . They did it and they did some of the worst voice acting. Like they just didn't lead these these celebrities to turn in good voice performances and the whole thing fall is a first person game . Knowing that I'm playing as chong only goes so far . You need to do the legwork on the audio to make me feel like I spent the money on something cool . Right ? Man , anyway . I'm very curious to see what they end up doing with skins this year because they did say like, oh we're going to keep it but like the Nicholas Cage that they're putting into the game appears to just be wearing like fucking tactical military like he look,s like he looked in the rock kind of and so I wonder if that's going to be if that will be the way they go with it is like, oh yeah, we're putting all this licensed stuff in it but, it's going to fit the tone of the game or whatever. Like all right . We'll see . You're still selling a black cell pass, so I assume that it's still going to look all fucking dumb . Anyway, that's it for emails. Thanks everybody for writing in podcast at Guard. Bike is your email address to use to send things to me . If you want me to read them . So do that . I'll be back on Wednesday, we'll hang around and then come Friday come Friday . We are going to play I'm not going to mention every single game that we're going to play on Friday for the Nintendo sixty four , but we are going to start playing Nintendo sixty four games and ranking them scientifically . And because Friday is the release date of the new Starfox , I thought I should probably play Starfox sixty four . So that will be on the list . I will also play Cruz in USA because that was the game that I can't stop thinking about for whatever reason and there is more . Hopefully, I mean, I don't know, I don't know how long the average N sixty four game will take. I mean, I figure, you know, you can finish Starfox sixty four in like what nine minutes. So I mean the game's so short like we probably finish it like twice . So yeah , come through on Friday and we'll see at least those two games and we'll talk about the one good song in Cruising USA I'll see you then.