Get A Load Of This Segment

Hello everybody and welcome to a new episode of The Min Max Show Place about Games, Friends. Getting better. I'm Ben Hansen. Thanks for clicking on this. I'm joined by Kyle Hillard. Hello. Joined by Jacob Geller . I'm here and the other king of YouTube, fresh on the scene, Jason Tryer . Hello, I'm a YouTuber now, welcome. Like and subscribe. You are kicking butt cranking out these videos where it's you looking to camera and just unloading your brain and look at those views and I'm seething with jealousy in an unhealthy way but I was just wondering like what's going on with you? What is the goal? What do you want from being able to have this new avenue of talking to the community? You already got Treble Click, you got Bloomberg at your Becon call and now you need YouTube too . Well, I can tell you this. I just got an email. This happened like five minutes before we recorded. I got an email from someone who's like, Hi, I won't say the company name, but hi, we're a lifestyle apparel company. I'm reaching out to propose a flat fee partnership for a thirty to sixty second integration in one of your upcoming videos. Deal Blah blah blah blah blah send you some swag. What's your rate? And so I responded and I said, Hi, my rate is ten million dollars . So if as a result of the YouTube channel, I can get ten million dollars, then mission accomplished. Jason if you respond without reading the fine print though, someone will just like sure, you know? Jason, if you respond like that to raid shadow legends, they will say yes, here you go. And then you will have to decide do you want ten million dollars or do you not want to promote raid shadow legends? That is a good question. I mean, here's the thing. I have two children who need to go to college. So I think I want ten million dollars, but we'll see. We'll see if the opportunity arises. Okay, right, right and ring. Check it out. Jason Tryer on YouTube. It's exploding. It'll eclipse the world soon. On this episode of the podcast, Jason will be here just for the first section because we got to talk about what's going on with Xbox. Always a new saga. It's fascinating even if you're sick of it, I promise. There's a lot to unpack here. Then we're gonna be talking about some things that we genuinely love, I promise, like Adventures of Elliot, the Millennium Tales, talking about that new action RP . And then the great Seraporsorsky and Halem McLean are going to be joining to talk about Dead by Daylight's tenth anniversary. They went up to a big event in Montreal. And it's one of Haley's favorite games of all time. So talking about the state of that game as that's also still exploring in popularity. It's amazing. Jacob, you said you wanted to have a whole section that was playing games with Jacob Geller . I'm a playing game guy now. Yeah, awesome. I can't wait for part of my identity. Hell yeah, Ace Combat, Project Winman, a bunch more. And with Sarah the Playing Girls, games you played on. Yeah, I'm with Kyle. That's what I thought too. Oh yeah, match three , the trivia one where you can play against other people on the plane. I love that. Like literally games that can only be played on the back of a headset as well . Yeah, that's right. They're exclusive. And exclusives are all the rage now so I hear. We're also going to talk about Parales. Wey'zre going to talk a little bit about Steamface Steam Next Face, some cool demos that we played there. And then back half the show as always, we have great questions submitted over there on Patreon . Jason Schier, thank you for joining us. You're popping off stories over there at Bloomberg saying trouble at Xbox round fifty seven for this year. What is the status of what's going on with these ambiguous Microsoft Studios? Yeah, so quick refres her is on june tenth I reported at Bloomberg that layoffs were coming at the end of fiscal year, which is june thirtieth, so it'll be shortly after that kind of ed to my article for complicated reasons , Asha Sharma, the new CEO sent out a letter to staff saying, Hey, here's what's going on. Here's some grim numbers, bleak picture. She used the words this cannot continue, which you know things are going to be bad when an executive says this cannot continue. Yeah, exactly. And she started singing , she started singing the song as robots swarmed her. Yeah, man. I thought I thought she wasn't a gamer, but here we go . So yeah, it's weak . I had thought that we wouldn't really hear anything again until the layoffs actually started. But over on Friday , the people at Compulsion Games in Montreal were informed by their leadership, hey, stuff is going down. We've been informed that Xbox does not planned to keep us . And they got kind of an early heads up so they could start looking for new work as quickly as possible. And on Monday I reported at Bloomberg that at least three studios Compulsion, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory are currently in negotiations with Xbox because they've been told they're on the chopping block and there are different steps they can take to move forward . Maybe they can spin out, maybe they can find another buyer, whatever that looks like. It is kind of the current status is them just negotiating with people . And there are more to come. Those are not the only three that are going to face closure , but those are the three that I've been able to confirm so far. And as we speak, I'm still trying to figure out what's going on . My phone is blowing up right now with text messages from people within the Xenomax organization. That's a company that owns Bethesda and ID and Machine Games and Arcane . And not a lot of people know what's going on. There's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of frustration, there's a lot of anxiety, a lot of people just trying to figure out what happens to their jobs. And man, needless to say, not a lot of work getting done. Very hard to do your job when you have this kind of ax hanging over you. The axe box, do you think that is it Arcane being paranoid and rightfully scared of the studio's health? Or are there some inklings that something is up with Arcane in France ? Well, I'm talking about like all over ZenMax, not just Arcane. I know there have been kind of like people sharing rumors about Arcane specifically, but I mean there are people that are concerned all around the org . I feel like it's probably a little irresponsible to just be like, well , there's a belief that this studio could shut down like I saw with Arcane without knowing for sure. So I'm going to refrain from like commenting on what I've heard unless I know it to be one hundred percent certain, which is why I just sucked to those three studios. Like I've heard rumors about all sorts of other studios within the arc. The only thing I can say for sure is that those three studios are facing closure and there will be others probably multiple others . But other than that I can't really add much to I don't want to like spread rumors I get when I don't know they're true. I have a million questions. One of them is like why do we know this? Normally it's like, hey news broke, studios shut down, everyone's scrambling for work. Why is this a matter of like after june thirtieth , heads are going to roll? Why is there this much of a rare heads up ? Well, okay, so two parts of this. One is the kind of the massive scale, the fact that massive layoffs are coming. That leaked out to me a while ago . A lot of people have been informed. A lot of people know it's coming. A lot of people are preparing for it in some way or another. The individual studios themselves, so the reason that those three have been confirmed, the reason I've confirmed those three been able to confirm those three is because those three studios management had conversations with their employees and said, Look, here's what's going on. There are others where management has been informed and chose not to tell employees just yet for their own reasons . There could be all sorts of reasons for that. I think there are pros and cons to telling employees and knowing that it's going to become public news And then the other kind of bucket is that some studios, even their management doesn't know what's going on . So there's just a lot of a lot of uncertainty right now, a lot of confusion , a lot of uncertainty. It's infuriating. You know, we talked about a couple of weeks ago on the podcast, just the idea of like doing everything they could to try and be like, hey gamers, we're on your side. Twitter poll, what should Xbox be called? Is it in all caps or not? And then just knowing this was the big ax to drop of radical change and just the huge swings that they have to take. You know, I thought it was really telling that what is his name? Christopher Ball? Matthew Ball. Matthew Ball, thank you. When Matthew Ball did an interview with Game Business, you know, and he said that one of the first questions that Asha had for him when he came on board was like, Is it salvageable? Is the entire Xbox thing fixable? And then there's quotes from Microsoft CEO Nadella where he said, quote, YouTube monetizes Xbox better than we do , which is a fucking insane thing for the CEO to say. I mean, also true of news organizations . So hey , that's why I'm a YouTuber now. Okay, it's a place to be apparent . What's everybody feeling like? Is it fury? Is it chaos? Kyle Jacob or yeah these days . I really I liked, you know, lots of lots of people posting things , but a friend and colleague Joshua Rivera posted like, do we have to keep being loosey in the football with this? Yeah. Like why why would we ever have given them any credit? Like this is it's it's just the inevitable finish line. It just feels like it's like and then we pretend like o,h you, know like, things are things are looking pretty good here where it's just like this is this is how it was always going to end and it feels stupid that we keep reporting on like a not reporting. Jason, I appreciate your report ing. But like the idea of kind of being like things are looking up. Things are looking down. It's just like it makes us all seem like idiots because like this is how it was always going to work and now it's how it's working. And I just kind of it's hard to get past the feeling of just like what are we doing? What were we doing thinking like this time they really figured it out . I think there's like there's vibes and then there's the business of it all and the vibes are generally what the podcast and Twitter and Blue Sky that's kind of and Rosetta. That's like what the conversation has been about. As far as the business,, I mean I think most business analysts have looked over an Xbox and like this is unsalvageable unless drastic moves are made . And I think it remains to be seen if this turns out to be a win for them. But if the goal, Fascia Sharma has been placed here not to turn around the vibes, but to turn Xbox into a growing, sustainable business , then that's a whole 'nother question entirely. And you're right that like some of these earlier moves in the first few month s have been about vibes, changing the name to all caps, Xbox or whatever, addressing Tim Dog on Twitter . Even the exclusives thing is all about vibes because that's kind of nonsens otherwise . But like this big layoff and reorganization , I think the kind of how that worked out for the org , we're going to have to wait and see as horrible as it is. I mean, it's like horrible from a human perspective. There are going to be a lot of people out of work, a lot of people whose lives are ruined because of this . But from a question of is Asha Sharma delivering on her mandate , I think, remains to be seen. I mean the acquisition of half the industry and because specifically, you said like can Xox be sustainable, but in general, Microsoft's goal is not sustainability, it's infinite growth, right? And that's why like, you know, the idea of a studio selling a game that did like good enough to fund another one doesn't seem like even if that would be sustainable for a studio that existed within its own ecosystem , the idea of being part of Microsoft where the goal and demand is continuous growth after growth quarter after quarter forever is a wholly destructive thing towards the idea of making art. Yeah. And I think like the part that makes me want to scream is that idea of like, all right, I'm happy to hear your new strategy. I would like to see the strategy. And right now it seems like the strategy is go back to where Xbox was in like twenty eighteen. Like if we just had some exclusives and had fewer studios and focused on quote, great games , mission accomplished, where I feel like one of the wise things I think Phil Spencer said towards the end of his reign is like it's not a matter of great games anymore. If we crank out five amazing games per year, people still aren't selling their PS five and picking up an Xbox. They need tos be something bigger and a bigger , cleaner swing than that. And so just the strategy of like if we just had fewer people on the payroll and more exclusives, maybe we'll be okay. Like, I'm not seeing a future path just based on that alone . Yeah, I mean I think that's right. I think that the kind of what's hard to square here is that it's like a lot of different competing kind of mission statements like, selling hardware is almost like a Sicipian goal at this point. Like you might try to be like yours is exclusive. So we're going to sell Xboxes because of that, which is kind of an asinine concept for a few reasons. One is because it's not exclusive. It's coming to PC. So that already cuts out a massive swath of your audience. But two is because they're losing money on every piece of hardware they're selling in the first place. And this memory chip crisis like their hardware was in a bad place before me the cost of storage and memory went up tenfold . So that kind of almost feels like an X factor in its own right. But in terms of them as just kind of a software company, which is what I've at least been looking at a little bit more through a focused lens because that's where it seems like most of most of most people who work in the Xbox Orger work on the software side of things . That's where I mean it's hard to argue that there isn't a lot of room for change there. The fact that they haven't had a fallout game for as long as Xbox has owned Zenimax. They haven't had a new fallout game, just a couple of remasters. I mean, that's like, that's crazy. Actually, they haven't even had remasters yet . Do they remaster fallout for? I'm trying to remember or was that just like like I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's just like that's crazy to me. That is like an aitptude that you have this massively successful show but you haven't been able to put out a new follow up game to correspond to that. So that I understand why Asha Sharma would come in and be like, why haven't we had a new follow up game? This is insane . At the same time , this idea of doubling down on bigger franchises without being able to take the kind of smaller investments maybe not necessarily like artsier games but games that maybe maybe can be more creative and also actually have a shot at hitting , that seems like well, I don't know. I mean, I guess we don't know exactly what the map is going to look like because the full scale of the cuts is not going to have been revealed. But to me it seems like you need to be investing in both big and small projects. They just have to be the right ones. And I mean that is kind of a subjective . I don't see a world like Double Fine is such a valuable studio to me that to me it seems like something that would be worth keeping. But if you're Asha Sharman and you're coming in and you don't know anything about the history of these companies, you just know what you're learning about the business right , then I guess it's kind of an obvious move. This isn't a company known for making a bunch of money. Would her knowing about it change this? I don't think so. Yeah, why are why are we moving forward with the assumption that any of them care ? Well, I mean I think that it's I don't know, it depends what her mandate is. It depends what her overall strategy is . But I think it doesn't help to come in and be like, like when Phil Spencer comes in and he decides to buy double fine and hang on to them and tell them they can make whatever kind of artsy games they want as long as it fills out game pass. That to me is largely because he has been working in the games industry for thirty years and knows Tim Schafer pretty well and they have a good relationship and work well together. That's where a lot of these acquisitions and kind of mergers and deals come out of. I mean, there's so many games that have been signed because like two people were good friends and had a drink at the fig in downtown Los Angeles during an E three one time and then started talking about how like, hey, this franchise that you work on would actually be a good fit for this studio that I operate . That's how a lot of stuff gets done. It's just that relationship building and bringing in kind of an outsider, an operator who really knows platforms, but doesn't know the games industry . You just don't have any of those relationships. And so there's a lot that will be different as a result of that . But when Phil Spencer decides to Phil Spencer and accomplices decides to close Tango Gameworks , you know, it's it's not it is, it's not because he doesn't know about or care about game history. I just feel like any of these I believe that people meet each other through artistic fashion, even if they do work for , you know, a trillion dollar human rights abusing company. But it's just kind of like it feels strange to me to be like if Asha Sharma just understood the history of games, maybe she wouldn't close double fine because I don't think that's how I don't think that people have no, that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that I think it's it's so much to people who do know the history of games, it's a lot more clear what the value of double fine is and what the history of double fine is and why. I mean, if I were running a business, I would be like, Double Fine just made some of the most engaging, rewarding, incredibly compelling documentaries on the planet. We should find a way to boost those and get those on Netflix and like turn like make double fine, like double fine is value just in that. But that's not the type of thing that like a brand new operator is coming in to evaluate and look at. I'm not saying if she understood the history of Dubafein, she would like automatically be saving the studio, but I think that plays a much bigger role than you would expect. Like certain relationships and understanding of history, like that all plays a huge part in how business functions. Yeah, and even we saw in the documentary that it seemed like higher up to Microsoft didn't really understand the documentary, even when they were visiting double fine. I was like, wait, what is this? You're filming a documentary. I don't know what you've been doing here for the last five years, but it seems ambitious, sure. But it is the big question mark is what's going to happen with these studios? Are they all going to get shut down? Are they all going to be sold off, spun off in theory? I mean, they toys for Bob got its independence not that long ago. You know, a tango GameWorks, Craften came in and purchased them . You know, bungie, if you want to go back a couple years before that, like it's not unreasonable for these studios to to spin off and especially in terms Jacob of like, you know, why would they not close this down? Like if they're in the business of just goodwill , they could they could pull a move like fandom, you know, of like just being like, hey studio like double fine buy yourself back the way the giant bomb did or whatever. Like here we go and no harm done and we alleviate all of these employees on the payroll. And we know what? It'll look pretty good on the spreadsheet and then people won't hate us even more for bringing down double fine in all these studios. So the business of goodwill, the business that Xbox is best at I mean they're at least trying for the first half of the year. That was very much their angle is like, hey gamers, let's try and get back to some ounce of goodwill , but it is just the question of whether or not it's going to be feasible. Like the confusing thing, right, is they announced Senua, the third hellblade game , and then it came out from Game File that they knew that they're going to be splitting off or doing something apparently, you know, with Ninja Theory before they even announced that. And so they announced that as a way to gauge interest in a sale of the studiobe. if May Wishl ists were skyrocketing through the moon for the new Senma, things would be slightly different , but it's just a weird situation that they're in. I had a question about that because I haven't read the sort of detailed story. Was Ninja theory in that loop? Is that what the sort of concern is that they weren't made aware before the announcement? It seems unclear as the unclear gamefiles reporting, at least that they knew exactly what was going on. I mean, if you look at that reveal trailer did, but Ninja Theory didn't. Correct, correct. And if you look at that reveal trailer, it is telling that it's maybe I'm reading too much in a rapid but it's Sena drowning in a big pool of gold like in that trailer as she's being suff ocated . And so it's interesting that Matthew Ball in that in that interview and game business, they were asking about just exclusives and why are some games exclusive? Others are not. How does it make sense for Gears Were EDA to be exclusive console wise? But then Senwa a new announcement is not. And he was like, Uh, it's a case by case basis. Sometimes it depends on the studio and I can't comment on what's going on in Ninja Theory. And so it very much felt like, okay, something, something might be up here. And so I guess best we can do is fingers crossed these studios can get their independence back and a toys for Bob like fashion, you know, like I have heard you know that with a studio like Double Fine that that was at least part of the messaging internally, you know, when Microsoft purchased them as Tim Schaeffer said something along the lines of like, and you know, we can always buy ourselves back if this thing goes south. And I think there's some confusion about like is, that in the contract or is that just an assumption that this can happen? Could you buy back the name Double Fine, but with none of the IP? Would Microsoft own all of that? Jason, I don't know if you have more thoughts on this, but that's what I'm hearing at least. There's just a lot of confusion about what exact ly this would mean that is the big wrinkle. You just identified it. The IP. When Toys for Bob spun out of activision, they spun out with a deal to make a spyro game, but they do not own the Sypro IP , and that is that is kind of going to be a big sticking point in these negotiations because Xbox will have to place a value on them and whoever is making the whether it's outside financers or the studio heads themselves using the money they got from the initial acquisition trying to buy themselves back out , the IP is going to be a big part of those negotiations . There's also the question of how many staff you can actually afford to retain if you do choose to spin out . Much easier to keep your entire team together if you're sold to another company with big pockets than it is if you are trying to spin out and own the company yourself and fund salaries yourself . There's also a possibility that like one of these companies, like say, if you're double fine, you might say, Hey, well, we've got this game in development. Can we spin out but continue working on this game with you as a publisher or can we shop it around to another publisher? So there are a lot of complicated variables here and that's why there is now this negotiation period where none of the studios are actually getting shut down and like it's a little bit misleading to see headlines saying that ninja theory is closing or compulsion is closing because none of this is actually being executed until after fiscal year. So like early July is when the layoffs are actually going to go through. Right now there,'s this negotiation period and it's essentially Microsoft saying, Hey, we're going to shut down these studios , but like now let's talk about what that looks like, whether you can spin out before we shut you down, whether we can find another buyer, whatever other solutions there are. I don't know what all the possible options are. Maybe private equity can swoop in, who knows . But the idea is that like none of these studios are actually shut down right now. What's being messaged to employees is like, he y, things are bad. We just got told we're going to be shut down. So feel free to look for work right now because even if we do get to save ourselves, we might not be able to save everybody. It might be like very small percentage of you guys . So take these next two weeks as like an additional two weeks to keep to get a head start on looking for work, which I think is very generous of those studios to offer to their employees. Yeah, and a recent example , you with know,fect Per Dark and the Initiative Studios shutting down is there were talks right for take two to pick up that project. So another example of like, Hey, maybe somebody outside can come save us. And then the answer was no, nevermind . Well, yeah, the main reason that that deal fell apart, IP, IP ownership. Yeah. Who would own the perfect dark IP was the biggest ticking point in that deal? But can you imagine the idea of like, great job, Microsoft, you're going to be hoarding all of Double Fine's IP without Tim Shaf eer, you know, good luck. You know, the idea of like, I mean, what you can make a knots three with whatever team you still own toys for Bob. Yeah, I mean, part of it is a back catalog, right? Like if Xbox, we don't really know what the future looks like for GamePass. Asha Sharma has not really talked a lot about GamePass, but if they want to keep all of those old double fine games on there, that's part of that is IP ownership. Yeah. That's it. There's a world in which like a contract that is put together. And again, this is why it's like negotiations and there's a lot of lawyers and back and forth, but like one kind of potential outline for a contract is like, hey, we will buy back this IP, but in perpetuity, you can have this this and this g game oname pass as long as game pass and so on and so forth. So that's when you get into a lot of kind of complications in the contracts. Yeah, it's just a heartbreaking thinking of the last game that Double Fine released understand. I there was a cancell ation there not too long ago as well for another project, but like the last game they released was Kilm. Ben Hanson of the Insider. Insider scoop. No, but just the idea of like kiln was last game they released. Didn't like the world on fire, but like hey, it's kind of a cool little thing. The pottery making is nice. And it just it freaks me out all of us being fans of, you know, Double Find's video history they've been so bold and brave to reveal so much of, like seeing the origins of Kilm, where is this the Amnesia Fortnite project and Derek Brand just being like, yeah, I don't know, a pottery kind of multiplayer thing and everyone's like, yeah, that's cool. That's a cool idea. Like that's such an innocent starting point. And now jump forward to twenty twenty six Asha Sharma and all the heads of Xbox are looking like, I don't know what's the last game Doublefine made? Some pottery multiplayer game that no one played, kill it. You know, like it's just such a sad ending if this is going to be the finish line for Doublefly in this iteration, at least it's brutal. Jacob, you're the way you're talking , do you think that this is it? Like for Xbox? Like do you see like a finish line in the near future? It's just like the tone I get from you Yeah, I mean, I don't respect them as a company or a group of decision making individuals, but like I do think that there will be some version of , you know, like the team that makes gears and whatever that continues to limp along for a long time. But I feel like the past decade we have essentially been living through the experiment of what if Microsoft bought half the gaming industry . And now we're at the end of that experiment, which is that it didn't work. Game pass didn't make anyone any money, and the studios were not more sustainable. I mean, there is the question that's it. I hear that. There is the question though of,, you know, would double fine exist if they weren't purchased in twenty nineteen. I mean, if you watch the video content, you know that like business is obviously hard. You know, they have sixty to seventy employees in San Francisco. That's pretty expensive, right? And so it's not a not to be like, thank Microsoft for giving them a couple more years, but like it is a big question for a lot of these studios out there. Like would they still be around? And you know, not to just to spread it out a little bit more , you know, it's like at least these studios got to release some games on Microsoft. If you look at something like Blue Point with Sony shutting down with which they purchased and then got zero games out the door. It's like it's all messier than you'd want to believe, you know? They did work on Ragnarox and be fair. Okay. Yeah, on the double point , it's safe to say that either they wouldn't exist or they would have had to find money elsewhere to finish that game or they would have released it earlier and worse. So yes, in that case , and you can see that very clearly in psychoticy, the Microsoft acquisition worked out well for them. I think the real fatal flaw and when history is written about all this stuff . I think that kind of gaming historians will point to the Activision Blizzard deal as the kind of the biggest mistake that Phil Spencer ever made for a number of reasons. One is because it made it just way too big, double the size of the company. I mentioned this on YouTube on a YouTube video , but I think it's worth reiterating that that deal, the cost of that deal isn't just sixty nine billion dollars to buy Activision Blizzard. It's also adding ten thousand employees your organization and having to pay them their salaries and benefits for the next however long you keep them around. So that is a significant investment. It made the org way too big . It drew a lot of attention from Microsoft who also happened to arrive around the same time that AI was starting to take off and Microsoft was like, Hey, we need to become an AI company. Wait a minute. Why are we investing all this money in Xbox, which gives us such low returns when that money could be going to Azure and making a way more, way, way bigger profits or into AI and pleasing our shareholders . And the other problem is that just when that deal was announced in January of twenty twenty two was a time of zero interest rate, zero percent interest rates , which is a very different world than when it was actually closed in October of twenty twenty three . And I mean, if you guys remember, that zero percent interest rate drove everybody crazy. That's when Sony spent three billion dollars to buy Bungie, Take two spent twelve billion dollars to buy Zinga. It was just crazy. Like money was free. And then suddenly money wasn't free and that deal looked really, really bad in retrospect. And it has not worked out well for them. It has not led to game past growth. It has not led to them suddenly being a dominant player in mobile or cloud or I think they were talking about the metaverse a little bit back then, which is hilarious in retrospect . It was just a bad move on their part and Activision could have unlike Double Fine, Activision would have been fine. It was a profitable company. It had great, like its Keger numbers are insane . It was doing quite well for itself other than that the misconduct scandal , which I think who knows how that would have turned out if they weren't purchased by Microsoft, but the company would have been fine. The people there would have been fine and that consolidation just did not need to happen and is going to be and like has just caused an like uncountable amount of damage like to people's lives and to the entire gaming industry . Fortunately, there's no other massive entertainment consolidation going on right now involving Warner Brothers in Paramount because that sure would be bad to look at history and repeat it, that sure would be a mistake. Oh God. All right, it's a mess right now, but as always, it's a fascinating saga and fingers crossed for all those studios that they can end up in an absolutely in an okay spot of their employees can at least get out away from this atomic blast of Xbox's wrath at the moment . Hey, in happier news, things are going great in fillability, everybody. That's right. The adventurers of Elliot, our favorite adventurer, he's on a roll Jason Ch,arlie you teased us with the scoop of a lifetime on the name of Filma Beldia, please we must know . Okay, so Adventures of Elliot, I spoke to the developers of that game and I asked the produc er and the director I said, Hey, like why is it called Philaveldia, which is the name of the land in this in this game we were talking about before the show how like somehow like all these people in this in this game just are like normal names with like a single letter changed or removed or added or something. Like what was the one you mentioned Ben Yugen? You gene with the Y ugene with a Y in the middle who looks like me when I was nineteen years old? That's what I looked like if you ever wanted to know. I looked like Zugene with a Y. There you go. Good to know. Were you also like a scientist like conducting lab experiments and stuff? Yeah, it gave us this random dude a javelin? I don't know. Just seemed important at the time. Nice. So I asked them and I said, Hey, why is it called Philad elsia ? And they said , Well , it's not because of Philadelphia . They said, It's because the origin is firebird and then they added the word dia to it, meaning continent and the kind of the results are firebird dia , which I guess when kind of translated from the Katakana into English, turned into Philibel Dia . Ladies and gentlemen, that's why you come to the Min M ac Show. Now you all like the name . It's actually really smart . Now I don't have to triple check that it's spelled correctly. So many times especially with Elliot to. All right, and the game itself, Kyle, you may playing have been the most. I've played the first , there's a very generous demo out there that's like, you know, four to six hours or something of the prologue that progress carries over, which is a very nice score and next trend. Jason, you've been dabbling a little bit, but Kyle's curious what you think about the advent ures of Elliot here. Yeah, I mean, I'm not too much far beyond the prologue, but like it kind of surprised me how much I liked it because I didn't really know what to expect. I was like, you know, as much as I love Zelda, I'm not the biggest fan of like over head combat, I guess you could say, you know , but I was like charmed pretty quickly. Like I I'm still into the HD two D style. I know sort of it's it's kind of sort of falling out of favor and people are kind of annoyed by it. But like I think the combat feels good . I like the sort of inventory of abilities. It is so much more Zelda E than I expected . I just thought it was going to be sort of like Secret of Mana or something like that, but there's there is more zelda to it in a way that it is even though it's not like engaging me in this way that like I'm kind of going back and forth between it and bond where bond is a much more like I have to sort of get ready for this experience and like sneak around and stuff where Elliot's more like I'm just going to go and beat up some monsters and let the story I will press the L button to let the story move forward by itself . I'm engaged by it and I like it. I'm into it. I think it's cool. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting just in the world of, you know, team Asano games, which as far as I understand, it's just Asano over there at Square is just games that he is involved with and he's a producer of it'.s So not as clean as like this is the Octomath Traveler team. It's technically the team I think Claytech works that develop the bravely default series, but everything's kind of just this big HD two D Asano umbrella and stuff. And this is kind of their take on Zelda in the same way, I guess that me the Hollowers kind of, you know, Yachlub's take on Zelda. It's interesting to have these two in comparison back to back. Jason 's not full Zelda to be clear. Right. It's just like closer to Zelda than I expected. Yeah. Yeah. And is the world's biggest octopath traveler too fan? Jason, is it living up to kind of that Timasano pedigree, at least? I'm enjoying it. It's fine. It hasn't blown me away or anything. It's kind of it's a tough comparison because I just I jumped to it after playing through Mina the Hollower, which is like one of the best two D action games ever made. So jumping to a game that's just kind of fine mana is combat and Zelda is h rudimentary puzzles isn't isn't quite is always going to be a letdown after a game like Mina Hollower. But I'm enjoying it. I mean, the story is kind of a mess. The fact that Elliot, your main character is just the most good tissue personality list here whoever makes me want to jump out a window. Like again, I think this game is visually beautiful. I think the music's awesome. I think it has a lot of really smart quality of life things that are keeping me playing . At the same time, every time a character talks, I just scream like just say anything interesting instead of just I'm a nice guy. Oh yeah, Elliot. I think you're very nice. Yeah, and I also like orphans. He and the orphans like me too. It's just that for like forty minutes. It's absurd. Kyle, is the narrative picking up at all for you ? I mean, not particularly no, that is not, that's not what is drawing me to this game for sure. It's just the action. Yeah. And it's funny because like as much as I really liked Mina a lot and played it a lot, I got a hundred percent, you know, like I played the hell out of Mina . This is like weirdly a good chaser for that game because it is not as intense for me. Like it's just like coming at the right time, you know, where it's like the combat isn't as intense and it's not as punishing and like I like it for that reason and but yeah, I mean it's it's like yeah, like you guys are saying, like the sort of characterization is very like surface level and it's it's not I'm not eager to talk to people. I'm eager to get back out in the world which is a bunch and beat up some monsters . And like there's a lot, you know, the fast travel is really good. You know, like you can you don't have to sort of retrace your steps a lot. So it's just it's a mindless is too rude , but that's kind of the sort of the video game space it's filling for me right now and it's what I'm in the mood for. So I'm enjoying it. I can dig it. Yeah. Jason, does your Found Fantasy VI scents tingle when they talk about magic site so much? It's like they know which buttons to push. Yeah, it's pretty good. The story, by the way, in Octobath Traveler two is significantly better and the characters are way more interesting . Yes, my FSX painting. Well, it's funny. It's the developers of this game told me they were most inspired by Adventures of Mana , or sorry, not Adventures of Mana, Final Fantasy Adventure , which I believe was localized here as sword of mana a little bit later. But that was the game boy game Fin Falantasy Game Boy games, which was the first condensed new game, the first ever moderate game that was just released in the US with a title with the title Final Fantasy Adventure presumably to get more people into Final Fantasy and buying it and checking it out rather than like using a new title. They did weird things with naming back then. They called FF six. They called it FF three, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, that was a game that inspired them the most. And you can see that if you've played that game some of, the monst ers resemble mana monsters. The kind of your wheels are very mana like , the weapon collection is pretty much straight out of Funnel Fantasy Adventure . You got your scythe, you got your kind of traditional sword, you got your javelin . So yeah, it definitely feels like those it feels like a modern game. Yeah, yeah. All right, well we'll keep playing Ky itle,. you're going to stick with it Adventures of Elliott. Yeah , I am. I'm curious if I see it to the end. I'm playing it on Switch two . And it's just like that's just a great platform for it because I can boot it up for a little bit and make some progress. And so like it's I don't, I don't it's not one that I like am so pulled in that I'm like, oh yeah, I'm seeing this thing to credits, but like I 've been enjoying it so far. Yeah, I'm very thankful they have the setting in settings there to you can minimize how much your characters talk because like if you're annoyed by it's literally chattiness. Right. Isn't that what a chattiness ? Because oh there's a princess in your ear and it is like as you're opening a treasure chest, gee, I wonder if it's in this treasure chest. Like just let me play the game please. Or worse as you're opening a treasure chest she says, Oh look, there's a treasure chest . Yeah, I turned it all the way down and it's still too much. So like maybe maybe they can just get it down to a little It's a lot. It's one of those games . It's kind of like one of those parody videos that you'll see of like modern games where it'll be like the camera will zoom over to a switch and then after the camera zooms back, your ferry will be like, look, a switch. Maybe we can hit it and then we'll get closer to the switch. And she'll be like, there it is the switch. You should try hitting that. Every time you get hit by an enemy, she'll be like, You should try using your shield. So first of all, I'm also playing, I'm playing it on Steam Deck same thing as the switch runs pretty great on Steam Deck . I've been playing on the hard difficulty which makes it feel a little more intense and I actually really like that. It makes the combat much more interesting, I think, than the normal difficulty, but your mile age may vary if you just want to kind of turn your brain off for a bit, it might be better to play a normal or easy. Yeah, right on. Try that. There's a mention of Elliot. Jason Schreier, thanks for being here, sir. You want to plug anything in particular? Check out my YouTube channel. No, don't check out my YouTube channel. Check out the triple click podcast. That's where I like to spend most of my time. Triple click. Awesome. Subscribe now. check it out Please, sweet. And we do something very obnoxious where we let people know that there's been a transition in the cast by giving a clap. So if you find a give a clap, you're on out of here, dude. Okay . Bye . Hey, McLane, welcome to the show . Also joined by Sarah Podersky. Welcome to the show . And that's Kyle Skew. He's scared of noises. I am. I wish you would've let me leave already been. Bye . All right, you know, Kyle Hillary probably had to go to one spot and one spot only. What I call the paradise of the Midwest. You know where that is Jacob Geller? Oh, ban, I should remember the name of it. Yes, that's the point of this ad reads. Yes. Pocahontas County, Iowa, everybody. It's home to eleven large kaleidoscopes. How many times we didn't tell you all about these freaking kaleidoscopes before you make a plan to discover Pocahontas County, Haley McLean? This is our ad's. That awesome. It's the best. It has large kalecopes throughout communities and county parks as part of the state's tourism initiative to take some time discovering what Iowa has to offer, their kaleidoscopes offer a way to enjoy an affordable and fun vacation with your family friends, and even if you want to go independently. While you're in the area, be sure to check out the three public schools, including the brand new Lorenz Aquatic Center located near the Lorenz Gladoscope in Sportsman Park or catch one of the free movies during Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons at the Rielto Theater in Downtown Pocahontas. There's several public parks to enjoy, places to eat and shop, entertainment to enjoy throughout the entire county. Look, don't go to some crowded crap hole for your summer vacation , go to Pocahontas County. That's not their ad read. That's mine. You can add it to your travel list this year. You can go to discoverpoco. com to start planning your itinerary. That's discoverpo . com. Thank you for giving us the most enjoyable ad read of all time , Pocahontas County, Iowa That was so wholesome. Isn't that sweet? It's like we're back in Dark Lighting again with the wholesome . Yeah , I took dock lighting with the footage just like the opposite of Dead by Daylight, as non wholesome as it gets because what if you were a murderer and then you had to pay money to be a murderer? Surprisingly wholesome. Is that surprisingly wholesome? For all the murder , that's what I've discovered. Surprisingly wholesome. Okay, walk you through this journey. Okay, so Deba Delitte is a game that Haley has spent how many hours playing here at least a thousand, but it's split between two places, but at least a thousand. Awesome. And then Sarah, you've been like a distant admirer of these series. I played around like twenty twenty, I think. Awesome. Okay. When I had a big demonstration I had some hours logged on steam. I went and looked okay. Okay, she's legit. She's legit. And then the idea was they're celebrating their tenth anniversary and they had a big event up in Montreal and very kindly flew Sarah and Haley out to it. And I feel like most games at their tenth anniversary, it's like, that's nice. I'm glad you're still around. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like breaking its concurrent steam users still ten years in. It's ridiculous. Yep. Yep. The Jason DLC launched today, which they've been trying to get since they're on Jason So like when they first launched de by dayad theylight tri,ed to get Jason and they couldn't get Jason. So they created the trapper, which is very much like an homage to Jason. He puts traps in the ground. He kind of has his build big unit of a guy with a blade. So they never got him , but like their main character, the branding of their game is based around Jason. You know, the game's in the fog , you run away, like you run away from this killer trying to kill you. So it's clearly a huge inspiration. So the fact that they got it a decade later is very sweet that they're finally like what are you doing yet? Everyone's just like freaking out. At the show, they had like a cosplay Jason walking around and he had he had like a escape room so he didn't look likeed he had property on the the p inort of Montreal, like a little shack and you could like go up and unfortunately it closed so Sarah and I couldn't go at it. But we did at the end of the day, when it was empty over there, we were peeking inside and sneaking around, that'll be in the footage . Yeah . They shot a travel log that should be up. The plan is early next week showing off this trip. Yeah. Sarah, how does it compare to your big Kyoto trip? Which by the way, in Mexpotlight , the plan is to drop that before the end of June. So there's been a lot of travel logs lately. I get that. I know it's a little bit out of order release wise, but that's coming soon. But sir, how do the trips compare for you ? I mean, it's so it's so different, right? Because like the Kyoto trip was just like Hailey and I embarking on our own and like, you know, bitsumit is very much a game about the games industry. Yeah. Whereas like for dead by daylight tenth anniversary in Montreal, we were very much like well taken care of . Like they took such this is like the only time that they took such good care of us. They invited us to the office, we met the staff, they fed us food, we got cupcakes. Like sweet. It was very, very sweet, like the care that they took for us. And then it was more about the community of the game. So it's like I talked to some of the people who worked there and a lot of them had never met before, but they invited people from all the different offices to come in, like met in person . So it was very much like a celebration of this community that's been around for ten years, which is so worth celebrating. Yeah. They have twelve hundred employees plus. What i? Yeah . twelve hundred plus. This game is just that successful. They just kept ballooning. That's ridiculous. They have this thing. Other arms, but this is like their white whale for sure, yeah. Because I feel like if you're not in the bubble of dead by daylight, it really isn't the game that's on your radar . But for the people who are in the bubble, like it is a very solid game . It sounds like the dev team in the community have a really close relationship . Like as somebody who's like an ex community manager, yeah, I'm always like testing the health of communities. And it's like if I had to like test the health of the waters of this community, I'd say like pretty healthy. That's really healthy for ten years. For like a living game, I feel like ten years . I mean, you can compare it to like the state of the Destiny community, which now maybe is healthier just 'cause they're like rallying around, trying to be like, this thing was good, damn it, don't let it die. You know, but like was it like a big geek out trip for you, Hailey? Was there stuff that you freaked out seeing? I was freaking out a lot, Sarah. I was running around. We made part of the video . We involved a lot of cosplayers . So we were going up and asking questions to cosplayers. That's going to be so fun to see rapid fire, but Sarah at one point you were like, I think we have enough footage and I was like a few more it's just like so fun to talk to them. They're all so cute. Like it is interesting that it's such a scary dark game and it attracts such pleasant people. Like every time we went up we're like, we love your cosplay. They're like dressed as the scariest like this guy was the trapper. He literally had the build. He was the trapper. We went to him like love your cos mos. He said, Thank you. Like it's just like so fucking adorable. They're all so cute. And everyone was having such a good time. The devs were like beaming. Like Sarah and I got to sit with where the devs were sitting during their big announcement that they streamed on Twitch where they announced like twenty five things. It was like rapid fire and people were popping like at one point when they announced like Dwight came out and had a skin with scooby do onesie and people got out of their seats and were like shaking each other and screaming and like you look at the dem and and they're like the devs are just like you , they like it. It's just it fills your cup up. It was the sweetest thing. It's very rare as a developer to get to like see physically see your community. And there was like three what thousand people there and like the stage went so far back. It was like the entire upper level of like a parking garage and the chairs went back as far as you could see. And like just imagine being a developer working on this game for ten years announcing things and actually getting to see your community, like your most invested players who came out to celebrate with you freak out about this kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean that's the that's the thing is like you could say, Oh these events it must cost so much money and flying people up there but it',s like the morale boost that the developers would get from being in that environment like that's worth its weight in gold, you know? Like I think it's absolutely worth their while to make this huge thing. So okay, what are the big announcements? Jason, that's huge. Scooby Doo is coming, which like that's a big deal for me. It's like it's weird but like that gets my head to turn more than any of his, you know, that got the whole room's head turned like crazy. So that's where anything Scooby Doo a monster ? No, so it'll be cosmetics. The big thing with Dead by Daylight is they have chapters and then they have like cosmetic packs which is skins and items and stuff like that. So to do a chapter is actually a big deal because you need you'd have a killer come in who has unique perks that could change the meta and usually a survivor as well who then has unique perks that come in and change the meta. So a chapter is a big thing. So the Jason chapter just released like that's out and Jason comes out has his own unique abilities, his own unique skill, three perks that you could move on to any other killers. It's a lot more work. But then they have cosmetic packs. Like one of their other cosmetic pack was Diablo four. So now the artist is getting Lilith skin. It would be cool if Lilith came to the game and was a killer, but that would require like probably one hundred times more development work because now it's a playable thing instead of just an item . So they kind of balance between IP just in skins versus implementation into the game . And as far as I can tell, the ads like it would require like probably two years of frontline to get a character into a game versus a skin, which could be turned around probably in a few months. Right, right, right. Yeah. Do you think Sarah it's like, oh this is a nice thing to check in on? Is it going to change how much you're going back to Dead by Daylight moving forward? Do you think it's like, all right, I'm convinced this is this is actually the best . Dead by Daylight is a fun game, but it is it does still have that like beginner hump. It has a liking hump. It kind of has a bit of an onboarding ramp, but they are giving away like how many blood points to help new players. ten million. ten million. What? So I don't know what that means, but that sounds like a lot people like you have to like level up characters to get better perks. So it's like you have to play the game with sort of worse perks before you can get better perks that all the other players have. they're kind of level up. Yeah. Yeah, so they're kind of using easing that pinch point. It essentially lets you level up like ten characters when usually you'd have like to get ten million blood points would take dozens and dozens of games. So they're letting you skip like new players could come in and skip ahead and level up the four free survivors and just get going with switching their perks around and maybe buy a couple and stuff like that. That's smart. Yeah. A backsage pass chat says that you two should be roommates by now . You've gone to we're trying to keep saying we're a bonded pair at the shelter now. Like we got split up for this trip. We weren't in the same room and we were like, we were sad about it. You have to adopt both of them Sarah would just come over to my room because my room had better AC and she'd stay there until like one thirty in the morning and then go back to her room like we were very fond of her. That's very sweet. Look forward like I haven't tried to editing this video yet, but it's be going fun to to see it. That kind' ofs the follow up to the Kyoto one strangely enough just to see. Are you the one editing it? I'm planning on it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you're going to have to cut out a lot of quite inappropriate time. So we even call you go Ben, will you leave this in? So I'm curious can you believe we're gonna make some poor editor probably Ben listen to his talk about this? All right, well, there's gonna be the backstage pass version, which I think is like five and a half hours long. If my math is that really? Yes. Tier you'll unlock that version and apparently we had to beat we had to beat the SGF three hour hours. Threes that's rookie numbers They're absolute rookie numbers. Is that something? I thought that too. And I forget what it was . I went back and looked at some old travel log. I think it was like maybe RSGF or something and it was only like three and a half hours for the extended version as well. Like back in the day that was seen as like, that's a ridiculous amount. And now the Kyoto vlog s twenty hours for the backstage pass version. It's true insane. Can I say something? Yeah. I thought that this year's SGF cut too short. Too short . Yeah, fair. I was moving me through there. I mean, it's like, I know I could watch the backstage pass one, which is however long, but I was like, come on, we got to spend more time up here. That's very thoughtful. Yeah, you're probably right. Yeah , that's on me. I was trying to get it out in a very timely manner and I was like, all right, I'm being a little bit drastic with some of these cuts so I can just get this thing out there for folks. And so I'm like, I don't know, Jacob is the YouTube game, right? I'm like, I don't know fifteen minutes. Maybe that'll get people to click through. Then I look at previous ones like, oh, we've done like an hour at SGF before in the past. You know, so it's a little YouTube. The YouTube game is always make stuff long er. Unless you're making a literal short, I think longer does better. Yeah it's confusing. Well hey more about Time by Daylight in the future for sure. Anything else you're dying to say from that trip ? Hailey got to play on the big scre en. What? She got to play. Yes . So we went to like the playstations where you could play with content creators, but they also just had open stations for people to have like pickup games at. And they had like seating, like chairs and people were watching on two big monitors kind of waiting their turn to play . And Haley very politely went up to wait for her turn to play and she got picked and she got to play Killer. And she's like, oh, I hope they don't put me on the like big screen because there was like three stations going on. So it was cycling. And Haley sits down, Amelia locks and I look up, I look at her monitor, I look at the big monitor, and I'm like, oh , I'm like, Haley, I and I didn't tell her because I didn't want her to get freaked out. I didn't want her to choke , but her and I we were both so wetting. And then sweet. And then Haley dummied them. She did so, so good. People in the audience clapped and that's how fake but they clapped. Whoa. Awesome. Yeah. I mean, it has to be nice to be picked for that. Like if they put my gameplay footage up on the big screen, I would bash my head into the monitor until I passed out. But like someone who's put like a thousand or more hours in this game, it must be a moment of like, yeah, here we go. Like it must be satisfying, right? Oh my God, I clench my butt more playing dead by daily. And I'm the killer. I'm a killer man. So I would say ninety five percent of my time has been killer, five percent survivor, so I'm really bad at surviv or. And I was so scared that they were going to put me up because also all my keybinds for survivor different. I was like, oh crap, what's the button for you's item? I have it as M three. Like it's going to be something weird. I can't remember so I was already like embarrassed and I was going to die. then But she said, Oh, like a drag queen left before me so that the killer spot was open. She was like, do you want to be killer? And I was like, yeah, and I was so excited. But then as soon as I looked up at one point and I saw my stuff on the screen, I turned to Sarah and, my oh god, Sarah she was like, I know. I know. Don't look like lock the hell in. It was like , okay, you're not on the big street anymore, but she was and I don't think she fell for it. Oh no, it was like a light right here. You're not up there anymore. And they were good survivors , right? Because I was going against people that were dressed as the skin in the game they were playing as the taxes at that event was probably much higher than random online matchmaking. Yes, like the Dwight beside me was playing Dwight in the game with the same skitty at on, and I was like, oh my God, he probably is playing this for a million billion hours. But I killed him. I killed that Dwight. Good, good on you. Yeah. Footage coming soon. Near future. I' myve been in You chTanunbeel so keep your eyes open for all that fun stuff . Jacob, what is going on? Are you going down a rabbit hole for the second of a video? Are you naturally falling down a rabbit hole pinocchio esque just about so exciting is it's not related to my work at all . Yeah . It is an elephant. At the beginning at the beginning of this episode, you were like, you were like, oh, we're gonna like talk about all the good playing games. And I feel like that's like way over promising because what I'm at now is like , I'm like learning to speak a new language and that is what's really fun is I picked up Ace Combat seven and had a great time with it and then I was like, I want to play another one of these . I went back to an ace combat zero and it was a little it was a little it was a hard transition going from seven like it doesn't have checkpoints at all in the game and the difficulty is a little hard . But then I started playing Project Wingman, which was not an official ace combat game, but it's very much a like biggest fans of ace combat in the world took their crack at making an ace combat game and it's unbelievably good and actually also doesn't have checkpoints. But like I at this point in time, I think I like Project Wing man more than Ace Combat Seven . But now I'm just like, like, I am legitimately considering buying a flight stick, you know, is the is that I made hell yeah. That's right. Okay, so if we could just transfer the title of Plane Guy from Sarah onto Jacob Geller, that would be great. You're a playing guy, no, you're a playing guy. Yeah, it doesn't fit a play girl. Jacob can be a playing girl, that would feel good. Mr. and Mrs. Plain, I think is how they look to be a wizard. Yeah, plain and tall. So what is it about Wingmen? Because I'm looking at it, it's like it's overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam , but it's like, oh, well, there's no way it can have like the pizzazz, the style that his combat has, right? No, that's that's what really really is cool is that I guess what I should say is I know that people are really into the ace combat stories and I don't think seven is generally regarded as having like one of the better ones . It's a storytelling method that for me is hard to take in because it's just people squawking at you while you are dog fighting. And I have a really hard time keeping people straight, especially if I can't see their names, you know, like , I don't learn people by just like their voices . And so that's all challenging. What Project Wingman has that eighth combat seven did not is the use of like weather and lighting is bananas and is so cool. There's an early level in Project Wingman where and these are all we haven't even said. These are games where you're fighter jets and you just fly close to things and you lock on with missiles and shoot them with your missiles. Like that's that's what the games are and they're very arcadie. They are not Microsoft Light Simulator. You can do lots of flips and tricks and your plane never falls out of the sk y Project Wingman has this level early on where it's you start and you're like there's there's a fleet of boats that you have to destroy that are and there's a very low cloud cover and there's a thunderstorm and then above the cloud cover there's like beautiful blue skies, a bunch of planes up there that you have to fight, but there's like this thick level of clouds in the middle and you're having to go up and down through them. And so you will have sequences where you're like running from a missile will get in the clouds, legitimately be like, I do not know which way is up. Like I am so scared because if I pull up the wrong way I'm going to fly directly into the ocean and like that happening with lightning striking and then like the feeling of getting better at these is really exciting because so much of it is just learning how to move your plane . So yeah, it's it's really it's just been like learning a new skill set in in the kind of action game format is a thing that I've just been loving. Dude, you realize how close you are to making this five times as good, which is Project Wingman is available in PSVR too. In VR, yeah, I know. Well, in PC VR I don't have to buy it on Dan Playstation. Okay, playing VR with a flight stick , you will cramp your pants. It's going to be so maybe literally and vomit. So I have to learn how to play it a little better today it's gonna be it's funny you mentioned Sarah, do you still have love? Are you gonna like lock in phrase combat eight just because you 're time streaming seven? For sure. Like I yeah, I love Ace Combat seven. Okay. I loved it, but it's like I loved, it for I feel like different reasons than Jacob did. Yeah , because like what I like about Ace Combat Seven is like they really made it like if you just want to play it with the most simple controls , we can give it to you, but if you want to play it as granularly and high as possible, we can give it to you. I was just there for like the camp of it all, you know , like the story was absolutely nonsensical. The characters were nonsensical. Like the nations are crazy and I'm like, oh , if I play the other game one I understand and the answer is probably . It's a space elevator that I have to protect. Like I eat that up. I eat it up . It absolutely had me like screaming and gasping and like it was so such a fun game. See, I'm absolutely playing ACECOBA. Yeah, it's so delayed dope like Yeah, the world is called Strange Real, which is cool. And then I was just looking at the series. I'm like, oh, I forgot Ice Combat three was called Electrosphere. It's like just having a subtitle of Electrosphere. I'm like, Hell yeah, what is going on here? Like I played Ace Combat four and really loved it on PS two and Ace Combat Zero completely missed me somehow, but like with the announcement like of, oh, you're pre order eight, you get the remastered version of Ace Combat Zero, the Belkan War. I was like, oh, I'm curious why people there's this passionate fan base for this one. And so that's how I spent my morning was like with my morning coffee playing Belkin War on PS two, Jacob 'cause I went back to it too. And I was instructed by like, God, just the style on this frickin thing , if you love remedy games, you know, this is opening with just like live action footage. Live action, yeah. Yeah, live action actor. And then just like all the UI everything is just like dripping with PS two style in a way that is awesome. Like before you even start the first mission, Hailey McLean, there's just a loading screen that says quote for after all what is man in nature a nothing in relation to infinity? All in relation to nothing. A central point between nothing and all an infinitely far from understanding either . Bam, Ace Combat . And what's great is they don't have like a bunch of quotes for the loading screen. It's just that. You see it before every mission and you just get to ponder it the whole time . And then the part that it's secretly, I think in Jacker two is like the music is so fricking good. It's like especially in Ace Combat Zero. It's like Harry Gregson Williams Metal Gear Solid style music within like flamenco guitars and just choruses bel ting it out, like just the track called Zero from that game. I was listening to you over and over again today. It fricking rules. Yeah, the music for all of them is amazing. What I've heard, someone on Blue Sky told me that Ace Combat four and zero are cons idered a trilogy and in part they were like the difficulty kind of like of zero starts assuming that you have played those other games and so I might go back even earlier and then work my way back up. But like I also played the Ace Combat seven DLC, Sarah have you played the DLC? No it's it is camp on camp. There are like you're fighting two people who I can't remember if they're actually siblings or if they've just like adopted each other and they're both like insane and then when you shoot one of them down the other one goes like even more insane and you're fighting the last big mission is literally just against a submarine. So you're a fighter pilot fighting a submarine that is shooting like rail guns at you. Hell yeah. Is this opening the door at all? I'm curious how this torid love affair is going to impact Starfox, which is launching next week. Do you have like more of an inkling to check out Starfox now Jacob because of this or is it now it's like nothing can compa tored it. Interesting that you didn't ask me that question, Bud. Well, Sarah, how do you feel about Starfox other than loving the design, which you've made very clear ? I'm not gonna play it. Okay. Thanks for asking. Jacob. She wants to be seeing you. Starfox sees you. He loves you . I honestly think it will make my experience with Starfox more negative if I play it because it's it's like riding it's like riding a bicycle and then being handed a tricycle that's like being pulled behind someone else's foot . You know , they just don't let you. It's like Starfucks you take an alley control the ship. You just kind of move in like a, you know, a two D plane while three D things happen around you. Yeah, but the storytelling is gonna be so good and you want to talk about camp. Starfox is the king of Nintendo camp, Sarah Is it? Oh, it's campius all hell. Absolutely. Luigi is the king of campus. Oh yeah, I guess Luigi kind of takes that throne in your round. Speak his name . Luigi Hey, what is up with Paralives, y'all? This is the Sims clone is too much . Sims inspired games. Inspired. Inspired. Legally inspired. This one got out the door. There were so many like Sims wannabes that were in production, like Paradoxes, which is called Life by You, that was canceled. Jake Solomon, who had on the show talking about the early stages of that project at Midsummer Studios that was canceled didn't make it through the door. Inzoy released, but maybe people are a little more mixed on it. And then Paralives swings in as a project and it works for oh so long . Yeah . Do you like it? I am liking it. I was really nervous because a lot of people are putting their eggs in the paralyzed basket . And it's a lot 'cause they are they,'re an indie dev team. You know, they're not like Inzo where it's like a company with a bigger dev team and more resources. Like they are an indie dev team. And I feel like what they were able to create , I'm just like, I'm so impressed by. I feel like they added a lot of great quality of life things in paralives that aren't in the Sims . It's absolutely it's like it's a Sims game made by people who like the Sims, but you can tell they wanted to fix certain things about the Sims. Right. Is it too much of a shorthand to be like, this is kind of a new take on Sims three with more of a kind of like that quote unquote open world. Yeah, it's so nice to be back in the open world. It is yeah. What does that mean then? Just like I saw that you can go and build up a community center and museum and stuff. You can go check out all these other buildings, which sounds like a cool idea . Well, when you go to work, you physically go to a specific build ing. Like every job has different tiers that then actually have a physical building to the point that I actually moved houses so I could be next door to my work to help my commute. Like there's little things like that. Yeah, like little things like that. And I think it's really good at implementing systems that have never been in the Sims. So a big part of why I like Paralives because I went into this kind of nervous too . I mean, it's smaller team. I don't know if I necessarily love the way the Paralyzed characters work, what are they called? I'm gonna call them Sims but the Sims work . Yeah, I've been saying a lot of Sim verbiage while I talk while I think and talk about this game. I don't love the way they look. It's, you know, it's a much smaller team, so I can respect that . But then like all these different systems are so interesting. Like for example, I wanted my girl to be a painter and kind of in the Sims you just get an easel, they paint and then you join the art career and they sort of level up. In this you , how would I even describe it? There's so many things that are happening. So like I have her have the life goal of wanting to be a painter, but then you know, her creativity goes up with all these different numbers that affect it, if she's happy, if she has high creativity, if she recently engaged in something else creative, if she has an art job that she likes, like all these things show up when you hover over her skill increasing and apply different boosts so that she earns create art skills maybe fifteen times faster, thirty times faster than like somebody who's only interested in sports who tries to practice art. So like automatically she's jumping up , but then with every skill those there's also a more general skill that's going up on top of that. So art for her was her other skill and that has its own boost that'll go up and down. And then if I wanted to is very much like the way that you advance in your career is not sticking with the same employer. It's like jumping around to different employers . So I'll be like working at my girl started as the receptionist at the museum and then I saw that there was a better job that's like ten levels ahead. I could stick at the museum and grind it out to get to level ten or I could jump over and get a better job. And my previous experience at the museum added a modifier that made it easier to get that other job because they recognized that I was already in an art career for three levels and that was like plus three levels, it's easier to apply for that job now. Like there's all of those kinds of things in the back end that makes my brain go, oh yeah , because it's just caring about the time you're putting into things instead of just the one track. Like now you're level two, get your creativity to five, you did it. Now you're level three, get your creativity to six, you're done. There's all these other things going on. So it makes it feel more like an RPG that you're like , you're planning ahead like twenty five steps instead of one, which is really fun. And now you understand like, you know, the Sims had a really really, tough development. And now you understand why Paralives was also in development for what like seven years or something because like if you're building this thing, then you're like, oh, well, how do I not have the idea that you can get ahead at your job if you go to a different place and then return , like there's just an infinite because it's life. And there's just an infinite level of complexity that you can bake into this thing. And for the fact that they pulled it off as much as they have an early access, like do you feel the early access kind of limits to this whole thing? I mean, there is like a limited amount of like furniture objects compared to the Sims. There's like a limited amount of like not everything is open in the game. Like the game has this really cute general store and you can like it looks like eventually you'll be able to go and buy things at the general store, like things for your fridge and stuff, which I think is a really cute way to make it immersive, but like that's currently off limits right now . But I think and some of the building stuff is like they're like, hey , you can make a rounded wall because that's the big thing about paralyzed, right? You can make rounded walls. Okay , but you can't put like windows or doors on them yet, but windows and doors will be coming eventually. Okay. Constant things. All right. Even when you build like building is a lot better in this, it's obvious like Sarah was just saying way , one thousandth less items to play with . But like when I'm building a couch, you can kind of see in the gameplay footage because a lot of my time is spent building. I like building. You don't have you can drag the couch to be as long as you want. Yeah, that's so fun. That's so fun. Or like if I have a plant, I can size it up or down and a really kind of a classic thing people complain about with the Sims is that when you're putting stuff on shelves, there's like two places to put things and that's it. And you kind of have to use like the alt tab and put it somewhere else and then zoozit over and then you can do it. You want a lot of cheats in the Sims. Like move all objects, like you have to kind of know the Sims debug menu commands if you want to be good at decorating in the Sims. Yeah, and then paralyze, they just you don't have to know any debug commands. It's all there from the beginning . You can like put windows together and like this is gonna sound so dumb. But like the fact that paralyz just lets gives you the hex the hexadecim forol colorss on things . You're like, duh, what's the of course? Why? Because the Sims, it's like, well, we only have like these three shades of red for this couch and like, and you're like, nothing in the Sims can match color wise, but like in parallelized they're just like here's a color wheel. Yeah, have added. Why not? And even like the granularity just for like creating your pairs or whatever like you can customize individually customize the color of each sock. This is like a level of granularity that's absurd here. Move the tattoos exactly where you want them on the road. You can also make yourself short. And I didn't realize when I made my pair that I could change my height. And then I was like, wait, am I short? What a nightmare existence. I can imagine. Yeah. any dings so far? Like is it just here's my question? Why isn't this going to be the new default Sims for people? Is it just that word hasn't spread enough? Because it's selling well, but you think it is like if you have this craving it's gonna be it. A lack of like, I don't want to say a lack of content, but a lack of content. Right. The Sims has been around for like several years and people have spent thousands of dollars and the mod els are all there and the mods are all there. But I think paralives paralives sold a lot . Yeah . And I'm suspecting that once they start to like churn out , you know, additional content weather better like better AI for children type situation. Like I think people will come back to it . Yeah. Yeah. The modding scene is they've already made it I think, pretty easy, for mod ders , which is a huge thing for indie games. Like how easily can your game be modded is like really affects the life cycle? So I think it'll be around for a while. I don't know. I went back to Inzoid. Yeah after Paralyz came out just to like compare and contrast and it's like I don't know, I definitely like Inzoid definitely looks better and it definitely has more , but I feel like Paralyz just feels more comfortable to me . Yeah, it's a little glossy over at Inzoy, a little AI polish and everything that's kind of I don't know what to say. But like Inzo, like, you know, you can just tell that something's like a game was made with evil . And that's how I feel when I play Inzoi. No, I can't describe it. I'm like, why do I feel like this game was made with evil? The UI in Paralyz is everything is visualized, which I really appreciate. Like I was flirting with this girl and it has a little spinner that it's like you'll have a thirty five percent chance to ask if she's single if she takes it well or not because you don't know her well enough. And in the Sims it's like you ask that and they just go wobboo and they get mad like oh I failed it this you see the spinner go around , you're like, you like hopper and did it. Like things like that are just making me have a lot of fun with it. But I wonder about the replayability because it kind of does feel like you're sort of going through an experience with a para and I wonder if I'm only ever going to want to do one experience per type of type of sim or pair whatever. Like okay I tried once with the painter and that was kind of fun. Now I'm going to do one with a tech bro. Okay I did that. Here's my vet character I. did that. Like once I do every career or like life goal will it be a little bit boring? I don't know. Yeah . But by then I think they'll release new content. And I really hope they don't do free DLC. I hope they do paid just because like I want them to get money. for it And I don't like that the indie thing is like, all DLC has to be free because it's like I'm like, no, charge, charge money. They'll make like the season stuff free. Anything that is kind of defacto in the Sims free and maybe other things could be paid. Yeah. Yeah. It's forty bucks on steam for a pair of lives. You want to jump on it now and the water's good. Don't wait if you're a Sims fan. No yeah, it's good. I know. I think it's fucking , but it's gonna be buggy. The Sims is buggy and that's fricking a million years old. So yeah. My Sim, yeah, the Sims is buggier than honestly, the Sims is buggier than Paralyze currently is in early access . That's insane. Yuck Hey, there's a bunch of stuff on Steam happening, Steam Next Fest. I think it's going through like the twenty second, I believe, with a bunch of amazing demos. Like the crazy thing is, you know, everybody fights at hell to go to summer game fest and the playdays and everything and then it's like, oh it turns out like a lot of the big games that were there, the people were doing previews of it's just on Steam Next Vest, right? When I heard that the Shinobi demo was like available immediately after and I know that the people who went to SGF got to play like a slightly different demo. On Mushi, but Oni Mushin at Chinobi. Yeah, too many ninches. Yeah, but it was totally, it was like, guys, don't go to LA Sit in your house and just wait. Yeah , you can have a huge chunk of the SGF experience just by sitting through all these steamed access demos. When I mentioned covering this on the show, Jacob, you're like, Sprawl Zero, you gotta play Sprawls, is that number one for you? It's hard to say I actually just played the blood dungeon demo this morning , which was, I know everyone who went to SGF was really hot on that and that is very fun and reduced and that's the one from the what is the sword fighting game? Nidhog ? Nidhog. It's a very like fun, kind of ugly in a charming way platformer vampire survivors like , but sprawl zero is fun because we have been talking for a long time about like first indie games. They looked like, you know, they were pixel art. And now they kind of, you know, for a while, they've looked like PS one . And Sprawl Zero is the first kind of indie game I've played that it's like, this is an Xbox era game. Xbox where one? Where Xbox No, you not the Xbox one then the original Xbox Yeah, where it is like it's a first person shooter very much in the style of kind of a halo or perhap half slight ones ? Yeah, it's a it's a like kind of narrative focused , but not it's a gameplay focus, but it does spends a long time setting up how badass you are as a character who's like a guy in an armor suit who can shoot stuff and then you just go blast your way through this big kind of future but rundown city and you're slowing down time . Your bullets are magnetizing to enemies. You can tell Kinesis things in the environment, you can put up a shield to block bullets and then throw all the bullets back at everyone. It's kind of like all of those original Xbox games, they all had one mechanic. And what if we just put them all in the same game? Is kind of what this feels like? Yeah, it is ridiculous. I was thinking of you, Sarah while playing it it because's like, yeah, it looks like half life, feels a little bit like half life in some ways. Except you have things called gravity gloves on. And it's basically just like, do you remember that gun or sorry the fist that you get at the end of the Reson Evil seven DLC that we played . Oh yeah, where it's just like it turns everybody just into like bloody mist when you punch them. You basically have that from the beginning of this demo. I've just run over these gravity gloves just good and everyone's just exploding in front of you. It's so satisfying. It's so funny that it's like in every other kind of first person shooter, it's like, look, you have a melee attack. It's kind of a last resort. It's not as strong as your weapons. You don't want to use it. And this is like you have a melee attack. It's slow. It will turn everything in front of you into mist. Yes. Yeah. It seems really cool. There's not a release yet yet for it, but it's from Kual Lee is the publisher who also did Town to City, which we're big fans of. And Luna Abyss, which we enjoyed quite a bit, and there's the unfortunate news that an entire studio was just shut down after that game's launch, which is brutal. Yeah, that sucks. It sucks, but that's a good one. Sprawl zero you can check out . And then Jacob, I coerced you to play over the hill , the little car game that I was very curious about because I'm just curious because the pitch is very much like, hey , you're driving this little car trying to get across these environments. I'm like, is this going to appeal for Jacob? Is it baby steps for cars ? You know, easy mode baby steps, I suppose with cars? It wasn't quite I could I think it's more of a, you know, like certainly at the demo it was, very relaxing. I didn't part of playing the game probably is learning how to, you know, like what control you have over your vehicle. Right. I wasn't like, oh my gosh, it's so fun to move this jeep around this environment in, you know, the thirty minutes or so that I played of it . But it is a very pretty, you know, it's kind of like, hey, if you just wish that there was like a version of Fire Watch that you could just kind of like hang out in and drive around , I like that aspect. It's very much like, you know, driving a jeep through a national park, but not destroying protect ed wildlife. Right. I don't know if this makes it like a dad game or not, but it's weird to geek out about like, oh boy, a winch. Like, dude excited about the idea of like attaching a winch to stuff and slowly pulling your car out of mud, but yeah, in a very aesthetically pleasing way. I'm still excited about overhead. It's basically like I was looking forward to the game and it just dabbled with the demo to be like, is this good? Okay, all right. I can look forward to the one point zero release when this thing eventually comes out. It looks like it has multiplayer. Yes, that's kind of the big thing. Yeah. Yeah, you won't believe the message that I sent to Ben last night and then him just completely rejecting. Let me guess what was it? Will you play this game with me? Jake's good, the news is I wasn't sitting on a couch smoking weed watching YouTube videos. I got a lot of work to do over here, man. I'm sorry. I'm playing it every night. No time to make for your friends who want to play the games with them that they recommended for you. Make a podcast better. Cherish your friends . Cherish them, man. Okay, but I have to make like this video for my kids' birthday and it's going up on Thursday and so I'm scrambling to do that. That video is going up for your Sunday. No, I make a little video for him every year. Oh, that's a clock. if he doesn't get that video, he's gonna go into a rage and quick. It's like the timing on these edits is off. He's gonna know might not be for him, but it's nice on his birthday, you know, that morning for like my wife and I and the kiddos to like watch this all together so my wife's gonna fight as a video editor you're like and for my kids' birthday they, each get one fan video. Like is it not just fancam of your child's year that they've been growing? It's basically that. Yeah, yeah, don't tell. I'm on one. Oh, okay. Okay, but this is my birthday. It's basically every travel log is that for your service. Yeah, that's true. That's true. He's got a I'm assuming you left this other game that you wrote down for last because you knew that it would be the biggest hit. Ooh, did you like your overload? Oh, yeah, that's your overload. I saw Jeff Grubb post about it and I was like, okay, is like a high score chasing grubby type of thing? Let me check it out. What did you think of sensory overload, Jacob? It was God. I was upstairs. I was like, you know, the music is p ounding, I'm screaming. And Auntie was like, What are you doing? And she, I was like, It's kind of like in an eighties movie if they showed a kid playing a future video game. Yeah That's what it feels like. I mean, this looks like Roblox. Oh, it's probably technically. You could literally play this on Roblox for free. Don't tell us what it feels what it feels like to me is actually like those crazy geometry dash levels literally literally the whole gameplay is you're just moving the mouse and it's just like don't hit the walls . And then every time I would scream and it would be like, What happened? I'd be like, I hit a wall. And you just do that forty times, but eventually you get through level, but it is just like it's completely hypnotic. The music is good . And it's the kind of thing where I had to stop playing because I was like, this is going to f up my sleep so bad if I keep playing this because it'll just you'll close your eyes and you'll get like Tetris affected. You'll just keep seeing Yeah, it feels so good to play with the mouse though just for like just razor precision for trying to get by these things. Maybe you can sc rape the edge and get too close there as you're trying to do this. It kind of has like it put me in a similar mindset as like a my gosh, why am I forgetting my favorite mobile game? Super hexagon? Super hexagon. Yeah, it gives me that same vibe, but especially playing on a PC. It's like I finished playing such a overload and I was like, it is messed up how my brain is feeling right now. But it's just making me feel barfy. I'm on my other screen It's crazy to play a game where you literally don't move your eyes from the exact center of the screen. Like it's like giving you like score pop ups and there's like a meter on top to be like, how close are you to the end of the level? It's like, I will never look at that. My eyes are exactly in the center of my screen for the entire time. Yeah, the good news is it comes out in a month. It's coming out july twentieth from Pancake Studios for Sensory Orange. I don't know if I can play this. You should try Barrow just feel alive a little bit. Just puke it's better. When you play it, you're controlling it. It's like it looks, you know, it looks car sick to watch someone else play it, but yeah, I mean, you're used to barfing. Yeah, barfing. Because she wow . I'll barf. Great. You know what doesn't make me barf syrup or ski? What? Pocahontas County? Pocahontas County, Iowa, go down there, puke free territory . Also the internet in general, specifically my favorite spot on the internet, which is patreon. com slash minimax with two ends. That's how this whole thing exists. Everybody can go there and unlock a benefit that is right for you, find something sustainable for you. You can drop down a tier if you need to, drop up a tier if you want to, unlock more benefits, completely up to you. We greatly appreciate it. This is how literally this whole thing operates. And special shout out of course to your dear friends over at IM eight bit. They want every body to know about the Scott Pilgrim EX game, the physical versions of that, which are IM eight bit exclusives on Nintendo Switch two and PS five, then also the vinyl soundtrack for Scott Pilgrim EX with music by Animata Gucci, of course. So cool stuff. Of course, everything I does and touches is cool because they are very good at what they do. Not only do they put on the whole summer game fest event, but they also just choose great partners. They have amazing item s in their store . And you can go there and use the promo code return of the six . Return of the six , no space for ten percent off of everything under one hundred dollars and you should go support IBIT with that promo code return to the sixth because each and every week they ship out a prize to the Mimax community whoever submits the best question over there on Patreon wins a prize physically mailed right to their house. This is something IBIT does every week. They've been doing it for years and years and years. So thank them by using that promo code . This week, whoever's the best question submitted on Patreon wins Lowfi Gravity Falls vinyl. Hey, listen to this gravity falls. My other gravity falls from them right here behind me. Ooh, but imagine it feels like really chill and cool , even more chill and cool. So here we go. Look alive, everybody. You ready for questions? Ready again? Great. Lambdance writes in, they say, I was thinking just the other day, I have no idea how the IP situation with the backrooms works. And I thought I'd tossed a question at the only podcast I know with a copyright lawyer on it. So the concept of the backrooms began as an anonymous internet creation with many works inspired by it. But now that Caine Parson has adapted his backroom's webseries into a feature film, do he and the studio A twenty four have some sort of copyright claim on the backrooms ? No, because it's's that an idea, right? Like if you were to remake their film with identical shots, then you had would have an issue. If you were to film in a similar libinal space and just be like, isn't this scary in this liminal space? You don't have a claim, they don't have a claim, they don't own the feeling of being uncomfy in limital spaces . But what do they do they own any version of the word back rooms if they make a movie called Backrooms? No, they likely trademarked it. So they would only trademark backrooms in relation to films . So you couldn't use that name if they trademarked it. But you could make a movie called Liminal Space and have it have the same vibe and stuff and it's like whatever. Absolutely. Yeah , how close could you get to the aesthetic? Because like he didn't invent the aesthetic. It's from the Fortune picture. You can't do or ideas or any of those things. Sorry, Sir. Did you know that the original backroom's photo is actually from Oshkosh, Wisconsin? It's in the Wow mean, it's a fun fact about Wisconsin. We have your camera in the back room. Yeah, so Jeffrey Dahmer Slenderman and then hey, I live near those girls. Yeah. And they're all back . They're in the backyard . Yeah, the slenderman stabbings. I was like, oh no, that's why that's where I'm from. Home . So do you think they're having weird territorial rights? Because it's weird for this idea of kind of just an internet, everything concept now to be an extremely profitable movie. It's got to be weird . I guess so, but it's still like nothing about that is conflictory with just like basic copyright of I could go film in a liminal space as long as I don't copy substantially copy their plot or their characters or the exact setting and mimic the shots and do, you know, those types would be the things like more direct copying . And then if you took a substantial portion of their ideas and just made a movie . But what if what if I was like I'm in a space that looks like a you know office with a bunch of yellow walls and fluorescent lighting because I'm adapting the original photo. Like is that kosher or you know, or what they because it seems like their aesthetic is kind of the aesthetic of the original. Obviously, it's a photo blown out to a world so they're you know, they're doing a lot with it, but like it seems like it would be hard to make something that was inspired by the original photo that was not in some way quite similar to the imagery that they put in the movie. If you had a direct one copy of like a set dressing that's just the photo , you might have some issues, but even then, I would say that's transformative enough because now it's in a different medium. Like the copyright of the photo would still be owned by the person who took the photo . The copyright of the film, like the shot in that room that looks similar, you could probably argue either way that there's no copyright issues even though it looks identical to the photo versus that's the photo just transformed into a different medium. Therefore it's copying. Like it's kind of subjective, but in that one specific use case, but it kind of think of it like there's a thousand slasher films. Like no one can ever be like oh no they own the right of a guy in a mask to hit you with a knife. Like it's that same kind of concept . Right. But this is like if there was like a fairy tale that a slasher came on Friday the thirteenth and then they made a movie called Friday the thirteenth . Could I make a different movie called Friday the thirteenth? Because it's based on that fairy tale, you know? It's like it's it's weird that if this happens a lot. I mean, it's like it's you know, public we all understand public domain when it's like Robinhood or whatever, but the fact that like we know exactly where the backroom's idea started, I think makes, it a just more interesting case. Yeah, it's drawing inspiration from the same origin point, but you can also draw inspiration from the same origin point as long as your final product is different from their final product. I think is kind of the key thought there. Yeah. I thought it was interesting. Who is it? I'm trying to remember, oh, it's a Devolver, they're releasing a game called Dark Scrolls . And I was like, yeah, that's a bold move, you know? I feel like everybody's been so tight. I mean, I always think of like, you know, notch making that game called Skrulls that was then sued by Bethesda it'll be confusing people think it's Elder Skrulls. And now it's like, I just call it Dark Skulls and whatever. No one's going to care if they should be pissing off two giants . It is worth saying that there are a lot of backroom games on Steam most of which existed before the movie released. Right or was even being made weird. You still like this stuff, Hailey? What do you mean? Your entire likes passion, you still into it? You like backrooms? Okay. I like the backrooms. And I like copyright all. Yeah, great. Backrooms in a lawyer office. Now there's the fun zone. Got I work from home. Bold. Tony Soprano writes in Tony Wait, the username is Tony Soprano showing Chris Chan to his therapist , of course. They're at Instant Heyman, Max. June tenth, twenty eighteen , we all remember where we were, right? That was the date when Elders School six was announced. It was one day before I got married. Here are the major life events that have happened since. I started my career. I bought a house, worldwide pandemic. Had a kid who's five years old now. I got several promotions, had another kid, almost two years old now. I bought a new house. From a fresh college grad to a thirty year old dad, I've lived almost a third of my life since elders girl six was announced. Don't say that. Do you think they could have waited a bit longer to announce it? Yeah , probably . I guess it just depends how much you want that game. I'm not particularly like so I'm not haven't really thought about it too much. I thought it was just for shareholders. Like I thought it was like a please give us money. It felt kind of like desperate like they had to. I think it's I kind of maybe shareholders is a factor. I think it's also like hiring. It's just like, hey, I'm sick of like keeping this secret and let's just let the world know what we're working on and maybe a lake was coming soon. What are we working on? Like I feel like when they showed that trailer they opened up like a dock and it was just called Elder Scrolls question mark and it was emp likety and they were all right . Yeah, yeah, with the and then they just put the trailer out there. Like it was an empty empty nothing there. Who made the trailer? Someone wasn't the trailer. It wasn't it just you flying over the world? It was like mountains or something. Yeah. Who made the trailer? Who make trailers? I think they have you saying it was you. Like you're assuming that the player character is going to be flying around Damriel you leveled up the jumping stat in Moro I kind of like it just because it would be very annoying to have like had conversations for the past ten years to be like, do you think they're making the Elder Scrolls six? Yeah, it's like we all know that one's gonna come out , you know, maybe it would have been better in that trailer if they were like, I don't know, ten years from now, question mark . But like I do like that there is not a mystery of like are they gonna make one they are genuinely, I feel like they just lie. Rushing them, Sarah. They're working on. Now they're gonna now it's another elder Scrolls online trailer. Yum Yum yum meet your online slop and it's like, I don't want it. The Elder Skirl six has been out in elder Skirls online for years. I know what he knows is it is it like common knowledge and this is not from an insight thing but like it's just Hammerfell. I remember everyone was speculating about the region for a long time and I feel like there were teasers like Starfield. There was like there was a piece of rust on one of the spaceships in the trailer that was the shape of Hammerfell that people thought was like we des'reper soate , aren't we? We're so desperate for anything. I'm just trying to know if the Elder School community is like, well, of course we know exactly where it's going to be or if it's still like any ounce of a hot debate, you know, this many years later, I don't know. But the question for you guys is do you, think about what number in a series you like you won't get to play because you'll be dead of old age? Yeah . No because I'll be dead. Never gonna know but think of it now. Like right now I think I think I'll make it apparently it's the next elder Scrolls game. I think I'll make red dead four but not red dead five, you know, like that's that's sad. That's sad to think of. That's okay. That's sad to be like, that's where you're going to be. You're going to be eighty. They won't have made a new game. They'll just be making red dead four . And I'll eat it up in my old lady bed with my nurses that hold the controller for me. You'll eat it up just like your applesauce they're spooning into your frickin' house. I'll say put it on, put it on, and they'll go, Oh, girl again, and they just have to stand there while I get all my trophies. And do you have like pictures and frames next to your hospital bed? It's like John. I'm not going to have kids and I'm Arthur Morris. Women live longer than men, so I'll be by myself playing right deadfield. No, Haley, I will be right next to you in that hospice bed. No doubt. Yeah. That'll be other. Finally be together in a real Haley, speaking of the industry being on hospice , you had a post on Blue Sky about Unreal Engine six . So Epic has said something more about Unreal Engine Six and it was just like, hey, this time we're embedding more Gen AI into it. So the tools are going to be right handed. Escape. Welcome to Hell. What's your reading of that? What was your post? What were your thoughts from the copyright angle? It's gonna, I'm going to have to learn what's in this dead ass for my job. I'm going to have to learn what's an unreal sex so I can contract draft around it, which is so annoying , so annoying. It's so essentially unreal , unreal wants to make Epic wants to make like the metaverse , right? But like it knows that that's a trigger word and everyone thinks that's funny. So not just calling it the verse. Just drop the meta and . But there's some parts of this that are actually kind of interesting. It's like it allows more portability between different games. They're saying, they're kind of using Fortnite as the tester baby, but essentially what they're just doing is like, hey , teach our LLM how to how to port things around things and they're trying to phrase it as like, isn't this the best thing in tools for you? Like it is interesting that you theoretically could have cosmetic items that when you make them, they're applicable to a bunch of different games at once. They're trying to be roblox, you guys. They're just trying to be roblox. That's what we're like to boil it down to the simplest thing. Because it's weird because that talking point is so weird because that was like the NFT argument that everyone's like, that's the best thing I've ever heard. And now it's just that argument, but NFTs is a buzzword, so they don't even use it anymore. So they just say like cosmetic port ability here. But this is actually like this is attainable. This is doable within the ecosystem of it all within the same engine and kind of work that they'd be made inverse is what they're calling it. Yeah. So they want everything to sort of like they announced it with like Rocket League will be on in the verse or whatever. And then they have this like Fortnite. It's like a it's almost kind of like a teach like an easier engine to learn in, but it's like FNF or something. It's like unreal engine in Fortnite is what it's called. And you essentially can make things using like Fortnite assets and make little games. It's just it's roblox, but with Fortnite assets. Yeah. But the issue I have with it is like, whatever, they can do that and people will either buy into it or not, like whatever . But they're implementing a few different AI things into unreal to essentially be like tools that how do they freight? Like to help you get through the busy work and get to the real creative stuff, but like that's such a dangerous way of framing it because what exactly is busy work, you know, and what is game development? Like who gets to decide what is the place where you can cut corners with generative AI and which is the place where real creative effort has to be expended. I don't think I trust corporations to be the ones that differentiate between those two things because I don't mind when AI is a tool and I don't think any of us mind when AI is a simple tool if you're in Photoshop and the background detector detects the background for you. Like on an ethical standpoint, yeah, that has energy consumption issues, but from a creative side point , no one's really mad about that because I'm making something, I'm extending creative effort and the tools simply helping me do that like a paintbrush or something. People don't mind that. So Unreal said , they showed I watched some of their presentation where they were showing off some of the tools and like some tools I didn't mind, like there was one tool that essentially while you're in the level editor, it allows you to be like barrel and it goes into your asset library and pulls out all the barrels for you to pick from and put them in the level. And it's like, oh well that's actually kind of nice, right? Because it 's able to look at all your assets, determine what is barrel and bring them up for you and put it in the level. That's a tool use of AI, and I don't mind that. What I don't like is if the assets that are in that library it's pulling from are being generated by the by the AI, right? That's what I don't like. And I don't think they're going to be really clear about which tools do the thing we don't like, which is generate assets, and then therefore there's no copyright and therefore unreal can't assign it to you and therefore you're violating your publishing agreement by using it versus the tools that are just like helping you skip over the step of just going to your storage bin. Like that's fine but and I just don't trust Big Corps to be clear about that. So I'm going to have to go in and learn this programming tool to figure out which tools are kosher, which ones aren't, and then advise my clients not to avoid the generative ones, I guess. So hang on, I'm curious about the devoiding the publishing rights. Can you speak more about like what exactly is not enforceable or not with the agreements by and large anymore? Copyright can't be assigned by AI because AI cannot own copyright when it makes something. It's a very established copyright doctrine that copyright can only exist in items that are made by human beings. And this is not something that's written down anywhere. There's not a legislative act that says copyright will be human made . Entry one in the copyright act. It's just something that's been decided thousands of times by a thousand different judges, and it's just like precedent at this point. So it's not like, you know, when they overturned Roe vade, it's like, there's one decision and now it's different. Like this is in a thousand different cases. It's just established doctrine at this point. Like humans make copyright and one of the first steps to determine whether copyright infringement existed is who made the item? Did they make it? Are they human? And then you move on. Like it's just established copyright law at this point. Yeah. Like how does that the new Tomb Raider game is using AI to help make it? Yeah . When do they not own it . Well, that's what's tough is I think there's going to have to be a lot of case law. So say for example there is an asset in the background of like a plank of wood and there was no creative effort by a human being to design that plank of wood asset, right? It's just a piece of wood in the ground. But they wrote, Hey, on real engine six, this is for that because that game didn't use this, but make me a plank of wood. It comes in and I put it in. And then if another game were to come along and just like take all my assets from my game that I quote unquote made but really it was just generative idea and put it in their game. I don't think there should be any argument that I can go after that game for copyright infringement because I didn't exert any creative effort to make these assets, therefore I don't own them, therefore someone else can use them . But what's tough is are there some assets? That's why a lot of studios like Larian came out was like, we're only doing it at the concept art phase . We're only doing it at this early phase and then humans make everything from then on. Like then you can arg ue even though AI was in a step of the creative process, it was still human beings that made the final RP, so therefore a human made it and therefore it's copyright . Well, I guess what and then maybe these are just the examples that you 've used, but it seems like mostly the use case is like asset reuse , which I would assume that the metaverse in the unreal engine would kind of be like you're all reusing assets anyway because that's what that's part of what we're offering you is you don't have to make your own plank of wood asset . You can ask us, we might make it with AI, but like when you know if you make a game with that and you didn't make the planks of wood, presumably you still own the right to the game and if other people use those same planks of woods in other games , it wouldn't take away like the money that you would make from that or am I what am I what am I not getting? You're not getting that if there is an argument that you don't own that plank of wood and therefore an element of your game hasn't been assigned or validly licensed. Like those are the keywords. Assignment is like you transfer ownership to somebody you're selling something to somebody. Licensing is I have the valid right to use something within the confines of whatever the license says. So before like Unreal has those asset packs, right? Like here's a thousand different pirate ship pieces that pay us five dollars and you can use whatever you want. That's fine because a human being historically in the past made all those assets and now I have a valid license to use them, I can, as long as I follow the license, put them in my game, I'm not violating a publishing agreement. But what every single publishing agreement I've ever read says is there is a section called Representations of Warranties. Most of them just have a straight up no AI section nowadays. I'd say seventy five percent of them say you will not use AI generate AI in the creation of any game assets. So straight up, don't do that. So using this would be a very clear breach of that. But there's also under the reps and warranties, which is promises you're making to the other party, like a representation that they that they're entering to this agreement believing is that you says that you have full ownership or the valid licenses to the IP in the game and all components of the game. So it's not just the game as a finished product, but every single piece within it . I could argue that if you use this, you don't have a valid license to every single piece of game intellectual property because even if it's just one plank of wood , technically Technically , that AI when it made it and there was no other human creative effort it didn't assign you or license you anything . Will anyone get mad and push back on it? Probably not. Like I don't think any like the LLM that made it is going to try to sue the person because they used it kind of way. But what the fallout of this is if you have a really bad faith publisher, like pitcher one that's losing tons of money and they just want out of the relationship but they can't, they might say, Oh, check if they used unreal. And then they'll go in and maybe they'll figure out that they used unreal. And like one tiny minuscule part of the game is created without any human effort. They can be like, you breached the agreement because it wasn't valid license. We're terminating by. Like that could be a theoretical argument for like a really bad faith actor and that's what I'm worried about for like clients. Yeah. Can I make a legal prediction with no legal knowledge ? I think I think there will be a court case where they decide that prompting is a creative act . I think they'll see thousands of cases about that already actually. And it hasn't. It depends on so there's it's called the modochrome of creativity, which is what the effort you put into creating something. And there's been cases that aren't that kind of feel similar but aren't even AI, which is one time a guy set up a camera that just took pictures at random times in a room and then one of them ended up being cool . And then somebody said, Well, you didn't have any modern creativity in the creation of that photo. You just set up an auto shutter. So technically you shouldn't own that IP . And so there's like case law like that that plays into it. So you would have to assess whether the tool did all the work or if there was a monochrome of human creativity that went to the creation of the product . Some people try to argue that the prompting of it is it. A lot of judicial cases are saying prompts aren't enough. There has to be an additional element to the creation of something outside of just prompting it. Yeah . Haile, are you a real lawyer or just like a video game lawyer? I'm just like a little sinky video game lawyer. I don't even know anything. You would be surpr soised how many people are like video game lawyers, huh? I don't think that's real. Some East Attorney fan, cool . Yeah, they just think I like Eastern Hailey, thanks for being an expert. Huan Wan writes in. They say hello and Max crew. In the recent news of the Xbox closures , not quite closures, it's ambiguous, right? Is the days of big companies funding smaller games with smaller budgets over ? Everyone in the industry is always championing games like Keeper, Godwar Suns of Sparta, or Hi Fi Rush, but these games don't sell. Suns of Sparta apparently only sold a little over two hundred thousand copies reportedly. While Kin Kiln and Keepers all time steam numbers from Double Fine were between one hundred and ninety and one hundred and ninety three. That's so sad. That's triple digits. It just doesn't feel like the mass audience wants small games from big publishers . I think it's interesting because yeah, I think it's an old drum that we like beating on this podcast. They're like, just let these big teams make smaller, weirder, less risky stuff. But if the message they get over over and and over again , you know, is that people aren't interested in this, and I don't know if it's that people aren't interested in that concept of like smaller games for big teams or it's just you're making these games that are relatively small from big publishers compete with the thousands and thousands of other games released every week on Steam. And so naturally your odds are very, very low that it'll break through. Yeah, counterpoint, those aren't small games. Yeah. Like that's , you know, I think I mean I have no idea what like Microsoft will do. I think that the safest bet if I had a billion dollars would be to give a bunch of different devs a hundred k because one of them might make Belachro . And if not , you know , then I'm not out that much money versus like, you know, I don't know what the team size on Sons of Sparta is, but like my guess is pretty big. My guess is bigger than most metroidvanias. And so like I think it's almost that they don't know how to make small games at the scale. It's hard to be a big team and suddenly make a small game because you need like work for however many employees work at your studio, right? There's just naturally going to be that much more kind of bureaucracy baked into the system and whatnot. But it's like I like that idea, right? Of like one hundred k to a bunch of different teams break it up that way. But even then, you know, if you just crunch the numbers just on steam balloon, right? It's like what your if you were just looking at it as objectively as you could, what are the odds of making your money back on steam ? What? five percent? I mean, I realistically, I don't know how low that we 've talked to won't name anyone, but it's like we've talked to people who are like, you know, if we sell three hundred thousand copies, then we can make another game. Right. You know, and so it's like if Sons of Sparta did that, then they could make another game. You know, but my guess is that that is not that game success quotient. And so also, yes, it is like, you know, I think your goal can't be and I will keep making more money forever , but like I'll keep being able to make games . Yeah. I think the sustainability model now in this age with such a saturated market is work for hire for other things until you have enough money to make the game you want to make and then making it on a bigger scale than ninety percent of what's on steam. You know, you just have to break through those sheer numbers. Look at the game awards when it opened up with look at how many games there are. Oh no! And made money. Yeah, like , I wasn't like, Whoopy. I was like well it's nice it's nice for the people that are just working on passion projects in their free time and Steam is such an approachable platform that they can launch on Steam and you know makes a little bit of money but they're not trying they don't have a team to support whatever. Like I think a lot of those games are those. If you scroll down far enough, there's like thousands and thousands of them. But for the ones that have like an established corporation and they're trying to make money and they have employees and stuff, I think I don't think launching a bunch of small g ames is the way forward anymore. You have to go do work for other companies, maybe not even in the game. You like design apps for a third party or something. If you're good at that, create art for this other thing until you have enough money saved up to do the game that you want to do. Yeah. I was trying to make a list and I'm curious if anybody has any comments about anything in general, just leave them in the YouTube channel, please. But like trying to think of those success stories of big publishers making a small game . You know what? My mind immediately went to geometry wars . Back in the day, I was like, oh, that's two thousand five. Maybe that's not the most relevant thing. And like, Ubisoft is cranking out a lot of smaller projects, you know, a they whole had era of the Ubi Art stuff, but like, I don't think any of those were really seen as like a wild success. Like just dance for Mubisoft is probably number one example of that, but it was like that was a budget game back in the day that has become a juggernaut. But even stuff like pentiment like is Pentiment probably didn't sell crazy well. We're not getting numbers like that, but that was more of a game pass thing it felt like too. Like they just wanted it on game pass because that's where I played it back then, yeah. Yeah, but like it won some awards is that just like mission accomplished? Is that kind of the best case scenario for what a big publisher making a quote unquote small game looks like these days? I don't trust them with the small games. I don't know. I just kind of wonder it ye'sah like, how much how much money does a you know, a like the thing about even if the team is small, then there are like managers and executives and whatever. And so it's just kind of like it just has to be so much more successful than exactly that same game made by someone who's not at a big publisher . Right, right ? Yeah, it's it's a wild world . You know, I'm obsessed with midnight murder party from PlayStation and the Starfox developers of Eveless Studios that came out last year that was a complete zero on everybody's radar. Just so many examples. How's that so cool? Oh yeah, just stop they just stopped talking. They were like, we never said that. We never released that game. Yep. Absolutely. Pretend it didn't exist. You could waterboard Herman Holstover Play Station, he would not admit to the publisher Good Murder Party and I don't recommend it. Tokyo Game Life , they write and they say Rodempers two came out a few days ago. Do you think it's gonna make the two ten s? It did Yeah. I watched your game. I've been playing it. Oh, but then I decided 'cause we'd go to a DB by Daily event. Pantoo How is that ? How's the sequel ? It's I like it. I don't know. It's it's interesting because the first chapter, the first half of the game, you're in the palace and you're like a lot more you're powerless and you're in the palace and I really like that dynam ic, right? Everyone was trying to kill you, you're stuck, you're young, you have no experience . And now you're outside the palace, you sort of escaped . And somehow like I've suddenly become a little bit of a badass . Like tell me why I'm like blocking these knife stabs with my bare hands like I'm some kind of like elite warrior. I'm like what I know that I went to a nunnery, right? So the end of the last game is you end up in a nunnery, but then I escape the nunnery and I'm like, somehow my power has really scaled and they're definitely angling it in the first half you had to sort of like play the two princes to stay alive . And now I'm like now I'm like, do we play the two princes to become emperors now and we just kill both of them? Like do we just use them as stepping stones with our power . So there's a lot more outside the palace stuff going on. So slightly deflated enjoyment ? No, I'm still enjoying it, but it's moving a lot faster. Like the pacing , I feel like we're just going ninety miles an hour and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, it felt a lot slower in the palace. And now it's like a little more actiony. I've been streaming it. Tune in dude. The best streams on the internet . I'm so sad of the Sarah Pizzorski Live despite sitting in rooms with you for a straight weekend . And more. Joey Smith writes in. They said Ace Combat reminds me. There's a lot of cool games about planes, cars , and spaceships, but there aren't that many cool games about boats. Joey, does the name Bloodwake mean nothing to you? Hydro Thunder Hydro Thunder You can cut wave race too, I think. But they say, how would you make a cool boat game? I think this is a good thing to think about. I do think boats are inherently kind of boring. Assassin's Creed four black flag? Yeah, ooh , yeah, isn't it spill b andone scenario? I would game the first quad a game . My dad has a boat and it's his favorite thing . Docking that boat with my father is the most scared I ever am in the history of the world because I know how to do it, but still something always goes awry and my father angry at me because the boat is going too far forward and we can't back it up quick enough and he's yelling at me and he's like hurry and I'm freaking out and I know all the knots but I still stumble a little bit because I missed the knot a little bit and you have to hop off the boat onto the dock and scamper forward as quick as you can on get a that. Like every time we go on the boat I'm thinking about when we have to dock later and my dad's gonna yell at me that's carbover at the time game of buying that. You have to make people believe they have the financial investment that a boat in real life is super star I'm with a boat type thing. Yeah, like a my summer covered with a boat and your money just drains forever. I saw a really interesting boat game. I don't remember the name of it, but it was an indie game and it looked like it had the PlayStation style graphics and you're in a speedboat and you were speeding around this like half sunken world, right? So I think the issue with boat games is there's like too much like empty open water and I'm not really interested in fish. Yep right,. But you were like you were going around this empty open world that was just like a a city but sunk in the water and you would have to stop at gas stations to gas up your boat and there were like sharks in the water but it looked really cool. I And was like yeah, if you, could play more boat games that were basically in destroyed apocalyptic cities and water, I feel like that would be cool. And I also you need to be able to get out of the boat. I hate to say this , but I need to be able to get out of the boat to at least talk to people. I don't know. Like dredge. I just need to get I need well in Ace comment they implied that you got out of the plane at some point, right? Right. Right. Like there are counts where you're not in the plane You also think that I do also think the problem is that water is inherently flat . Yeah, like right. You need I think you would need I am thinking of sword of the sea , you know, like you need to be able to incorporate like interesting three dimensional movement because it is just flat water is inherently kind of flat. But let me tell you exactly what it is. This ties into my pitch for a cool boat game. Because I think the most fun thing you can do on a boat or a jet ski is like tubing . But specifically it's pulling people on a jet ski that are tubing because it feels like such a game of trying to do that math of like, okay, I can make my own waves and then how do I bring them over to the spot? And I whip them out to the side. They'll have the speed to go off that wave there. Oh, the wave' nots cresting at how I thought it would be. It is such like a mind game of trying to like optimize them getting airborne and launch from that tube. And so if there's some sort of like two V one asymmetrical game, one person's driving a jet ski or a boat and they're trying to coordinate water physics, which are always fun to watch in a game and then it is very uneven and the other two people are trying to somehow stay on the tube like it's fricking peak or something. Like there's there's some game there, right? That's got be liket aa little mini game and like a split fiction styled game. Yeah, you're right. Point in it now. Yeah, it probably already is about it. The older I get, the more I hate tubing and my boundaries being not at all respected while I hate it. I go slow, you know what? They go like this if you want to slow down. How come every time I do this they go on they do ten donuts? Bad people this is fair . Bad people you gotta push it like ten percent over what they want. No, see, I hate that. I hate that as soon as someone's on a tube, they're like, consent doesn't matter anymore. It's so weird. And it always no matter if they're the nicest person in the world, they do donuts on me and I fall off there myself . I don't like it. I haven't been tubing since I was like twelve. And anytime I'm near a boat, I'm like, can we go tubing? And the people are like, yeah, we love tubing and then it just doesn't happen for some reason. It's a hassle. Gotta blow it up and stuff Which also is I'm counting when we were going to go to Ben's Lakehouse last year and then the disaster trip happened or whatever but hand foot out the universe is trying to deny me tubing dud,e , you're going tubing at some point with me. Watch from the shore and Haley is going to be right there with you and she's going to be going slow down. You'll be saying speed up and I'll have to speed up. I will have no choice Christian Yemeniz writes in and they say hello, hello. Do you ever get mildly annoyed when things aren't formatted like text properly or consistently? I love this Christian. Thank you to say. For example, on PlayStation in your game library, this is how the Resident Evil series is l isted . I thought maybe it was all lowercase for the originals and uppercase for the remakes, but not at all. And this is a tough thing to convey over a podcast, but it is the most inconsistent thing. So Resident Evil won the remake, lower caps,, normal resinval zero, lower, resin evil two, normal, resin evalu two, all caps. Resin evil three nemesis, lowercase, resinval three remake, all caps. Then it gets confusing. Residable four, lowercase, resinval four remake, lowercase. Resident equal five all caps no space between the L and the five, resident evil six lowercase, resident evil seven, that's all capitalized, biohazard is lowercase. Residal requium, resident evil is capitalized, and then requiem is lowercase. It is just like the biggest disaster of formatting that you could possibly imagine. I do want to shout out the Fast and The Furious franchise because they have like the ongoing bit of never naming them the same way . And it's kind of like the it's like the biggest franchise that I can think of that's just kind of doing a bit for no reason because it's like can you can you name them I can't fast . So it's really like an intentional bit of they will always shake up. I mean it would be it's almost impossible to imagine that it's not intentional because it's the first one is called the fast and the furious. Right. Second, too fast, too furious. Third one fast and furious, Tokyo Drift. Fourth one is just called fast and furious. Fifth one, fast five , second , fast amper s fandur,ious six , seventh one, furious seven, eighth one, the fate of the furious . Right. The ninth one, just F nine. And then the tenth one is fast X. Like there's literally no consistency is the style and I think it's so funny. That's fun. I like that too. Yeah . Did you have one of my hands? I'm unusual. Yeah, well mine's more from like contract drafting when like I hate all my agreements are so pretty and they're really nice and the formatting's all right. If you check under the hood, everything's perfect. And like everything's paragraph it's perfect. And then I get sent these agreements and they're so trash and they're all so ungly. And so I'll like I can't build for that, but my the little grummy's in my brain, I turn off my bill my billable hour tracker and I make them pretty before I send them back because it pisses me off so much. Like they'll have like everything isn't adjusted, justified, everything and like the numbering isn't consolidated so that it only goes in one alt tab and then two if it's the next tier down layer. So I'll fix that. And then there's always like, you know, if you highlight everything and then check the paragraph, it'll be like one point five spacing instead of just one spacing. So I'll fix that. And ends up always being an extra forty minutes to work, but I cannot do it. And I don't think anyone ever notices, but I feel weird if I send an agreement back and I haven't made it pretty yet. Yeah, just send all your contracts over to us. We'll admire them aesthetically. We're not going to read them, but we'll just agree. Just redact everything except for the spacing. Redactions are beautiful . Let's see. Louise writes in how, gen uinely relieved has been that the Leo Wynn show is over and how will this shape future choices? I don't think you're the villain for that, even though I went on the show and I screamed I hate you all now is comments yelling, stop the Leoin show over and over. It was yeah, this is a new show plus option whereas Leo and Kelsey talked to each other based on a name that Sarah suggested on Blue Sky and it became Leo Win is my Frankenstein's monster. That's it. Call me Dr. Frankenstein because I made the Leo Yup. And it basically went for seven weeks straight. It broke the records. There's a little hiccup where we're gonna take a pause for a week, you know, because the scheduling didn't work out it is the new plus I don't know streak champion it is it yeah last this week Oh yeah it lasts two weeks and tell Haley what you had to do to get Leo into the idea was Leo Winshow pivots to video and they were going to play a game. They're going to play the killer. It became a game Play five got fourth in the poll, which is crazy. And we have worth the evil genius of just making it a gameplay stream, which I would prefer to do more of by the way, just to kill it. Right. I think we all would. We all play games. Flay games. Yeah, it's an interesting lesson. Interesting tension every once in point, every once in a while in the Midwest community people being like, who's voting for these? Just let it die. And it's like, I think they were under the impression that I was miserable, that Leo and Kelsey were miserable. I think the tone, correct me if I'm wrong, was more just like Leo Kelsey like kind of flattered and kind of just like , I mean it's easy, sure, you know, whatever, it'll be alright . Yeah, so I don't think I was gritting my teeth, but in terms of relief, maybe like a six out of ten, just really feeling like it's nice to have more variety on the channel channel, I guess. And so after seven weeks, if I just spread the work around on all of Gelsi and Leo every Tuesday for a little bit. Right, right. And so it's like, oh, it'll be nice to shake it up. And so there are lessons, you know, of just like, don't just be transparent when you can't make that happen in a week. Instead of just putting up a bunch of stock footage, that's not fun for anybody. That ain't fun for anybody whatsoever . And so stand by that. Okay. Great . Thank you. There's also lessons, I think maybe if we're just like, it's funny to me, Hailey, of like , are we overthinking things at times? Am I overthinking this podcast? All the time. Am I forcing you to, I know? Am I forcing you to overthink bonus pod? Because that's so saw so many comments that are like, we just we just like hearing you guys talk. That's why Leo Winshow wins like bonus pod is right there. That's a piece. I know. I yelled at that and the win show Macs on the discord. I'm like, Hello, I'm over here. Like, would it be nice if there was a show where they the chores just got to chit chat? I was like, am I am I nothing to you? Hello God . Yeah, so next up there to bonus pod is just gonna be called bonus pod, the Leo Win Show spinoff. I'm gonna Leo Win Show is dead. Hazah. Yeah. Just take the Leo Winname, but it's still bonus pod and there's no Leo Winnie. Okay, yeah. So naughty, let's do that. Smart smart, naughty, but fun. Do you think about it Hailey or you're like, oh maybe we should have more bonus pods that are just like no game plan. Let's just go in for an hour and just like make it the chit chat hour. I said not a lot . That's what it is, Ben. What do you think happens? Well, sometimes maybe perhaps me more than most people are like, Oh, what's the angle? What's the headline? You know, maybe you can talk about summer game festival, you know, that type of thing. I'm just I like to go in with loose concepts of ideas, but you know, I did one with Jacob where we just talked about browser games and it was just like we didn't we didn't make we just it was browser games fun. Here's some of my favorite that still feels like that's that's a theme. That's a topic, you know? Like that's not I agree B.en if, Blank Jack had a Patreon episode that was just called Griffin David and Ben Calk for an hour , you would you would listen to that immediately, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's just the middle of every commentary track that they do, I feel like where they kind of just don't want to . And I'm like, you guys don't need the movie. Right, right . No. So yes, of course there's lessons and everything, but charge shot one. So we're going to be doing a special one off mysterious thing that I'll communicate more about the schedule. It might be a week later and there might be a poll next week for New Show Plus and yeah, there'll be a fun surprise for that NewsHlus poll. But as always, it's very fun . Rest in peace, Leo in Show. Leo and Kelsey, you're fine. Ryan and Gogo writes and they say, How do they max? What was your favorite book as a child? I'm talking two to five years old. I have a two year old and I'm taking recommendations . I spy books. Oh, I spy books. Oh great pick, great pick. Because you don't even have need to read. Yeah, but it still feels like you're reading. That is the beauty of ISPI I mean, my favorite book to get read to me, I think was Chica Chicka Boom Boom. I was gonna say that . I was just wondering is there gonna be enough room? That's the best. Yeah. Enough. Oh, what's this? This looks cute. You don't know Chicken Chicka Boom boom ? No. Oh, it's a killer. Chick the chicken boom boom. It's a book that will get stuck in your head somehow. It's very it's kind of like it's kind of like a slam poem or like a bad rap. Yeah . This was the first game, the first game. This first book that popped into my head when I was like books I remember when I was two. Yeah. I remember like I remember like six to eight my books, but like two yep. And the rainbow fish. I don't know. Yeah, okay there's a good chainbow fish. I also liked the book Stella Luna she was a little bad. Oh sure. Stella Luna was a good one. Yeah. There's a it's fun to still have some of my old books like to my parents house and stuff so I get to put them out and read these again. And one of them is called Sylvester The Magic Pebble , which maybe it's a deep cut. I don't know, but I was like, Oh, I love this book as a kid. I was reading it my kid. I'm like, wait, I have no memory of how this story actually happened. I loved this book too. Do you know it? It is dark and weird and it's just a story of like parents read this. Okay, it is like parents that are, you know, donkeys that are searching for their kid who's been turned into a rock and it's just like it is just seventy percent of it is the parents just like mourning the loss of their kid. It is delightfully dark . Oh, Nat Nat the Nentucka cat, if I'm not mistaken, he loses all his nine lives while walking around Nantucket in different ways. Oh that's he dies a bunch of times. That's kind of dark. That's a page turner. That's a page turner . I mean, now it's been tainted by the Zachary Levi movie, but Harold and the Purple Crayon . Really good. I only read the novelization of the film for that one. Yeah . There's one thing, please. The Who's the Where the Wild Things are Maury Sendak has my favorite anecdote of anything ever where he had a there he also had a book called Like In the Night Kitchen where there's just this little boy running around naked in a big kitchen the whole time. Hilarious . But there was like a kid who his mom helped write to Maurice Sendak of like, Hey, I like your book so much. And Maurice Sendak was like, Well, I loved it. And so I drew something and I sent it back to him . And the mom responded with like, hey, he loved your picture so much, he ate it He got an original illustration from the guy who wrote where the wild things are. And he's like, yeah, I'm good . That's perfect. Yeah. Another favorite of mine I've been reading a lot lately is who wants an old Teddy bear? Which I feel like I guess the goal of any of these books is just like teach them empathy. And the basic is some kid who gets a teddy bear and he hates it. And then he has a nightmare and he goes to a teddy bear world and all the teddy bears are like who wants a stupid little boy? It's very good. I read the Bernstein Bears books because they were shaped different than all the other books. They were square. And I remember that tickled my brain somehow. There's a book that I got from the library which is like excellent and it's called Zebra and Yak , the backwards alphabet book. I feel like if people have kids around me, I'll just give this as a gift because it's a very good premise where the idea is like A is missing and so they have to read the alphabet backwards and all the alphabet letters. Every year kid gets pulled aside into like a drunk driving assessment is gonna be so good to mail it.. Yeah So it's like it's the zebra and Yak being like, we missed our cue. And so they're going backwards to the alphabet to be like, hey, wake up, wake up X. It's sticker turn and everyone's like, What are the other letters? And it's just like fun, silly all these letters being confused basically like, I'm not on stage yet. I'm waiting for D to go first. It's very good. Y'all read Arthur, like Arthur, the Arthur of the Ardvark, where the first book is about like, Hey, man, it's okay that you've got like a big weird freaky nose. And then when they make the animated series, they're like, no, he's normal. He's just got a smooth head. Don't make him look too weird. He's beautiful. He's beautiful. Sent the prophet writes and says a huge kudos to Leo Vader on the deepest dive for zero seven First Light. I only bought first light at release because of the deepest dive. For me and assumed some others, it directly led to another sale. Deepest dive sell games . I don't want to make this gross, but tell the publishers they don't send us codes at a time because I'm like, We're doing the deepest stuff. What more can we possibly be doing? This is such a thoughtful discussion on Dev seven first light and truly a treat to have Leo's hipman expertise throughout the entire thing. It captures a unique in time moment of what this game is like and it'll be fun to look back on in ten years. Thanks again . Yeah, never felt safer in a deepest dive than with the shield of Leo Vader's patriotism for IO . No one can ever come in and say you actually didn't talk about everything in the entire world of this scam like yeah, we dig it was on it . A hundred percent of it. Sit down before you fall down, comment or yeah double seven. The second discussion is live now. And now final one's gonna be airing next week as well. There's a little bit of a break just for a breather but for SGF and stuff. So hopefully folks can jump back in and finish off seven and in good spirits. Pork bun powered layup of a finale to say, hey, I've really enjoyed the travels you all have done. One thing I love to ask travelers is if you had to pick one, do you prefer doing a ridiculously planned well travelled route or a loose wandering off the beaten path? Also, rest in peace Sarah Mussel Bar Pushup video. That's right, it's lost forever 'cause Haley didn't get the recording and will never see it . Okay, interesting. I'll be quiet. Maybe you should stay tuned for the Kyoto Travel Lug for the Miracle of All Miracles to have happened to Haley and the Internet . But yeah, I think you guys were talking before the journey about how you had it all so well mapped out and stuff. Did that strategy work out okay? I'm curious to hear your perspective, Sarah, because I feel like I'm very much more on the grid and I feel like you were nice and let me be on the grid, but are you more loosey goosey? prefer to have at least like a plan . Like I like to go in like knowing where I want to eat, like having options basically. And then I kind of like to mix and match them based on how I'm feeling about the day. Right. So I like having all these places, like things I want to do, things that I could potentially do and the day of you kind of slot things in. Yeah. I like that too. I like having maybe like one big reservation every couple days. It's like, yeah, well Thursday's the night where we go to that restaurant that you have to call ahead two months in advance, but today we have nothing. Like that feels good too because you can kind of spread it out a little bit, but I will say I do have a bit of the brainworm of I need to look at the map and know everything where everything is and plan ahead like crazy . My favorite thing if you can swing it is like you got everything planned out and then like one of your days you're like, well, we're gonna be hanging out with someone who lives here. And so it's just gonna be it's it's in their court, you know, show me your favorite thing because that's always it's like, you know, it was in Italy for a friend's wedding. And we have a friend in Italy. And we were like, Hey man, just show us like what do you do here? And he was like, let me show you the place where Wes Anderson buys his shirts. Okay. And then we went over there and it's like I never would have found that on Google Maps. That's awesome. You just readed your entire wardrobe, little West Junior over there. I bought one Wes Anderson style shirt and I think it's very noticeable . Like if you see it, you're like, yeah, that's, you know, Luke Wilson would be wearing that Aspect Ratio's all wonky. All right, what do y'all like for Christ of the week? Hm . Backrooms IP. Backgrounds' IP or the Unreal Fund . The question is the unreal one. I hear you, but unfortunately, Sarah, the unreal one was me just bringing it up. So we don't want to give you a present. No, I have enough for IMA bit . All right, backgrounds IP . Yeah, yes. All right, there we go, lamb dance. You just got a big prize from IM eight pit. Now it's time for something we call get a little this. Who wants to go first? Who's got a pump dinger? Get a little this . I got in there. How do you, Jacob? I saw your mouth open, I snuck in . Get a little this . When Sarah and I were at the Montreal event, there was a cosplay contest. And Sarah and I sat we got there early after twenty minutes early and we watched the whole cosplay contest and it was so fun . It's just dead by Daily People. A lot of Legions, I won't lie, like half of it is Legion cosplayers because Legions very easy to cosplay. Some of those were absolutely insane. There's one, we actually talked to them. They're in our vlog, but it was a guy dressed up as the own i in a specific minotaur skin. And this thing is like movie quality. It had special effects, it had light up things when he opened the thing's mouth, it roared the exact same audio sound effect from the game . And then there was multiple survivors that accompanied him essentially as props that would run around him pretending to be scared. And then when he altered or whatever, they would just put on a bot thing on their head and pretend to be bots and then run away like a stupid bot and it was like a whole show. It was the best. There was one person who was just the hex devour hope, which is the hexes in the games were just purple like little triangles and it came out in a purple suit and their face was just face painted to look like that hex and the crowd exploded with like yeah like everyone just loved it. It's very heartwarming and good. I'll find a link for it because they stream the whole thing. Get a load of this . friend Ours , people make games over on YouTube , do a lot of great work. A lot of that great work is pretty tough stories , you know, union busting , you know, who's this human rights abusing company, blah, blah blah . This week they released a video which has maybe maybe they're AB testing a title. Currently I see it as he won't stop building a map to an imaginary place that is the most beautiful video. I mean like truly a video that you will tear up at the end of if you are not a monster , which is a man who has been creating a map of a place that he made up for essentially his entire life , like he's he's like seventy years old and he's been doing it for fifty years or whatever . But they go there, including Game Informers Alexand er, who filmed the thing for them , and they help him this entire map and he has not done that for fourteen years and it takes them like a group of twenty people. It takes them like four days because it's thousands and thousands of tiles. But the real like juice of the video is he's talking about like how he makes it and he has this deck of cards that he created himself and every day he pulls a card and the card will tell him what kind of map to draw including like create a new dimension . And then there's this thing where he's actually like destroying huge portions of the map that he has previous ly created because of something called The Void, which is this white space that then he's like papering over with like notes people that he's received over his light it is the most staggeringly beautiful project. You're like everyone else has not achieved the thing that this man has achieved . So people make games his newest video. It's just amazing. Links below for all this stuff. Here's an easy one. Get a little this . Does Emmanardi know this? And am I a big dumb guy ? Did you wake me up? Did you rub my lamp? It's okay. Getting a big shipment of stuff filled with p acking peanuts and at that moment of like, oh what's it? You can't recycle packing peanuts, right? Let me look up at what you do with these. And then the internet recommends. Put them in water. You put them in water and they disappear. Does everybody know this about packing peanuts? I fear they do, yeah. Jacob, did you know this, my son? No. Aha. Thank you. Also, is that why you're supposed to you're supposed to dump a million pounds of microplastics into the water supplies. Looks like you do that. It was confusing how much they disappeared. I have never seen something so remarkable in my life. From my experience, I think the green ones are very good to the point that they recommend you dissolve it and they can use it for like plant food. And it's like some companies use like really eco friendly ones that plant stuff in them and stuff, yeah. Jeez. All right, let me know in the comments dumb guy or smart guy. Did everyone know this or is this coming knowledge? Please let me know. Get a load of this. There is a team competing in a CS two competition in Cologne , Team Spirit and they lost their head coach due to illness and then they couldn't get a backup coach due to visa issues . So they decided to put in as their coach a frog plushy named Jab Jabbitch, which I guess translates to Tod son excellent in Russian. Excellent. He's a little frog plushy. And they were like, what are and people are like asking what their strategies are and their strategy is one Rush B and two Don,k go kill. I guess Donk is like the best player on their team. So that's kind of the strategies they've been falling back on. But the thing is like this little this little toad, this little like plushy, they give them. I didn't realize this, but they give stats to play ers under coaches for like how much the players win under coaches. You kind of get a ratio. The players are all hitting like their highest ratios under this frog coach . Like they are doing so well under this frog coach , he has his own like official esports like I don't know what it's called, like a profile, an HLTV profile, which I guess is like a big deal to have as an official coach . And I guess the plushy, which was just plush ay they got out of the store has like sold out and you can't get it anymore . That's also terrifying. So yeah. So but they're apparently like still in contact with their other head coach . And they do have said recently that they do miss having a coach , but they did go viral because like jab jabbits was like showing up in interviews. Like people were interviewing they're like, how do you think team spirit is doing? Like what do you think they're what's your strategy for the next game? Yeah, you know, Hailey, this is just the turtle from Nathan for you. This is just like the shop everywhere. The turtle back of that. True . Links below for this fun stuff. Tokyo Game Life in the community discord where they share get a little this is all day every day. They shared a post from Mario Broth blog saying in nineteen ninety six, Nintendo was seemingly very fond of a single particular stock photo of the sky so that it ended up on the cartridge artwork of three different games released in that year. Mario sixty four, Mario Kart sixty four, and Pilot Wing sixty four , same stock photo of clouds for different parts in the background, which is fun to see. It's all part of the same thing. Why mess with a good thing? That's exactly it. That is it for this episode of Min Max Show. Thanks so much. If you're new, thanks for being here. You can always subscribe, stick around, check out the podcast version, or if you're listening on the podcast version, check out the video version, find the one that's right for you as with all things. We have exciting things happening all day every day. Chicago. People of Chicago, we're hosting a community meetup, specifically Leo Vader, you know, star of the Leo Winshow , and then Janet Garcia. They're going to be in Chicago for a minute spotlight coming up . And so they're hosting a community meet up on Tuesday july fourteenth at off color brewing tap room. It's technically called the mouse trap is the name of the tap room. So from eight to ten PM Tuesday, july fourteenth. If you're in the Chicago area, come out, say hi, bring a friend. You don't need to be a patreon supporter to come out. There's more info on the Patreon though. We'll be sharing more on social as well. So Chicago people come on out and say hello. Otherwise, Doc Light ning, the YouTube cut went live this week where we just drank champagne and watched two hours of documentaries made by community and watched the cruise nuke, have you seen the welcome to Midmax gift Haley? That's just the cruise nift. No, somebody made a new welcome Midnight Gift. It's so good. Yeah, again, we hype it up a lot. I sincerely think your best cenasear scio for a lovely time is just sit back with a big bay of popcorn and just watch that Dock Lightning series of Duck Lights. It's my favorite thing . We do. So good. It is just rapid fire humanity in a way that's like it's too It's too much to absorb in one lifetime, but just cram it into two and a half hours. You'll be set. So thanks for everyone who contributed short documentaries from the community. They were amazing. Thank you so much. Bonus pod this week sucked because frickin' Haley wasn't there , but I guest hosted and we had Yeph and Yubetcha and Kelsey and Isaiah so they have Isaiah on there and we went over more SGF stuff. We didn't really just like talk about what we wanted to talk about. We had a strict mission of what we were hitting and that was like all the other interesting SGF previews we talked about like hands on with alien isolation two, strange of the Heaven. Isaiah tries to get us into magic sp.re Heads the good words so it's a fun episode of Bonus Pod. You can unlock it to the five dollars tier. Otherwise, you have deepest seven. That is up and a bunch of other stuff on the horizon, which is going to be fun. So we appreciate a lot going on right now. I know. It's a busy time. Travel log a city so if you're at the backstage pass here, you're eating good . All right, that's so much everybody. We'll be back next week for a whole new episode of the Min Max Show. Until then, be good everyone, let's go