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  • ABTS-418: Humanoid Androids Next Year!

    In this episode of ABTS, Doug and Bren discuss the games they’ve been playing, Doug tells about his limited experience so far with Mario Golf Super Rush, plus we hear about Elon Musk’s plans for household humanoid androids in 2022!

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    Doug Coleman: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Almost Better Than Silence. I'm your host Doug Coleman, and I'm here today with the other co host, Brendan McCullough. How's it going, Bren?

    Brendan McCullough: I started in a TTRPG. It's like four now.

    Doug Coleman: No way.

    Brendan McCullough: It's too many. But it's addicting, apparently.

    Doug Coleman: Are you DMing again?

    Brendan McCullough: No, this one's different. It's a buddy of mine who we actually were doing a DND campaign before the pandemic and then most of us fell off because everyone hated it, doing it online. And he's like, I want to do it again, but I'm not crazy about DND. It's a little too mechanical for me. It's just kind of unnecessarily complicated. So he found this one called Orbital Blues, which is a more narrative heavy. So DND, like everyone knows it's got combat, you got like, maps, you got grids, you got little tokens and stuff. And it's all mechanical. Like, I can move this many spaces on, turn in and do this. A lot of mechanical features to Ttrbg. Orbital Blues is very much more narrative of, like, you're building the story. It's all about the story. So it's pretty loose mechanics wise in theory. Easy to learn, but there are some weird mechanics for it. But it's effectively a sad cowboy in space game.

    Doug Coleman: I was going to say. Is this cowboy beebop?

    Brendan McCullough: Basically, yes. You play characters there's like, the space frontier, like you're playing as an outlaw that's, you know, you don't really have a choice in that. And then you build your story based on, like, how you got there, this and that. You get nicknames and then there's like 40 nicknames you can choose from. So you pick which one you are of the crew, like the Face, the arm, the money, this guy, the fixer, the kid, and all these different stuff. And yeah, it's kind of cool. From what I could tell you, you basically only use two dies, like 2D sixes or regular six sided die. And that kind of is like, for most stuff, and you have different stats and stuff, but they're very minimal, so it's easier to follow. And it's really more about just collectively telling the story with the group of people you're playing with rather than like, we're going into treasure, we're fighting a dragon and we're killing God. It's not that big. It's more of like the weird thing is the sad part is built in.

    Doug Coleman: That'S a mechanic and being a space outlaw is too.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. So that's kind of just the world and setting and what your characters are, so you just fit in with that. But a mechanic is you have health like you would in any other game, but then you have blues, which are stuff you keep track of. And anytime you encounter one of your blues or like the sad scenario from your backstory you've made up or it gives you a bunch of examples you can pick from some of those. So like family issues or like work related issues or like vices, like if you're a drug addict or an alcoholic or this or that. When you encounter one of them, the DM starts playing or the game master starts playing music. We haven't done it yet with session zeros tomorrow, so we're still figuring shit out. Okay, but from what I can tell, music is played throughout the whole session. And when one of your blues comes up, one of your sad things, your character's sad about one of your songs comes on. So it'll just like, automatically the game master will automatically play one of your songs. And that's kind of a hint to you of like, is your time to shine. Like, let's get sad and mopey in your spotlight and you have to roll to see if you can overcome the blues. And if you do, you get a point for your blues, which you can use for other things to do, like certain abilities and skills. And if you don't roll high enough, you don't get a point. It's basically deciding, like, you're getting sad. Are you going to power through it and use that power to gain an advantage later on, or are you going to get sad and you're going to succumb to that and have a depressive episode and do nothing for this period?

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: So it's kind of interesting that that's a built in game mechanic of like yes. It's not just thematically sad speeds cowboys, it's mechanically sad space cowboys, too.

    Doug Coleman: That's ridiculous.

    Brendan McCullough: You're going to be sad. So, yeah, we're making playlists and stuff for our own characters and figuring out what song is going to play when and stuff. It's interesting.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun. It adds a whole new twist or something. Like, I never would have thought of, like, I need to bring a playlist to my DND session tonight.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. So for me, DM and stuff, I just have ambient city, like, fantasy city music or like, noises for when we're playing. And then I have combat and that's pretty much it. But yes, some people have specific curated playlist for their own characters, or a DM will be really meticulous with the music that they're playing during a session.

    Doug Coleman: Okay, so you can't just troll them super hard with, like, K pop and just be like, yeah, I'm sad.

    Brendan McCullough: I don't know. Like I said, we haven't played it. But I give Leeway to the game master. I picked out my playlist of my songs. I gave it to him. I was like, you can pick and choose what does and doesn't fit thematically in this song.

    Doug Coleman: Okay.

    Brendan McCullough: I have rise against him there. He's like, nah, this is kind of too, like, punk metal, like aggressive. We want more sadder stuff. So I'll take that one out. I was like, fair enough.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. I understand they're going for the sad space vibes.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. So there's definitely a theme and a style that they're going for, like, hey.

    Doug Coleman: Never going to give you.

    Brendan McCullough: Maybe it's possible you can find some sad K pop. I'm sure it's out there, but yeah, you could do a lot of stuff. And it's interesting to see both depressive nature being sad and both the music being built into tabletop RPG system and stuff. It's kind of neat. So I'm looking forward to playing that. But God help me, that's just another week.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. Like you need more TT RPGs in your life.

    Brendan McCullough: It's four now.

    Doug Coleman: That is wild. No, that's a cool way to start this one off, that is. I like the interesting mechanics of it all. I know I've been going off with all the different card games and stuff. In Metazu, they have like this fourth wall mechanic where if you play certain terra cards or whatever, it affects the Beasties. So that being said, there's also like this I think they have the next set coming out in October. It's called Nightfall, and a lot of those Beasties are only able to be contracted in the month of October. So I'm like, man, this game is just so bizarre. But it'll be interesting. Yeah, exactly. Super Halloween themes and people that are playing this game, if you're in the month of October, you can have a whole new deck or something. I don't know. Seems pretty exciting, but all right. This is more or less a video game podcast, though, not table top RPG stuff. I don't know, we've been delving into that a lot recently. Yeah, it's a game podcast. We talk about games. Right. But no, let's go around table. You know what I mean by that. Back and forth with the games we've been playing. Brent, have you been playing anything new? I actually have a new game to talk about, but I didn't get to play it very much yet.

    Brendan McCullough: Okay. I got some Isaac still just running through there because I don't know, it's my Zen game. It's just if I don't need to think it's good for multitasking. Still playing Knockout City? A bunch. Not as much as my one friend. My one friend is like the team captain, basically. Like, come on, guys, we got to keep training. You guys getting the runs and stuff. And me and my other buddy, yeah, we'll play as the group, but I don't think either me and my other friend will play ourselves much.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, that makes sense because it's just random and stuff.

    Brendan McCullough: And it's more fun when you have a team you could work with and friends to play with and stuff. Totally still dipping in, but that's definitely winding now for me. Same with Pokemon unit. I'm still playing it, but even the friends I played that with, I'm seeing like, oh, so and so was last online three days ago, so it was last online a week ago and stuff. They're both still fun, but they're both still the same thing. Yeah, there hasn't been anything too new to really shake stuff up. Pokemon Unite for me, will definitely be more interesting once there's a new map because I've said it before the default ranked matches and like regular casual matches and even some of the quick matches are all the same map. And then there's three maps for the quick matches. One of them is the same as all the other maps, and then two of them are different, so those are fun, but it's basically a different mode of playstyle altogether. It's kind of a different game entirely. It feels like those quicker matches because it's less like, oh, we got to fight and defend our lane and more just get as many points as you can and dunk as many points as you can and that's it. If you happen to fight the enemy team while you're doing that, sure, but it's not worth your time to stall your team from gaining points by fighting the enemy team.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: It's better to just run a gun and grab points where you can. Those are fun, but I think yeah, once a new map comes out, that will really change it up a bit and probably grab my interest more. Still fun. They added Blissy, which is the evolved form of Chancy recently. Big support character does a little bit of damage, but mostly just healing and buffing the team. They're ally team members. So yeah, it's not a character you could really solo well with, but if you have an ally working with you in your land or something really beneficial because just a lot of heels nice, but yeah, Pokemon, it's still fun, but I think I'm hitting the wall of the pay to winners of using their items. That's right, because it's still a free game and that's still really the only pay to win element is the items people use. And sometimes it's hard to tell whether an item is doing it or whether the player is just better. So, for instance, when you score points in the game, you have to go to an area, hold down a button, and you score your points. The more points you have, the longer it is to hold down the button and score it. So it gives the enemies, the enemy team time to run in and interrupt you from doing that.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: One of the abilities is while you're scoring points, while you're holding down the button, you'll gain a shield. As long as that shield is still up, you can't be interrupted, but if they break through that shield, then it can be interrupted.

    Doug Coleman: Okay.

    Brendan McCullough: I'm seeing that item be used a lot more, so that way people can just run in with however many points they have, dunk it, and unless your whole team is there, you can't really break through that shield fast enough.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: So stuff like that is like that person is clearly using that item and if it's maxed out, it's pretty much impossible to break through. So in regards to that, I think I'm kind of hitting a stall point because the items you can level up, you start at level one and go to level 20 to maximize, and at level ten, it gets, like, a boost. I got all my items to level ten, but now I'm running out of currency or resources to level them up. Beyond that, the increase in prices to upgrade them is a big, steep incline to get them past level ten. So I think that's where the difference of, like, people who paid to upgrade those are really coming in clutch because they can go beyond level ten into, like, the teens and up to level 20. Everyone else is playing for free or not paying for it is kind of stalling at or around the ten mark. Yeah, but like I said, some items are very clear that they're being used and some aren't. Some are just, like, boost. Like, you get more health or you get more damage, and it's not super clear. So it's not ruining the game by any means. I wouldn't say it's like, yeah, this guy's paid to win. Fuck this guy. He bought a costume.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, but it gives, like, invisible advantages that you're unaware of, at least. I would almost prefer it's like, oh, that guy's got the power hat on. You know what I mean? It's, like, very obvious they're using this item.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. I mean, if they're wearing a cosmetic I got one free cosmetic outfit for my Venosaur. It just randomly gave it to me with a certain level I hit. So I think everyone gets one free outfit. But yeah, if you see a guy running around in a golden Mr. Mimes, like tuxedo, it's like, yeah, that guy's spend money on this game. Because all the cosmetic stuff you have to pay for, but it's because they don't do anything. I would be curious to see if there's a way, I think in the match, if you go to the character profile, you can see what items are using, but there's so much crap happening all the time. You would never waste time and a match doing that.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: So it'd be interesting if they had a wave indicating, like, oh, you can see the items the person is wearing on their Pokemon, like, they're carrying around those three items or something else like that.

    Doug Coleman: If they have a boost effect on them, they glow a little bit more than everyone else or something. It's just like, oh, okay, clearly they have an advantage.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. There's no clear indicator of like, there are some if you attack some Pokemon in the field, you get a boost, and it has, like, an orange or purple light circling your feet. Okay, so I think the purple one is like, a little defense buff, and then there's, like, one Pokemon where if you defeat them, you get a shield or you get, like, a temporary shield. You can see those. But items no, I don't think there's a real indicator of who's using what items until the end of the match when you look at them.

    Doug Coleman: Okay.

    Brendan McCullough: But it's also kind of tough. It's with MOBAs, you got the meta, like the most efficient tactic. Action. It's an abbreviation for something, but yeah. So if you go to items, you can pick up Pokemon and you can go to see what's the recommended item set for them. And it gives you recommended item set for healing or attacking or scoring points, whichever your Pokemon type is best at.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: And then it gives you four more recommendations on what the master ranked players are using.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, wow.

    Brendan McCullough: This is the number one Mr. Mine player in the world. He's using these items. This is the number one slow bro player in the world. She's using these items. It says it shows you what they're using so you can just copy them, which is great. It's very convenient, but I think most people are probably using that. So it does to give leeway to everyone's using the same items for the same Pokemon sort of thing.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: Not a lot of experimentation but still fun. But I kind of burning out on a little bit. But I'm keeping my eye on it to see what changes are making. Like I said, they've already added guardovar and Blissy and the game came out like a month ago or something. So they're doing pretty well, at least putting in new stuff. But yeah, some of them just feel real. Pikachu feels like Pikachu and Charles are just feel like the favorites. They're good in every game just because they're like the mascots. And it's just like whenever you're fighting one of them, it's just like, god damn it. All right, let's fucking go. A slog.

    Doug Coleman: Makes sense. Fingers crossed for that new map, though.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, I think that'll keep my interest at least a lot more because the game is different every time you played. Every match is different because it's different team members and all that stuff and different enemies. But you're just looking at the same map every single time. Just kind of visually gets dull.

    Doug Coleman: That makes sense.

    Brendan McCullough: So that'll shake it up. And I think it's on switch now. And I think it's going to be coming to mobile phones in September at some time. And there's going to be cross play. And I think that's going to get real messy because it's kind of tricky enough to play on the phone as it is or playing on the switch as it is. Playing it on the phone with less controls.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: One thing I noticed that's a real problem is when you're using some of your abilities to attack, you use the right joystick on the switch, the right joy con, and that will kind of direct where your attack is going. That is also tied to what enemy you're targeting. So if you're fighting a group of enemies and you want to target the weaker one instead of just feeding into the tank and just wasting your tax on the defense character, you can specifically target Pikachu instead of Snorlax, but you use the right joy, con joystick to do that as well.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: So with some moves, like Slow Bro, he has a surf move where he moves with the ability, so it's good for escaping. Like a big tidal wave comes and pushes him forward in the direction you're facing. And you can use that to help escape sometimes. And there's a few moves like that, but if you're running from somebody and you're directing it to the left and then there's also enemy teams attacking you, the JoyCon is going to read it as you're targeting the left character in your little wheel of enemy characters to target.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: Which is bad because there's an auto attack thing. So you're going to automatically attack enemies in your vicinity in your range. So if I'm holding the left JoyCon or the right JoyCon to the left trying to escape and it's locking on pikachu as soon as I let go of like the run as soon as I move my thumb to a different control. My character is automatically going to turn around to try to attack that pikachu instead of just doing the ability to get out of there.

    Doug Coleman: Interesting.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. There's a few times where I'm running away and then my character almost gets yanked back because I accidentally targeted character with the JoyCon that is to direct my abilities.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. I feel like that's something they're going to polish. I don't know. That's obviously not what they intended, but also that's kind of a hard problem to solve when yeah, I don't really.

    Brendan McCullough: Know of a good solution because the targeted thing is necessary.

    Doug Coleman: Right?

    Brendan McCullough: Because otherwise you're just going to be feeding into the tank and not doing any real damage instead of taking off a weaker one, like a support character. So it's needed, but I don't know if there's a great way to swap out like the ability joystick and the targeting joystick because the other joysticks being used for movement. So like, I don't know, it's kind of tough. Maybe the DPAD maybe do that. So, yeah, I don't have a good solution, but that's definitely a problem I've had where I died a few times because I got yanked back because my guy auto attacked the enemy as I.

    Doug Coleman: Was running away from that sucks.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. So still fun. We'll be interested to see what the updates have. I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more pay to win and at a certain point it's just like unless you're willing to spend money on it, you really can't compete. I wouldn't be surprised if we get there considering it's a free game. Like they got to make their money somewhere. Yeah, so we'll see. That's primarily what I've been playing I also recently got the game, Road 96.

    Doug Coleman: We talked about that, right?

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, it was shown off at E Three and we talked about a bit like with different trailers that came out. I was saying it looks like a good life is strange. I like, Life is strange. I like, the first life is strange. The rest I don't quite care for. I don't think they planned out fucking what's her name? Ashley?

    Doug Coleman: No. Fuck chloe. No, I know you're talking about Rachel. Rachel?

    Brendan McCullough: Rachel Amber? Yeah. I don't think they played out Rachel Amber. Well, they did it for the first game as like a sacrificial pawn and then by doing a freak because they're like, shit, we have to make a career. I'm like, why is everyone obsessed with this girl? She kind of sucks. She doesn't care. Anyway, I'm not here to bitch about life. The games I didn't play, that's fair. But yeah, Route 96 is after playing it, it's kind of more of a telltale game. Okay, it's Episodic, but it's not released in an Episodic format. It's not like, oh, you get the first episode here, you get the next episode in three months. It's all done, it's all out, it's done, it's finished game. But you play it. You play as teenagers trying to escape a country in political turmoil. And every time you do it, it's a different episode, it's a different teenager. You're playing in this sort of thing. So the first one I played as, I started off on some roadside in the desert, and there's like a big concert rave going on. And you find out it's a political fundraising party for this one guy who's running for re election of the country. And it's pretty much a party for his sponsors and stuff and the people who donated to his funds and stuff. And whenever you do something, you see like, oh, everything you do has consequences, or you see a poster of the Good and you can graffiti it and it's like, this will have an impact in the story. And it's like, okay, kind of teaching. You can't just run around doing chaos. Watch your ass.

    Doug Coleman: Well, you can, but you can.

    Brendan McCullough: But it's going to bite you in the ass.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: And right when you start the game, it's just like, oh, what do you feel like when you're on the road trip? Do you like listening to music? Do you like talking? Do you like driving in silence? If you were in a political heightened political situation within your country, what would you do? Like vote rebel? Like, nothing. Lean into the party, leaning to the system and stuff like that. So it asks you questions from the very beginning. That kind of sets up the tone for the rest of the game. Or I guess it sets up factors, but I haven't seen them yet. Is that clear cut?

    Doug Coleman: Okay.

    Brendan McCullough: But yeah, he just plays his character. You run around, you interact with stuff, and you're just trying to get to the border of your country and escape. Because it's very clear that the current president and who's likely going to win the election is kind of a pseudo dictator who's taking control of the country and is doing whatever he wants.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: There's rumors that teenagers that are caught trying to flee the border get arrested and are taken to the iron pits as kind of alluded to it. That yeah, it's a very politically heavy game, which I wasn't expecting. I don't mind that you couldn't tell that from the advertisement.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, sure, yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: So, yeah, I go to this rave sort of thing. I walk around. I don't have much money. They're like, oh, do you want to steal this guy's backpack? He's sleeping right here. It's like, no, I played enough telltale games to be like, no, there's going to be a consequence for this. I won't touch it.

    Doug Coleman: That'll be like real shit later.

    Brendan McCullough: It's like, you need money. It's like, yeah, but he's going to hunt me down with a gun or something later. I know enough to plan ahead. There was like a little arcade area where you can play the games, which are kind of neat.

    Doug Coleman: Yes. This is what caught my eye in the trailer. I'm like, man, the air hockey table.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, so you can play air hockey table against the guy who's just like working there. And then when you turn around, there's a bunch of arcade cabinets, like video games. The only video game you could play on the arc cabinet was Pong or Pong as they wrote it, which is also air hockey. It's just weird that the two games there were just both air hockey.

    Doug Coleman: That's funny. Three games.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. Kind of like, oh, weird. You didn't change it up at all. Okay. I'll say it's very clear that this is a small indie team. A lot of the models and physical assets of characters are reused very frequently to the point where I saw two women with the exact same bodies, like the exact same bodies and outfits in the same area, and the only thing different was their heads models.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: I saw some people complaining of like, oh, it really ruins the immersion in this. They got a small team here, man. I don't know how to make characters. I'm sure it's not easy. So it definitely is kind of a bit of a point against them. But it's like you will kind of see the same, like five people over and over again, recycled.

    Doug Coleman: That's fair. And at the end of the day, it's a $20 game, so they're not like, yeah, I think that's fine.

    Brendan McCullough: It's not AAAA studio.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: One thing that's kind of tough is it kind of moves like a PlayStation one sort of cut scene. So kind of like early Wretched and Clank with characters moving around and talking. They feel like kind of weird. Mannequins yeah, it's not polished. Like I said, you can tell it's a small indie team. They're definitely doing something neat here. I like the telltale style. I like that it's not telltale. Someone else is trying this. And they definitely do some interesting stuff with it. There's a lot of minigames. There's a lot of little things that you only do it once. There's a segment where you play music with, like, a trombone, and you have to match the notes with your mouse going up and down on a sliding scale and stuff. I was like, oh, that's kind of neat. I doubt I'll do that ever again. But another is you're assembling like a radio and getting the frequencies right and matching the hertz to power and stuff. So it's like a bunch of little things that are really neat. But yeah, for something that's a lot of dialogue and a lot of interactions with characters, they kind of just feel like loose early PC character, like mannequins, where it's like, oh, you're not I can't really tell what you're looking at right now. I assume you're talking to me, but it's hard to figure out what's happening right now.

    Doug Coleman: Right?

    Brendan McCullough: But, yeah, there's a lot of stuff of running around, interacting with characters, doing this and that, deciding a lot of conversation based. You got a stress meter for the taxi cab driver. You got to keep him calm or something will happen. So you try and do this. It's like, okay, that comes and down. It's like, I do this. That actually angered them more. And this and that. So it's pretty fun for the most part, pretty simple. There's not a lot to explore. There's little trinkets here and there. But it's very clear. Like, each setting, each scenario, each place you're at has one main thing, and then once you're done, you just move on to the next. Um, so it's deciding how you do it. Like, I want a lot of money. In one of the games, I had, like, $90. It was great. And like, all right, how are you going to get out of here? Are you going to hitchhike for free? Are you going to just walk along the road? Are you going to take the bus for $7? Are you going to take the taxi? Calling him for $1, taking the taxis $12.

    Doug Coleman: So, right.

    Brendan McCullough: Kind of clear of like, ah, I have to save my money for food and travel and all this stuff. I can't just burn it on the taxi right away. You got to piece it out. You'll progress further towards the border if you take a bus or a taxi.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, that makes sense.

    Brendan McCullough: Stuff like that. It's kind of tough in some parts because it's not always clear what the answer is. Skip right to the end of my scenario. I was walking around at the border trying to get over, and you hear of a few different ways to get across the border and. I had enough health and money where I was like, oh, I might be able to just physically climb the mountains, which is very taxing on your body, but I was a full health, so I would have enough to get through in theory.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: And then as I was walking around exploring, I found, like, a bunch of smugglers who were like, hey, we'll sneak you across the border. And immediately talked to the first lady just to see what her deal is. And she said, hey, I'm not doing it for free. What do you got? And it's like, I can give you money. I can give you this credit card I found of someone on the ground, or I could walk away. I was like, oh, maybe I can say, like, hey, I'll pay you with a credit card, and then we'll do that later that night, and I'll keep exploring. So I picked that one. I was like, I'll pay you with a credit card. She's like, Cool, I'll take that. Immediately cut to us trying to sneak over the board. I was like, no, I didn't explore to the rest of the camp. I wanted to see what the rest of my options were. So it wasn't clear that it was like, hey, this is we'll put rest to the next scene.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. I like when games are very obvious, where it's like, at this point, this is your last chance to save or something before moving on.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. So, like, with the hitchhiking, the taking a cab, taking a bus, or just walking on the road, in the first scenario, that was very clear. The closer you walked to the road, the more that icon lit up. And when you were close to it, it popped up with text being like, hey, you're about to go on the road. Are you sure you want to do this? Yeah, anytime. I was talking with a character that wasn't clear what would progress the story. And back to the woman that was smuggling me. I paid her with a credit card. She's like, Cool, we'll do that. Cut to us sneaking across the border. She's like, all right, I need my payment. I want to go pay her with the credit card. I didn't have the credit card anymore. It showed it in the choice option as a credit card, but it was red, and I didn't have it anymore.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, shit. So you lied to her?

    Brendan McCullough: No, because I had the credit card. I never used it for anything else, and as far as I know, I didn't get it stolen or lose it. If I did that, it wasn't clear.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, so that might have been glitch or something.

    Brendan McCullough: I'm not sure, because at one point, you do get kind of, like, kidnapped, sort of, or tied up by robbers, and they take your money, but then when you help them out, they give you your money back. So I might have lost it with them, but they gave me all the money back. So I don't know why they wouldn't have given me my credit card back.

    Doug Coleman: Well, I thought it was going to be one of those scenarios. It's like, yeah, here's this credit card I found. And then she's, like, tries to use it and it doesn't work.

    Brendan McCullough: It's like, that's what I thought. Because you just find it on the ground somewhere. You don't know whose it is, right? Yeah, cash. It's probably blank or out of service. Who knows? But I wasn't sure if I lost the credit card between those two, where I offered it and where I have to give it. So I was like, well, shit, I don't know if that was a glitch or not, or if that was like, yeah, you lost the card somewhere. That's part of the story. But either way, it wasn't made clear to me.

    Doug Coleman: Interesting.

    Brendan McCullough: So then when I did have the credit card, I had to pay it with the money I had. And I had a lot of money, but I didn't have enough because it's one of those things where like, all right, you have to pay me $50 up front. Cool. And then you get like halfway. She's like, all right, I need more money. It's like, all right, cool. And then you get to the very board. It's like, all right, I need, like 50 more dollars. You drink. Me drink. Like, oh, well. And they kind of fuck you over that way through, like, forced storytelling.

    Doug Coleman: Okay.

    Brendan McCullough: So it really kind of came to a crashing mess at the end when I was trying to cross the border because it forced me ahead into a new scenario in the story. I lost a credit card. But I wasn't sure if that's part of the story or not because I lost it. I had to spend all the money. But because I thought I was going to pay with the credit card, I spent money on other stuff, like food and, like, sleeping somewhere. So, like, they kind of screwed me over with that, with the miscommunication, because I don't have enough money for the guard. When I get to the guard post, he just calls other guards on me and gets me arrested. And up until this point, there's no real quick time events. It's not like, oh, you have to jump over this hurdle and dive under here and escape from the watchdogs in here and there. But when you're crossing the border because they panicked and they called the guards on me, it became quick time events. So I ran up to, like, the wall, and I was like, oh, you have a 16% chance of getting over this wall. And I'm like, I haven't had to do chances or probability really, until now.

    Doug Coleman: Right?

    Brendan McCullough: So I did it. And you get arrested and I get thrown in the iron pits. That's episode one. And I haven't started the next section yet. So I'm just like the last part of it really threw a lot of shit at me that wasn't in the game previously. And I don't know if that's because I avoided it, like, by my choices, or if that's just not an option in the game up to this point. Or if you're if it's episode one and you're supposed to get caught sort of thing, right? Because it's the first one, no matter what I did, I was going to get caught.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: So I'm not sure because like I said, it's a small indie game. It's entirely possible to just be buggy and glitchy and it just kind of bugged out at the end there. Or it wasn't well designed at the end. Or it's like, no, this is a narrative illusion of choice sort of thing, like a lot of telltale games do, where it's like, you do this or this, either way you're going to get the same result, but just a different way of getting there. It's still neat. It's still cool. You get a few cool character moments with some people, but it's all very small. What's the word I'm looking at? Venuets. Very small segments of like you go to a trailer park, you hang out this cool, like, punk girl, she's got a trombone. You have a little moment with her and then you move on. Don't think too much because you probably won't see those characters again. Or at least not as your character. If you play it again, you play as a different team, run away. It's weird for like one example is I keep seeing posters on like, if you find a stolen military equipment, make sure you call this number for a reward. I was like, cool, that's easy money. I see a cab driver who has that stolen military equipment. I was like, cool, now I just have to get to a phone, like a pay phone and call them because it's like 1996 and it's like fictional country phones. So I was like, cool, now that I know where the equipment is, I just have to call that number. Once I got into the cab, I never saw another Payphone ever again. So I wasn't sure if that was just my choices led me down that way or there was never actually a chance for it, or if I'm supposed to use that meta knowledge for the next character who doesn't know that the cab driver has that military equipment. But I do as the player so that I call the military on the cab driver next time I play. I'm not sure. Yeah, so it's definitely interesting. Like you said, it's $20, so it's not a huge loss if you're not thrilled about it. But I think you can get through the whole first episode within under 3 hours. And that's the refund policy for Steam. You have to play a game for less than 3 hours.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: So I would definitely say if you're curious about it or if it sounds like if you want, like, a telltale game experience, but not by telltale, definitely check it out. $20. You can play the first section in under 3 hours. If you don't like it after the first section, you can refund it, maybe. But it's an indie studio, so maybe don't.

    Doug Coleman: Don't exactly. I agree with that. It seems up my alley for sure. I'm interested. I'll probably get around to playing at one of these days, but I have a lot of games on my backlog.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, it's definitely neat. And if you like Life is Strange, you like these games. I have the choices. I have consequences later on. The story definitely up that alley. But yeah, keep very much in mind. It is a small indie team because it's not very well polished. It's kind of janky at times, but that's also a bit of a charm to it. So it's interesting. I'll keep playing it, but I can see some complaints about it. But overall, it's a neat idea. I want it to do well because I want to see what the studio can do with more time and funding and stuff because I think they're definitely onto something.

    Doug Coleman: Definitely.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah.

    Doug Coleman: That's exciting. Very cool. I'm glad you got around to playing that me. Unlike you, I'm still just doing all the same shit. Fall. Guys. Pokemon sword. You guys know the deal. But I did today pick up a copy of Mario Golf Super Rush. I've been meaning to do this for the longest time. $50. Did pick it up physically because I do just want to have this beautiful case. Mario looks so cute in his little golf clothes. God damn it. But yeah, this game looks so good. I didn't get around to playing it very much. I was starting off a tutorial and stuff and then fell asleep. So I was like, all right, I got to get some rest, and then I'll give this a go. I'm probably going to be streaming this a little bit later on the Twitch Channel, so if you're interested, stop in for that. But man, this game has so much to it. I remember the trailer was just, like, instantly selling me all the different game modes battle Golf, Speed golf for all this stuff and the different Mario cast of characters. I'm very much excited to get into this game and start playing it. I know the way it works, at least when you first start playing the game, is if you're trying to learn how to play the game, you can play as your me character in the whole Nintendo universe. But then if you're trying to play just, like, the regular game with friends and stuff, you can log in and do the various Mario characters. But yeah, this game looks so goddamn good. Yeah. Who the hell is that? Where did he come from? I don't even recognize him.

    Brendan McCullough: Super Mario World. Like, the SMS game. He's the last player, one that would charge you at the end of the level and you'd hop on his head. But he's got a helmet so you don't kill him. He just is super annoying. You kill he's an old school character.

    Doug Coleman: I was going to say that sounds old school. No wonder. I might have missed that one.

    Brendan McCullough: Of new ones because he's more of a side scrolling like enemy.

    Doug Coleman: But that's cool. They're representing even the older cast of characters and stuff. But yeah, I love me some golf games. I'm very much excited to diving further into this. I know for a while there I was really into everybody's golf. So I'm hoping this is going to be at least mechanically a little bit more easy to follow. I know this game boasts like you can do like spin shots and all these special moves. So I'm going to have to wrap my head around how to do that in this game versus everybody's golf. Because even that had its own little nuances and stuff.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, this is definitely a more complex Mario golf game than we've seen before. From what I've seen, you can put top spin and backspin on the ball. You can put like super backspin or super top spin. The difference is when you're going to putt, you hit like A to start the swing and then like A again to set your power. And then you'll swing it. See if they hit it twice. Yeah, this is that. You hit A to start the swing. If you hit A twice when you're going to set the power. If you hit A twice, that'll put top spin on it. If you hit A and then you hit B to set your power, that'll put backspin. If you hit B twice, that will do like a super backspin.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: So they're interesting ideas that are seen once you understand it's implemented pretty seamlessly. Easy enough to understand.

    Doug Coleman: Similarly, it's like with the spins, like you said, not like necessarily putting. You don't have to hit A twice, but when you're just like sending the ball flying, like for the initial shot, you do this twice. But that's the neat thing about the adding a spin to your ball is like you hit the initial A and it is like the power level. And then on the second time, once you hit it before Mario actually hits the ball with the club. If you hit on the left analog stick like a direction, it will then spin the ball in that direction. So there's a lot of fucking little you're going to have to get used to this game in order to really fine tune your shots and stuff. But again, they also have just like cool different modes and stuff. I'm excited to play with my wife multiplayer and everything. But yeah, this game looks super fun.

    Brendan McCullough: I know they took away the potting part. You still put, you still putt when you're on the green, but if you're within a yard of it or like a foot of it, something real short. They pretty much take away everything and it's just, like, hit a twice.

    Doug Coleman: Yes, there's a tap in option. Yes, definitely.

    Brendan McCullough: So I know some people were annoyed by that because it was really funny.

    Doug Coleman: Watching your I appreciate that. Honestly, why make you like that's the thing in everybody's golf, I would be like 2ft away or not even 2ft less than 2ft away from the hole. And it is just like, why can't I just tap this in? And then I'll accidentally do 100% on the power bar and it's like, what the hell? And it's just gone. It's like, oh, my God.

    Brendan McCullough: But yeah, I'm curious to see how you like the Speed golf and the Battle golf mode. Yes, because it seems with everyone I've seen playing it or streaming it or reviewing it, it's a real love it or hate it. You either love that mode or it's like this game is chaotic and it's stupid. It shouldn't exist in golf.

    Doug Coleman: Well, and that's why I like that they give you those options. Hopefully we'll probably just play like, the casual mode the most, but those will just be like, fun, like, spice it up options. But yeah, Mario fucking playing golf. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. The trailer sold me all those many months ago. So glad to get my hands on that. And yeah, if you're interested in seeing some of that gameplay, head over to our Twitch channel. I'll be playing a lot of that. I feel like this is going to be the fall guys replacement. Not necessarily, but it's going to be 50 50 fall guys. 50 50. Mario golf.

    Brendan McCullough: I don't know if you'll ever find a fall guys replacement.

    Doug Coleman: No, I don't either. It's just too good. And that's one thing. Okay, I will talk about fall guys replacement.

    Brendan McCullough: Here we go.

    Doug Coleman: It's this weekend only, so you probably already missed your chance at this, but I think the Devs even said if you missed your chance at this, we're going to bring it back for those people. There's like the special events event called fuck, I forget. It's something like the golden Glitzy. I don't know what glitzy even is. Apparently that's like slang for hot dog. Where did that come from?

    Brendan McCullough: I heard it's like a Washington DC sort of thing. I've been to Washington. I mean, I haven't lived down there. I haven't hung out down there. But I've never heard anyone call it a glitzy until I was out here on the West Coast and someone was like, oh yeah, back east they say this, do they? No, they do not know. What are you talking about?

    Doug Coleman: The fall guys devs thinks it's a good idea to make a golden hot dog outfit. And the only way you can achieve it is if you meet the certain criteria. So one of them is like, you have to win a main show, you have to win a Squad's duo show, you have to win a squad show. And there's like a bunch of other little dislike criteria. Things like, oh, get this many experience points, and if you cross all the dots, you get the golden hot dog. I went into this thinking I'll be able to do this right, and I haven't made much progress at all. So I'm either going to be streaming that tonight, really just grinding for the golden hot dog. But like the Dev said, don't lose sleep if you can't do it in time. They're going to bring this event back in the future, but I think it would be cool to see if I can't get it in time. I think I saw one of the fall guys streamers. I regularly watched they were streaming one and they named it like the Golden Glitzy Speed Run. So they were trying to get it as fast as possible.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. Devs, you can tell everyone you want to be like, hey, don't ruin your lives for this fucking video game. It's just a game. They'll still do it.

    Doug Coleman: People already have it instantly.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. Immediately. I saw a thing of Final Fantasy 14th is the biggest MMO of all time, apparently. I feel like I'm the last person I know on the internet who's not playing that game because I can't lose myself to an MMO. I know if I start, I'll just go in too deep and that's all I'll do. But for File Fantasy 14, they're like, oh, for our East Asian servers, we're going to do some downtime. We're going to get some data collection. We're going to be doing some like maintenance and this and that and stuff. Basically like trying to analyze all the data they've gotten, all the players, and see how to make it better and what's. Like the highest traffic times for servers and all that. And they did like a follow up tweet saying, we're not doing this for the North American servers because we already have too much goddamn data on all. You fucking basically saying everyone's playing so fucking much, they already have enough data. They don't have to shut it down to gather data. And it's just like, god, people really just live in that game.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I'm not looking for any MMOs myself, but no. New World is at least one of the ones that has my eye. But again, I'm not playing computers. Yeah. Oh, that too. Oh, man. Speaking which, I'm in the market for a new gaming PC. We'll see if I ever end up getting one before the show ends, but.

    Brendan McCullough: We'Ll see if you want. Mark helped me build my last computer and it worked pretty great. It was pretty high ends at the time. It was a lot of fucking problems though. I took my thing back to Microsoft like 20 different times, right?

    Doug Coleman: And that's the thing. I'm very much the I have money. Let me just buy it already pre built. But even in that, I was looking at certain reviews on Best Buy and people were like, I bought this $2,000 machine fresh out of the box that they built for me, and it doesn't work. Well, yeah, it makes me nervous that people that are building those for Best Buy don't fucking know what they're doing. And it's like, cool, let me put all these hardware pieces together that actually don't mesh.

    Brendan McCullough: I mean, it's the same thing with, like, a car. Like, you can get it more optimized and cheaper if you do it all yourself. But that requires, you know, what all that shit is if you don't know what it is. And yeah, I just bought my last one. It was like $2,000 or something. I just paid out. It's been working great. The only complaint I have is got that RGB light system that I can't turn off.

    Doug Coleman: I don't need so many of them. Just have that built in design. And I'm like, I don't care about that whatsoever. And in fact, if anything, almost all of the ones I've been looking at all have fan systems. And I'm like, I would love a liquid cooling because I just don't want it to sound like a goddamn jet engine.

    Brendan McCullough: I'll say depending on the system you get, depending on Peter, my computer has the fan system. It's quiet. It's so quiet.

    Doug Coleman: Okay, well, that's good.

    Brendan McCullough: Then again, I'm in a studio apartment, and I got the refrigerator blaring out next to me, so maybe I just can't hear the fans. There are some pre built computers that have liquid cooling, I'm sure, but they're definitely going to be much more expensive because of that. And you could definitely do it on your own. The benefit of having the pre built thing is a, you don't need to know how everything works and saves you time and stuff and all that energy. The main benefit for me is if there is ever a problem with this pre built computer, the specs are already there. I can just go to the page where I bought it and it has all the specs and go, these are the specs, as opposed to me keeping all the receipts and figuring out which every individual piece the computer is, because I don't remember any of those. So for like, the one me and Mark built, there was a problem with the cooling element on my computer, and the guy was like, oh, yeah, this uses, like, Prongs. This part of the machine hasn't used Prongs in years. It's just a really weird, outdated one. We might be able to get it to work, but it's a real crap shoot. I was like, fuck elements like that where individual stuff is more likely to go wrong, but it's easier to replace. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are like, never buy pre built, but fuck it, you have the money, you're paying for the effort, so go for it. It all has the information in one place. And if it doesn't work, it's someone else's fault.

    Doug Coleman: Exactly.

    Brendan McCullough: Return it. Get a new one. It's like the JoyCon drift. Yeah. It's broken. But I might lose the switch for a week while they're repairing it. But they're going to be repairing it for free because someone's fucked up on their end.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: As opposed to a PC you built. If you fuck up, that's on you.

    Doug Coleman: Totally.

    Brendan McCullough: It's a little more extra insurance.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. So, yeah, that's something on the horizon here. We'll see if that takes away that's also all I've really been playing these days. I do have to get more into Mario Golf, but let's see if there's anything going on in the show topics before wrapping this one up.

    Brendan McCullough: Anything going on you talked about before? I forget his name. The guy from Jesse Radio, the main character.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, beat.

    Brendan McCullough: Beat. He was announced to be in Super Monkey Ball. Banana Mania. The new super monkey ball game coming out.

    Doug Coleman: Yes.

    Brendan McCullough: Apparently they introduced a new character. Apparently this is now Super Smash Brothers because they just have a weird cameo character.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. Wait, what?

    Brendan McCullough: So they introduce Kiriu from Yakuza.

    Doug Coleman: No way. I'm looking at the picture right now. What the hell?

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, because he's a Yakuza member and he got a big head. He's in like a suit. And it's just really funny seeing a cheebe Kiryu and just a little plastic ball, like rolling around. It's funny.

    Doug Coleman: Pissed off looking. That's awesome.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. I only played yakuza zero. I don't think that's a franchise I'm going to fall into and play all of them. But with Yakuza Zero is like the origin point for all of them. And then Yakuza Kawami are kind of remasters of like one, two, and I think three is now.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: So if you want to get in Yakuza, it's the best time to because they're remastering all the old ones and apparently they're all tied together. But yeah, it's funny seeing Yakiru in it because he's a very good natured person, despite being Yakuza, but he's just a solemn, quiet man. But then Yakuza is also silly, where you can do karaoke and RC racing and you're doing all these weird little minigames. So it's also appropriate for Kiryu. But it's all Sega, too. So there's all Sega characters, but it's just funny to see.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, absolutely. I love it. I'm glad. Super monkey balls is like, fuck it. We're going to have fun with this.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, why not? It's a game about little monkeys rolling around on the track.

    Doug Coleman: Fantastic. Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: Doing us. What else is there? Skyrim. They're fucking doing it again.

    Doug Coleman: Fuck. Why?

    Brendan McCullough: Xbox series X and S are getting Skyrim ports with fishing. You can fish in Skyrim now.

    Doug Coleman: I don't care. Actually, I'm the guy that's all about fishing minigames in any game. I'm so excited. They've literally broken us. I think there was one of these memes where it's like a very common meme format, where it's like these women fighting. And in the background there's like this man, like smoking a bong or whatever. And the text over the women fighting was people being mad at rockstar for stretching Grand Theft Auto Five from PS Three to PS Five. And then it's like in the background is like, that dude smoking the bong. And it's like Bethesda planning skyrim for PS Seven. It's like, no shit. What the fuck? I hate Bethesda. Just fuck off already. They should have been working on the Elder Scrolls Six. I'm sure they claim they are, but that should have been something for PS Five, like a day one launch title to get everyone hyped up on the system. Or actually, no, Bethesda was bought by Xbox, so we know there's going to be no more PlayStation Elder Scrolls ever again. So fuck that whole noise at this point. It was honestly a meme five years ago and they're still doing it.

    Brendan McCullough: Hey, Doug, we played Scarring in high school.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, I know.

    Brendan McCullough: That was over a decade ago.

    Doug Coleman: That's disturbing.

    Brendan McCullough: I'm both on board with you because it's like, fucking really? Come on. It's like, yeah, what else are they going to do? But if it keeps making them money, why wouldn't they?

    Doug Coleman: I get easy money.

    Brendan McCullough: I understand why they're doing it. I'm more upset with the people who keep buying it because I've seen people be like, am I really going to buy Skyrim for a fifth time? I'm like, you shouldn't have bought Skyrim for a second time. You should buy the game once. Why do you buy it on every console in every generation? Why do you encourage this behavior from companies? Because they wouldn't do it if it didn't work.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: So it's going to work again. People are going to try and mod it again. And we're going to get a lot of video compilations of people just fishing in Skyrim because they're like, isn't this great? It's like, no, you paid $360 for the same game every two years. That's not good.

    Doug Coleman: No, stop it.

    Brendan McCullough: What else is going on? Good news. Probably just for me. I don't know anyone else who still keeps track of it. Adventure Time is getting a spin off series.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, wow.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, it's way after the series has already ended and they're still doing, like, miniseries on HBO. Max I think they have one more miniseries coming out. But yeah, they announced they're like, hey, remember that time we made Fiona and Cake the gender bent versions of Finn and Jake? Now that's getting a full series.

    Doug Coleman: Wow.

    Brendan McCullough: I'm aboard. I fucking love Adventure Time. I still love it. It's still one of the best shows I've ever seen, but anyone who wants more of that there you go.

    Doug Coleman: That's nice.

    Brendan McCullough: Pokemon did a big. Direct sort of thing. Big presentation, showing off all their new projects and stuff. So that's where some of the Pokemon Unite news came from, where they introduced Blissy and stuff. They got Pokemon Cafe remix coming out. It was like the Pokemon Cafe is like the mobile game they have which is really just moving around a bunch of little Pokemon Tokens around and matching them. It's like a Match Three, but you're not restricted to a grid. So it's like 1000% easier than Match Three games. So I don't know, it was kind of a weird thing, but I guess it's popular enough to remaster it. But the big things they were announcing were brilliant. Diamond and Shining Pearl. The Remasters for Pokemon. Diamond and Pearl. So they're showcasing that stuff a bit as well as Pokemon Legends name Archaeus. Yeah. The Jesus Pokemon. That is the creator of all the Pokemon universe that you can capture in a tiny ball. Yeah, but Pokemon Legends is like the ancient version of Pokemon where it's like ancient feudal Japan sort of era of Pokemon where you can play as Cinequil Rowlett or Oslotte as your starters from different generations. So they're showcasing that a lot because we haven't seen a ton about it yet so far. And they're showcasing gameplay. It's not just turn based battles. It's more of like Kingdom hearts, kind of like later final fantasies, open battles where you were actually fighting the Pokemon again in real time and not turn based. And some of the more agile Pokemon. It's like the Final Fantasy where you have the meter and when the meter builds up, that's what you can do in action. And some people's meters build up faster than others so they can get in multiple actions before slower characters. Yeah, so it looks like it's kind of going into that sort of combat style, which is a big branch from the rest of Pokemon. A big deviation from that, but it's neat. Some people are kind of complaining about the graphics of like, look at everything Breath of the Wild can do and then look at this game and it's kind of like sad in comparison. So I don't know. I don't know if they got the same technology. I don't know if Game Freak has the same resources or not. They're definitely making enough money, but who knows how much they're funneling back into the game productions of it. But they also showed off new variants because it's like ancient Japan sort of. They have different variants of Pokemon like they do with a lot of the recent Pokemon Games. So they got like a vault form of God. What's? The Deer pokemon. I know no one cares about this. Who's listening?

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. Shit.

    Brendan McCullough: Stantler. So everyone's favorite from Gen Two. That weird beaked. Deer as hell. But it's got like a new form where it's got bigger antlers and like a white coat and stuff. Hyceon, which is like the region HYCON bravery, which is like the America burn where it's like red, white, blue eagle. It's kind of funny thing to get a localized regional variation because it's just very Americanized. Hacion Growlith, who is just very fluffy and has taken the internet by storm. I see everyone to Rolling haseon Growlith because it's just a big old fluffy dog and I think it's going to evolve into like a lion dog or lion guardian sort of Growlith like those big Chinese lion dog statues we've seen or I think that'll be an arkanine, rather. Sorry, arkanine will be like that, so that'll be cool to see. And the one I mostly want to talk about was fucking Pokemon names, man. When did they get so hard to read? I can't even find a pronunciation on this thing. Bascolleon. Basco legion.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, that seems right.

    Brendan McCullough: Sure. Yeah, let's go with that. It's a fish from like Gen Seven that I didn't play, so we'll just go with that. It's basically just this big, like, barracuda looking asshole from Pokemon. The localized reason for this is it's like a it's like a spirit of the dead fish. Like the lore for it is like all the other fish in its school of fish died and empowered this one single fish with the power of like 100 dead fish or something. And it's like Chiron the fairy man between the world living and dead, but as a Pokemon. And it's like one of those like god, every time they got like a ghost Pokemon, they just make it super fucking weird. And this is a new one and it's fucking so weird. I love it. It's a cool design and it's really fitting for the setting, but just like the ingame lore reason for it.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, the background.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. Like there's one Pokemon where it's like a ghost tree sort of thing, and it's like, oh, this Pokemon is formed by children who get lost in the woods and die. And then there's spirits and Jesus Christ possess a nearby tree where its body was found. It's like, okay, cool. And as you captured in a tiny ball and enslaved it. Yeah, okay. It's just so weird.

    Doug Coleman: God damn it.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. I love ghost Pokemon. Lord. Because it's always so morbidous. I mean, how is it not morbid when it's a ghost? But it's just always funny to me. That is Pokemon Legions looks like a cool open world deviation that people were hoping for. It doesn't seem perfect. Seems like people stop playing complaints about it. But this might be an interesting way to see a new new line of Pokemon.

    Doug Coleman: James going, nice, exciting. And then I guess the last thing I'll end the episode on is Elon Musk says tesla will release humanoid robots next year. We need that. Yeah. And dude, the funny thing about it is that Tesla had to make a statement that these humanoid bots will only be five foot eight inches, weigh approximately £125. So that for anybody that's afraid of them can run away from it and most likely overpower it.

    Brendan McCullough: Five foot eight inches is about the average height of humans in the world. That's not small.

    Doug Coleman: I was going to say there's probably plenty of shorter people that probably still would be terrified of these things. And anybody buying this is just contributing to the robot uprising.

    Brendan McCullough: Well, he is also like, oh, we need to support universal basic income because labor jobs in the future will be outsourced to robots and like, automation like this. Hey, one of a good way to avoid outsourcing jobs to robots don't build the fucking robot.

    Doug Coleman: Exactly. And these things seem like the most needless things ever. It's like, why would you want one of these? It's like, oh, you know, to take the groceries from your car to the inside of your house. Or it might be able to tighten a nut or something with a wrench. It's like, cool, I could do that myself.

    Brendan McCullough: I think this is definitely more for industrial work rather than personal devsy. The robot made from the jetsons.

    Doug Coleman: I don't know. We'll see.

    Brendan McCullough: We'll see. I mean, who knows? It might be Tesla fucking you get an automated car that can drive itself. You can do that. You can purchase that yourself.

    Doug Coleman: It's a lot of the same technology, believe it or not. It's weird.

    Brendan McCullough: I do believe it, and I do not trust it.

    Doug Coleman: Elon yeah, exactly.

    Brendan McCullough: Sociopath. He's like the worst case like SALUTA we could have ever done. His dad made his fortune from running an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa. All Elon's doing is now taking the unethical element and just turning the workers into robots.

    Doug Coleman: But can you imagine at the beginning of this podcast saying to yourself, like, oh yeah, seven years later, down the road, we're going to have humanoid robots?

    Brendan McCullough: I mean, we're still seeing stuff. Mega man, 20 X of like, the super. It's the year 2020. We got flying cars, so we still see old media that does that. And just like, if anyone's seen the movie on Netflix, the Mitchells versus the Machines, hey, it's a very good movie. It's very entertaining, very colorful and funny. They look exactly like the robots from that movie.

    Doug Coleman: God damn it.

    Brendan McCullough: Take over the world. So it's not even a joke of like, ha ha. But what if it's like, no, it Will. I don't trust Elon Musk.

    Doug Coleman: I was going to say, has he seen a robot? I don't know. With Will Smith specifically?

    Brendan McCullough: I mean, is that the one you want to fair? There's some good moments, though. But either way, Elon Musk can't be trusted to name his own child Jesus.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. What the hell did he it's not even pronounceable anyway.

    Brendan McCullough: No, it's not.

    Doug Coleman: Let's wrap this one up in decent plugs. Thanks for listening, listener. Bren, where can our listeners find you on the Internet?

    Brendan McCullough: You can find me on Twitter. ABTS. Brandon I really don't use it much. Don't recommend it. Twitter sucks in general. But you can find me on another podcast for anime where we watch three episodes of an anime or a movie. Give it a recap, give our opinions on it. It's a good sample or platter of anime. If you want to see if you'd be interested, listen to the episode and then dig into the anime yourself. Or if you just want to hear shit all over an anime like we did with Future Diary, that shows garbage.

    Doug Coleman: Damn.

    Brendan McCullough: But it's like hot garbage where it's like, this is hilarious to watch it so bad.

    Doug Coleman: That's fair. Yeah. Laugh along with that listener. And if you like our show, give us a, like, follow subscribe refinable at all the places at Abt Silence, specifically Twitch TVT Silence, where you can find me. Streaming a lot of fall guys coming up, some Mario Golf, all that kind of stuff. And I have a record label. It's Missed Out Records.com, if you want to see what vinyl and cassettes are available for sale over there. And the band that does our intro in natural music is a band called Kind of All Right. Head over to Kind of All Right Bandcamp.com for more music from them. But that's going to do it for this week. Thanks so much for listening. See you guys next time. Bye.

  • ABTS-417: Sexy Knuckles

    In this episode of ABTS, Doug and Bren discuss the games they’ve been playing, Doug tells how he’s finally finished painting the basement with his wife, as well as the fact that Idris Elba will be voicing (a sexy) Knuckles in the sequel to the Sonic movie!

    Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/abts/9793ea5d-da28-4285-a9ef-59ac6799cba5

    This podcast is powered by Pinecast.


    Subscribe hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Almost Better Than Silence. I'm your host, Doug Coleman, and I'm here today with the other co host, Brendan McCullough. And I finally finished painting the basement. I don't know if that's the thing I should bring up on this show or not, but here's the game. That's what we're starting on. Goddamn cool characters. I've been talking about it enough on this podcast for, like, the past year or whatever. I'm such a lazy fuck, and it takes forever to just slowly section off parts of this basement and do ceilings and walls, but it's done. We had family over. They stayed in the guest room. So all in all, it's just been a giant we've finally accomplished this thing that's been weighing over us for so long. Maybe I can play games now. Well, you're still actively using the basement. That's where you stream from, right? Yes, my stream room is in the basement. Yeah. It wasn't just like a black room where it's like, oh, we can knock this out in the weekend. It's like, we got to like it's so much worse once there's shit inside the room. And what we've saved for last with the stairwell and the ceiling of the stairwell, it's just like, oh, my God. Approaching that. Luckily, I'm tall enough that I could do it, but it was still like, I'm on my tippy toes on stairs. It's like, God damn it. So that was not great. But hey, it's all done, and I can play video games for anybody new. I'm sorry. This is not about me painting my house. It was a very game podcast. Podcast? Yeah, the podcast that you guys tune in for, my Home Improvement. But no, we've had Mark home in the past. He's talked about home improvement before, right? Or no gardening. That's his whole stick. Hopefully we'll hear from him again in the future, but who knows? He's a parent. You know how it is. I'm in La. I can't afford a house ever. Poor brand. Are you going to stay there forever? You think I know what I'm doing next month? What do you mean? I'm going to stay here? Do I know what I ate for breakfast? No. I got a six month lease. That's as far as ahead as I'm planning ever in my life. That's fair. Yeah. What an insane question to ask you. But no. What have you been playing, Brent? Speaking of insane questions yeah, we got. To start off with the actual show now. Let's see. I kind of relapsed into Isaac for a hot minute just because I have something mindless to just jump into playing a lot of Knockout City. Still, new season, new stage, new rules. There's a new mode going on right now where it's like it's like random mode or something. I don't know what they're doing. There's a new stage and the premises, it's like a drive in movie theater and the stage is just a blank slate that changes depending on what movie it is. So there's like a bridge over a river with like, flower petals everywhere for like a rom.com. And then there's like a haunted mansion sort of looking one. And then there's like a pyramid. It's supposed to be like Indiana Jones, tomb Raider. So the stage changes during the match, okay? And I guess they really want to sell it to people and they really want people to play this new stage because the new mode is it's a randomized mode where every match you play is going to be a different game mode they've had so far. So either like a free for all, a permanent elimination, so when you get knocked out, you're out for the whole round. Three V. Three a two V. Two. It changes what game mode it is every match. Right? The caveat being they're always located at this movie theater stage, this new stage. Okay? So I don't get it. I don't get why it has to be that new stage if the whole mode is changing randomly, right? And especially because this new stage, it changes as the match goes on, but it's just one big cube area that changes, okay? And it's pretty small, like, compared to how some of the stages are. When the map is changing, everything goes down and it's just a big square, flat area. And I don't know if it's just because of that, because you can see the whole map at once or if it is actually much smaller than all the other maps in the game so far, but it just feels real small. It's not good for certain game modes. So I've talked about before knockouts, it's just very chaotic, very high speed, like high energy. You can get knocked out pretty easily. And, like, the fun of the game is you get knocked out, you come back in 5 seconds, you go again when it's the permanent elimination mode where you get knocked out and you're out into your whole team's out sort of mode that sucks when the stage is so small and you get just bombarded by whatever team state cluster together the most. Right? So some of the game modes really aren't beneficial for that stage. And it's weird that they make it all that state. It does it they're trying to sell you on a new product, but like, hey, why don't you buy the movie stage level? I play randomly. You go through the stages randomly already in game modes. So it's like, why are you trying to like, you're trying to sell us on this one? I can't choose which stage I go to. So why are you trying to force this one on us more? It's kind of weird. I don't get really what they're doing besides just trying to showcase a new thing more than everything else. And that's just part of the new season. Yeah, that's just like the new season, okay, that's like the default game mode instead of like a straight ball, which is just a three V three regular match. Like the default that's the new default is this randomized mode. Got you. And I was like, oh, this sucks. I'd rather just play a regular match. One of the oddball modes that are usually something weird, like free for all or something that's now become just default three V three. They just put it somewhere else. So it threw me off for a second. But like, yeah, so you can still play a regular match. You can still play like, ranked matches. You can still play like four V four or something weird. As well as this randomized mode, there's always three modes you can do. And they change it out, I think, every week. But this season, like this season of the ranked matches, they're really focusing on it because it's the first and latest update. But I don't know. I don't like the randomized mode because like I said, some of the matches just aren't really good. And if you go into a match being like, all right, we're going to do a free for all mode and it's randomized and you end up getting like the permanent elimination mode, you might not be ready for that and you might get knocked out immediately and be like, well, shit, all right, I guess I'm out. Right? So it kind of messes you up not knowing what mode you're really going into. But yeah, I'm still playing that with some friends. They have the weekly contracts and stuff. And now there's like a new seasonal thing. I don't know, there's a lot going on in Knockout City already. Games new. What level are you? My street rank is street rank. Damn. So street rank is just like the regular rank. Like you just play, you get ranked up. It really says nothing more than how much time you've played. Okay. Then there's the ranked matches of the league, which is like the competitive mode. So with that, I am sapphire. I just got the sapphire with some friends. So I said it before. You start out like, you start out like wood or whatever, like nothing. Then you have bronze, silver, gold, and then sapphire, emerald, ruby, and then diamonds or platinum maybe. Maybe both, I think. So I'm pretty much right in the middle of ranked leak matches. I'm like midway up the tier. Okay. And then as for the street rank, which is just like how much you've played, you get different levels and stuff, but it doesn't do anything. It doesn't match you. Based on that. I just got into silver. So every time you get to 100, it puts you up into the next rank. So you're like, you're nothing. You start out, you get to 100. Then you go into bronze, and then the level starts over again. So you go to 100 and bronze, you become silver go to 100, and Silver you go. Gold. Got you. And the street rank is really just nothing more than the amount of time you've played so far, I see. Yeah. It's still fun. You get different, like, cosmetic outfits and stuff. And you get style chips, which allow you to change the cosmetics that you have into four alternate, like, colors or skins or styles of them. So it's like, oh, I like this one outfit, but I don't like the color scheme of it. You can change it to, like, three other options with a style chip. That's cool. I got a lot of style chips. You only can wear one outfit at a time. So I'm just like I like this outfit. Why would I change it? And I'm just, like, overflowing with style chips because I'm not going to change the other outfits because I don't give a shit about the other outfits. I'm not going to change the overall outfits because I'm never going to wear the overall outfit. So I'm not going to just waste style chips on those. So that's a weird thing I've noticed of I got a lot of, like, the ingame currency things because I never use it on anything else than the one I already have in, like right. That's a weird, spoiled sort of thing of, like, nice spoiled, but need this. It's like all the coupons you get in the mail. It's like, I don't even go to the store right. I don't need these coupons. I get flooded with them. Yeah, I love the supermarket. It's like, oh, we're trying to be green. You should bring your own bag so we can cut down on plastic waste of bags. I said, Cool, here's a way to cut down on waste and be environmentally friendly. Stop sending me paper coupons every goddamn day in the mail that I don't use. Ralph's trader Joe's. Kmart. So you got a lot of style of chips in Knockout City, but like I said, you kind of pick your one outfit. Yeah, you can swap an alpha, so this is fun, but you probably never have more than, like, three or four outfits per character, and you already have three characters to swap from for different outfits. So it's like I don't know. It's kind of weird. I got all these incentives to change dress cosmetics, but it's just cosmetic. I pick the one I like, and I stick with it. That makes sense to me. I don't know. My only thing that I can relate with is fall guys and all the cosmetics there. It's just cosmetics. It doesn't affect the gameplay. I was very much like a conspiracy theorist early on in the days of fall guys saying some of the bigger outfits that you can wear, like, I don't know, say, like, a tomato or something that just makes you, like, a big bulbous bean would have adverse effects on your gameplay. I don't think it actually does affect speed whatsoever. But the thing that it does affect is if certain obstacles are hitting your bean, it's just more surface area. Yeah, you do have a larger hitbox. Whether people want to admit that or not, I don't know. I've seen it where it will scrape the top of a tomato and it doesn't hit somebody else or something, for instance. It's like, well, if you weren't wearing that outfit, you might have avoided that. I don't know. It's tough because you could easily just make it all cosmetics where it's like, oh, the hitbox is just identical to the default character. So stuff would just clip through you. But then say if someone in fallout or fall guys. Say if someone in Fallout trying to trigger and fall guys, if someone's trying to jump at you and try and pull you or knock you over or grab you away from something and they ear a big round tomato and their hands clip through you, that would throw off their timing and fuck them up. So it has to be a physical costume that can interact with your environment or else it's going to miss. Other players are going to misjudge it, thinking you're bigger than you are. The downside of that is if your hitbox is bigger than what you are yeah. You're going to get cliff by different obstacles. Not because your character got hit by it, but because your costume got hit by there's a problem with both sides of it. That's the thing. I think the hitboxes probably are identical, and that's how they get away with it. The fall guys. Devs has probably said this till they're blue in the face. There's absolutely no difference in if you wear the tomato or not. But I just feel like I've seen it. So it's just like a personal thing where I'd like, I don't know. Just pick your favorite. And if you're a tomato, good luck. Good luck. Yeah. With Knockout City, it's so fast, and you never get clipped by like my hand clipped the Dodgeball and I got out. It's like no, it hits you square in the chest. The crosshairs kind of like auto locks in on characters when you're close enough to them, which kind of sucks. But it's also pretty good at times. And if they throw it yeah, it's either like pelting you straight on the head or like right in the chest. There's no real, like, I clicked my costume, not me, like, question about it. Right. But I do remember Overwatch had that for a hot minute with certain costumes because they have a lot of cosmetics for all their characters. And some of them give different costumes. Like every update. Fucking Tracers got probably 15 costumes by now. And then Zari's got like three. So clearly some are favorited more than others. And someone who maintains most of the tanks and all the tanks have shit costumes. I can't say I'm thrilled. I haven't played overwatch in like four years. But yeah, I remember for a while some of their costumes would be like big and awesome tanks or just ridiculous and exaggerated are fun and that's a lot of the charm of it. But some of them did change the hit boxes to either being they would be hit by that part of the costume would get hit, or it would misdirect the enemies into thinking their target is bigger than what they are. And then the bullets would clip through part of the costume and be a false pretense. Sort of like idea. So it kind of sucks. You I guess for developers, you kind of got to figure out which one you're going to stick with and just stick with that. Yeah, because either way someone's going to be pissed because they got unfairly hit or they unfairly didn't get hit. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Yeah. But yeah, a little bit of bonding. Isaac I'm not doing better. I got all the alternate characters, but I don't think there's anything to unlock with them. So I don't know, I'm just wasting time. I really should be playing different games. There's no progression in this anymore. And Nagas city is primarily it pokemon unite. Still playing that a lot. It's on my switch, so it's not right in front of me, so I forget I play it. Still playing that a lot. It's infuriating playing that. And that also has a ranked mode. So there's like the casual matches, there's quick matches for like five minute matches and then there's like the ranked match for people who want to get competitive and toxic as shit as the MOBAs tend to do it's infuriating. Because it's a team based game and there's a lot of times where it's like, hey, your teammates just not playing like that team is just gone, you lost. Like there's nothing you can do about it. There was a game where I was playing where we like my lane, the top lane. I was playing with another player. For anyone who doesn't know, the map basically breaks up with the three parts. The top lane, the bottom lane, and then kind of a middling lane where one person can go and that's usually two on top and two on bottom. Yeah, so I was playing top lane and play slow, bro most of the time. And me and the score bunny player, we're doing good. We're pretty much dominating our lane and like, we already got the first base already cleared out like three minutes and we're doing great. And I look, the bottom lane is dog shit and the middle, the jungler to the center player is not even. There, like their AFK or so oh my God. And I'm just like, we're doing so good in our spot and then the rest of the team like single handling. I mean, not even single handling. Three of them fucked it up for us, but I was just like, God damn it, that sucks. And there is a feature where, because it's on the switch, you can just turn off the screen to your switch and turn it back on and you'll still be in the match. Or even if you give it to the home screen on the switch and then go back into Pokemon Unite, it'll still be in that game you're playing. Oh, wow. And it doesn't really kick you out unless you close the game or unless you're idle for like five minutes. But the matches are only ten minutes long, so five minutes is a long time in that. Yeah. And if you do eventually leave the match, it would give the other players control of your character of saying either tell them to stay at one of the bases for defense or tell them to just tag along with you and kind of go on autopilot as like a secondary backup. But that's not great either, because there's a lot of nuance with MOBAs. It's a lot of, like, poking and running back. Like you run in, you attack them a little bit and you run away. You don't stay in the fight till the death. And so having an AI character just tagging along, not really like just firing at any enemies nearby and not really having any strategy isn't really helpful either, because they can get picked up very easily by the enemy and you're down a character. So there's no real good solution for when a party member or a team member leaves because you're just kind of screwed no matter what. Yeah. And it happens so frequently, it's almost. Like the solution is if somebody else is looking for a game, you could join that game as the person that just launch. Yeah, I know Knockout Cities had that problem where I've had friends join my group, and if we're down a player, we're down a player for that round. But as soon as that round is over, a new person can enjoy it fills. Oh, that's cool. With Pokemon Unit, though, they don't have anything like that. They have kind of a fair play system, they call it where it's point based, where if you have 100 points for playing the game, and if you're just a good player or you're just not a shit lord, you'll keep those 100 points, you'll keep your fair points up, and you get a little rewarding. You get a little in game currency for keeping it that high. Yeah. Anytime you leave a match early, it'll drop down. It's like a little credit system, basically. It's pretty much like a good player credit system. Yes. So if you leave a match early, it'll drop down. If you drop down below 80 points, you can't play ranked matches anymore. If it drops below 60 points, you can't play, like, any matches anymore. Like, you can't play, like, at all. I think. Yeah. That's like also similar to, like, a strike based system, certain number of strikes, strikes and you're out. Yeah. And then if you play, like if you lose some points, you play regular match and you stay the whole time, you'll get those points back. It's easy enough to get them back. That's good. But it makes me wonder, I'm like, if the cut off is like 60, why you can go to 100? Why not just have 50 exactly, like, just inflating the numbers. But I'm also not sure how effective that is because like I said, it happens a lot. Especially if it's a casual game and a teammate leaves. Like, that sucks. But whatever, it's ten minutes and we're back in here. We can go again. Sometimes your team is all there and you play an earnest match and you all try your best and you still get just stomped on by really good players. So sometimes it doesn't even matter if everyone is even there playing. Sure, yeah. But with the rank matches, it seems to happen so frequently where it's like, cool, I guess my rank is going down because two of my teammates just left mid match and this is the third time it happens. And it's just like there's the ranks of beginner, expert, veteran, master, I think legend, maybe there's like five ranks to the rank system and one buddy's at the top. He's like master rank. He's way up there because he loves League of Legends, so he's already used to MOBAs and he loves Pokemon, so this is crack cocaine for him. But I asked him, I'm like, how the hell do you even get there? Because every time I win one match in ranked, I'll lose like two or something. So it's just like I don't even know because you have to consistently win to go up and ranks. I'm just like, how? Because you're still relying on the other team members. So, I mean, I'm not competitive or I was like, God damn, that cost me a magic rip. My switch in half, right? I don't care. But it's just like man, when you're earnestly trying, it's like, oh, that's a bummer. Yes. Super relatable. With me playing Rocket League, people would just quit and at least like I said, they had a system there where they would like, yeah, if you quit mid ranked match, you couldn't join a ranked match for the next five minutes, which honestly, that's more or less a slap on the wrist. But if you're joining a match and you have to leave mid match because say you have to run off somewhere, there's an emergency, that penalty doesn't matter because you're not going to be back in five minutes to play the game anyway. Yeah. So, I mean, there's plenty of games that have some sort of like penalty system for being either throwing a game or being a toxic player or like just leaving mid match and like leaving a team hanging. Yeah, I don't know any that really have it one nailed downwards. Like, this is the definitive system. Every other game should be copying this one because it works the best. Not yet at least. So I don't have a solution, but it's just like, man, I wish there was a way to track how many people leave like mid match and instead of penalizing, like, taking points away and if you lose something, it just keeps a record of you. Like, we've seen you've left mid match seven times this week alone. You're not going to be allowed to play ranked anymore. You can do casual, you can do the quick match, you can do everything else with friends, like a private match. You can't do ranked where people actually want to try and put effort into it. I think that's what you proposed as a possible solution, but yeah, to implement that is another story. Yeah, we're not giving ourselves I don't know how hard that would actually be. To it doesn't sound that bad, honestly. But again, I don't fucking know. I mean, I know a lot of people who are like, hey, dubbing is easy, it's super simple. Why don't they just do this bitch? Nothing's easy. So I'm sure there's 1000 complications to it. But, yeah, it's just kind of a bummer. Because like I said, it is a ten minute match. And when the match starts and three your teammates all run out to the match AC two other ones lingering at base because they're AFK. It's like, well, I guess we're locked into this for ten minutes. You can surrender in the game and there's like different timers and stuff, so you can't surrender right away or spam it okay. In a casual match, if you surrender, you surrender, you don't get as much experience to level up. You get a little chop skis or in game currency and stuff. So you might not get as much experience to level up if you surrender in a casual match, but that's about it. If you surrender in a ranked match, you lose so much points. So there's a secondary experience system in ranked matches where it's like every match you play and finish, you get up to 25 points and then once you get up to 200 points, you'll automatically go to rank up. You need three wins in a row to rank up. Okay, so if you get to 200 of these ranked points, it will automatically give you one win, like one of those little notches to help you get to the next rank. So some way to kind of encourage, hey, you keep playing even if you're not winning, you can still get these little experience points, things that will help you get those wins and make oh, wow. Okay, so every match you play, you get like 25, let's say out of 200. If you surrender in a ranked match, you lose like 70 of those points. It pretty much depletes that XP bar entirely. If you surrender in a ranked like once. Yeah. So when I'm playing ranked and half my team is just AFK or actively throwing, I want to stop it. Clearly you want to surrender and just screw it. But then you get punished for surrendering. For every carry it out and get the minimal experience points. Yikes. No, it's kind of just a shitty situation of like I understand why they don't want to do the surrender easier in ranked matches, but just surrender. You need four out of five people to vote yes to surrender. Yeah, that makes sense. So even if the pit players are like AFK, it's like if two of them are AFK, I can't surrender anyway because they're holding me hostage here. So it's just kind of a shitty situation. I guess I just have to knowingly lose this battle and I don't know, put some effort into it or not. I don't know. Yeah, at that point it's like I'll get some practice in, I guess. Yeah, try and find but then because it's a momentum based game, the other team, if they have a little bit of momentum, I'm going in the beginning, it's going to just dominate through the rest of the match. It's like I can't even practice how I would fight against the Snorlax because he's so beefed up right now. He just stops me out in one move. And he's a defender. He's not even supposed to be doing this much damage. But MOBAs are like about momentum. So once another team starts getting into momentum, it's really hard to stop him. So if they get that momentum right off the bat, it's just like, well shit that game. And I'm just going to get curvestopped for the next ten years. This is a weird solution to the problem and I doubt will ever be what they ever end up doing. But it's almost like if they recognize that situation where these players are either AFK or just completely not contributing left to match, whatever either. I don't want to say handicap the other team, but maybe you give your players some kind of like special not special ability, but you know what I mean? Like beef them up some kind of boost. Literally. At least one of these Pokemon can put the team on their back in some way to at least stand a chance. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like kind of like oh, instead of a player left the match, instead of you haphazardly kind of controlling them. You don't even control them. They just follow around you like a puppy. So it's like instead of doing that, maybe just take that character out and then maybe give everyone else like a 10% damage increase or something. Exactly. Something where it's like the experience this person because in the mobile there's like random little enemies throughout that you can fight like neutral enemies that both you and the enemy team fight to get experience. And that. Experience is distributed across the team. So depending on how many enemies your whole team kills is how quickly you all level up, and then there's individual, like, how many you do personally. But maybe if AFK member teammate leaves, it gives you some sort of like, here's how much experience they had or should have gotten based on how long this match has gone. Or maybe just level everyone up once immediately. Yeah, maybe there should be some sort of buff instead of having just this blank slate AI character running around following you, who's probably more of a hindrance than help at that point. Yeah, maybe there's just a way of like, hey, everyone just gets one free level because you lost a teammate, and now hopefully that'll bounce out because there's some matches where, like, I'm a level four slow poke and we're three minutes in a match, and the other team's level seven or level eight. I don't know how they got there, but they're clearly doing way better than us. There's just no way to get that momentum back. We're losing that match. Makes sense. It's MOBAs. This has always kind of been a problem with MOBAs because even Overwatch isn't a mobile, but it's a very team based game, and when you have one AFK player, it just ruins everything. Oh, yeah. So it's probably just team based games in general. But that's why with Knockout City, I usually just play with my two other friends and we just do the three V three matches. Perfect. That way if someone fucks up, I can yell at them directly. I guess it's a rando like. Oh, well, that's funny. I'm playing surprisingly, like, a lot of competitive games right now. Yeah, that's awesome. It's mostly because my friend a friend of mine who plays Knockout City is also the one playing Pokemon. It's dragging me around to both of them, and it is fun, but it's also like, man, I'm really not a competitive person. I guess playing Overwatch with AJ and Mark really shouldn't be like, man, I truly don't give a shit about these games because there's so much shit out of our control. But it is fun, actually. Pokemon is a game where I'm surprised by it's fun playing the casual mode, and it is fun playing the rank mode of like, oh, I actually have to do strategy now. I have to plan out. Like, I have to run in here, pick off this neutral enemy before the enemy team gets it and stuff like that and strategizing more. So I am seeing the appeal of mobile MOBAs through Pokemonite more than like League of Legends or Smite or something. Yeah, but yeah, I'm not a competitive person, and it's like, it's a game. I'm doing this in my free time to relax and enjoy myself. If this is making me angry, I'm just not going to do it anymore. Yeah, exactly, man, I'm half competitive, half not. So I was very much like when I started playing Rocket League. It's like, of course I want to try to see how I hold up against all these other people, but then just the toxicity of the whole scene was just very much a turn off in many ways of just like they had plenty of problems with people. Just like, avoiding the censorship in the chat and like saying there's always bad things. Yeah, exactly. So stuff like that and people telling other people to kill themselves and stuff. It's like, okay, I do not need this. I just want to play the game. And that's when I started playing casual. That's also when I had the realization it's like, I can play games on easy mode. Holy shit, I'm actually enjoying this so much more. I'm going to do this story and it's easy. I don't know, as I grow older, I find myself wanting to put myself in less stressful situations. Especially when I'm finding myself gaming to unwind. Yeah. And I think we see a lot of that with kids because we play games as kids a lot because we have all the free time in the world. And I'm not going to say kids don't have stress. There's a lot of very stressed out child, but there's like less stresses or the stresses are less long lasting. Yeah. As a kid, you don't have to worry about a twelve year lease on your house. Like, you know, you don't have to worry that far ahead of time. So for some stuff it's like, yeah, I got nothing else going on as a kid. Let me just put everything into this and it's like, oh, it's a challenge. I want to beat it and overcome it as an adult. Yeah. I'm going to give a shit about easy or difficulty levels on a single player narrative game like Near Automata, where I don't interact with anyone else and it's just a story mission. And there's the insanity mode where it's one hit kill for everything. No. Why the fuck did I ever do that? Yeah. Unless it's like a franchise I've been a die hard for, maybe I'd consider it like, I don't know, kingdom did that speed run and shit. I did not need to do that. But it was fun. I mean, even Death Thor, I got 100% of the collectibles in the game because by the time I finished it, I was at like 82% or something. So I'm like, I'm already close. Why not? There's still like four achievements. I didn't get on Steam because it would require me to play it again. I don't care. I'm not doing that. It was a fun game, but I don't care enough to get those achievements and stuff. Yeah. So I want a game to be challenging enough to keep my attention of like, oh, I actually have to focus. I can't just zone out and play like a zombie. But also I'm not going to be playing those, like, unruly super permanent Death, Fire Emblem Three Houses. I did it where I was like, do you want to play with Perma Death, where if one of your characters dies in a match in a combat scenario, they're out of the game entirely? I guess that's how you're supposed to play these games. Apparently, that's the default setting on the old games. So let me try that out. I lost a character in the tutorial match in the tutorial combat, and he was out of the rest of the game for me. Luckily, you can turn that off at any time, so I turned it off right away. Yeah. But it was a character who died immediately, so I don't know any of his story. I don't know any of his interactions. This especially a dude I used to intern with was the voice of that character. So I was like, I don't know what I don't know who you are in Fire Emblem Love Three Houses because your dude died fucking immediately. That is wild. But yeah, it's like people are like, oh, permanent Death is the real way to play Fire Emblem. It's like, I'm playing like, I like these characters now. I like the story. I don't care if in battle they die forever or if they just go, I got a retreat for a little bit, and then I can keep playing the game with them. Anyone who says, like, this is the true way to play the game can eat my full asshole. I don't care. It's just for people that want that. I just watched the streamer do a nuzlock of Pokemon. Oh, my God. Yeah. I didn't even know what that term meant. And apparently the only Pokemon you can get are in certain areas of the early game, you have to go the first ones you catch. And if they die, they die. And it's just like, oh, wow. There's a lot of nuzzlock became this thing of people were doing with Souls Games where people make it harder on themselves. It's different. No weapon runs of a soul like Dark Souls Three or all of those, like, shit stat runs and stuff. Nuzlock. Was that for Pokemon? Is it a way for people to artificially make it harder on themselves, to give it a challenge? Because Pokemon is real mindless. Once you know the basics, you can pretty much just smash a it's a game for kids. It's a game for kids. Yeah. We all grew up with it. We all love it. There's plenty of adults who still love playing Pokemon United same, but it is a game for children. The base game is for kids. It's not that challenging. Nuzlocks. The rules vary depending on which nuzlock people are doing because it's all artificially imposed rules. Or you can choose which ones you do. But yeah, the standard array of nuzlock is if a Pokemon faints, they die. So you have to release them from the computer entirely. So you can never say. The standard rules for nuzlock is you catch one Pokemon per area on the map in Pokemon Games, it'll say, like, this is Route 15. This is Route 17th. This is the city. This is this cave. And anytime it's a new map, that's a new area, and you catch the first Pokemon you encounter in that area and nothing else. Exactly. So you're almost looking for a special spot, being like, maybe this will have something better. And then I think the guy I was watching as they got their first Pokemon, it was something really underwhelming, like, the squirrel looking guy. I don't remember their name, but God damn it, this is like, the last Pokemon they wanted out of all the options. Exactly. Some areas are like, water. Pokemon will be around water of a map. So it's like, if you want to try and bend your chances, you go to specific areas of a map. But even still, you catch the first Pokemon encounter. If you happen to accidentally kill that Pokemon, tough shit. You don't have a Pokemon now. You can't catch anything else in that area now, unreal. And then there's plenty of other rules people customize. Like, beyond that. I saw a lot of streamers doing a randomized nuzlock of I think it was Pokemon black and white. Okay. And it was where every Pokemon was randomized. So they didn't spawn in certain areas, like ponytails spawn in, like, Route 15. No, it could be anything. There's. No, that's cool. No clue. And then there are abilities. So Pokemon has different abilities now in later generations, like, innate abilities to a specific Pokemon. That's where a lot of the breeding comes in. So one of them is like, I think it's like Hydrate, where it's like, if this Pokemon gets hit by a water attack, it boosts their attack further. Yeah, I've seen that. Plant types. Yeah. So those were randomized as well as the Pokemon's moves. Like, all of the moves every Pokemon had was also randomized, as well as the evolutions. So when a Pokemon evolved, it could evolve into anything that was insane. So it was all randomized. And that's one where it's like, oh, this is stressful and harder. And despite what I just said about not playing stressful games, I'm too old for that shit. This looked fun as hell. Oh, yeah, that's wild and crazy. Like, you have, like, a friggin Wheedle that turns into a jazz art. It's like, whoa. Yeah. I don't know. That sounds really fun. The fun thing that I saw the most, though, is it's doing it with other people. So you can all share in that pain, because if it's just you by yourself, you're just torturing yourself. But if you're doing this with a group of friends, it can be really fun. I'm, like, so close and, like, this fucked up the streamer I was watching, playing it. It's funny you mentioned wheedle. He had a wheel. It evolved very early, so he was pumped. He's like, cool. This evolves, it could turn into anything. It could turn into any of the 875 Pokemon that were out at that point. That is so cool. So he's like, this could be anything. It evolved really early on, evolved into Kakuna. He's like, he lost his mind. Randomizers are the best. I actually really love that. I was going to say it would have been extra funny if it evolved into a weedle. I'd have been like, Wait, what? I don't think that's possible. Okay. The thing is, with all the randomizers and stuff and nuzlock, it's all custom code, so there's chances the code just fucked up because it's a random person doing it. But these people generally know what they're doing. Yeah, that's the first part of that line of code, is and make sure. That it's this Pokemon from but because it's randomized, there's plenty of times where a Pokemon would evolve into a new form that couldn't evolve any further. Like into a charizard, where it's like, that's the end of the line. Or elect a buzzwords. Like, shit, that's it. It can't go further than that. And it's a shitty evolution. It's like, I guess this guy I spent 15 hours trying to evolve is useless now. Or at one point, they went into a cave in black and white. It was just like a cave area. And there was like, in this guy's specific run, all those streamers I was watching, doing this collectively, all had different versions of the game, so it varied between all of them. This guy's in particular, the cave, was full of, like, seven different legendary Pokemon. Damn. And even though their moves were randomized and their levels were like, oh, it's a Kyoga, but it's level seven. It still has those in game stats of a legendary Pokemon. So he lost, like, so many Pokemon because he just kept running into legendary after legendary after legendary. And he couldn't catch them because he only caught that first one. That's right. And he's like, I'm so fucked. Like, half my party's dead after that cave. It's like, oops. That's the randomized element. Yeah. They're not all going to be winners. Yeah. After watching that, I really wanted to do, like, a randomized mouse lock with some friends because it looks real fun. But also, like I said, it's one of those shared pain games where we're all suffering together. That's what the fun is. Makes sense to me. No, that does sound like a lot of fun. I especially love the idea of just like, as you're walking throughout the Pokemon world, they could be any Pokemon encounter. I would just turn that on and just play the game. Normally there's a Zapdos in fucking Palate town. What the fuck? Yeah, just that mode alone. I think one guy walked around and he's like, oh, I found a diglet. And then the other streamer on his same screen, same spot, same field, exact same encounter. He's like, oh, I found a mewtwo y version. Like a mega evolved mewtwo y. And he's like, let's go. All right, I guess you got the better one then, right? That's sick. It's crazy. Yeah, if they did, like because there's plenty of games that have hacks and mods. Like built in systems like XCOM allow you to put mods in from the beginning. They're open source for mods. They allow you to do that. Plus putting other games. You have to break them kind of to do that. It would be great if Pokemon allowed just like randomized modes, like for just random encounters. That would be so much fun moving forward. They should really lean into what their audience clearly wants and would utilize. No, they would never do that. Yeah, true. They're not that smart. Nintendo shut down a Smash Brothers tournament because their online net code is so shit, the tournament had to use a third party support and then they shut them down because of it. So no, they will never do that. Fair enough. Yeah, a randomizer nuzlock run sounds so fun to me. Same. I got to get back into Pokemon. Okay, I guess I'll talk about the games I've been playing. That's the thing. Not too much. A little bit more of Pokemon sword. I think I've said shield earlier. I meant sword. Loving that game. I think I have one more badge. That's going to be fun wrapping that up on stream. Speaking of the stream, on Saturday, I had a really fun one. People were going crazy just hanging out, chatting. And the first attempt of the stream, I was playing Fall guys. Go figure. I got a crown on the first go round. It was so cool. The final was lost. Temple one of the new new final of season five. And that one is very much just like a giant labyrinth. You got to just kind of get lucky with the path you're taking. And yeah, there's a clip of it if you guys want to check it out. But it was a very glorious win. The guy was leading the way to the crown, and I'm just like, well, he's going to win. Fuck me. And I'm thinking to myself, I think I even said it on stream. I was just like, well, if he misses, it's ours. And he missed. And I was like, let's go. So it's definitely a lucky situation. Not skilled. Yeah, exactly. So that was cool. Still loving fall, guys. God, I can't get enough of that. Game, if I'm being real. They did have recently a Ratchet and clank like crossover event. So there was a week or two ago, the Ratchet event, which you had to do certain events in game in order to accomplish that. You could unlock a skin and like an emo and stuff. And then this week was the clank event, and then the cool thing is if you accomplish both of them, you get like a Rivet nameplate. So for people who are aware of the Ratcheting Clank series, rivet is I think that's her name, Gosh. Anyway, the new character from the girl character in Ratcheting Clank, the newest one. So that's all cool. I like seeing that. It feels weird to me like that this is the crossover event for season five. Like, season five is very much jungle theme. And we're going again back to like Ratchet and Clank, which is more like a space futuristic theme, which was more or less like season four. So to me, I would expect a crossover with like, I don't know, not Tarzan or anything. Like when was the last time he was relevant, but something like jungle related. Indiana Jones, right? Something like that. But we'll see if they ever once this event wraps up. In fact, actually, I think you listeners might have run out of time to get the emote and skin, but it's pretty nice. I'm rocking it for a couple of rounds and stuff. But yeah, I do like how they just are constantly updating the game with cool things. The one emote I got in the I don't want to say battle pass, but as you level up during the season, there's like 50 tiers I'm on level 44, you get this mummy walk emote. And I've been wanting it for so long and I finally got that. So it's really cool seeing do a mummy walk. But that's what I mean. It's all just goofy cosmetics and emotes. So nothing that really affects gameplay whatsoever. But this game still has a tremendous amount of glitches and stuff. That's one thing that happened to me over actually. Yeah, it was this weekend. I had a game I wasn't streaming, and I wish I was because I would have clipped the shit out of this. I was all by my lonesome, which probably should have told me the game is lagging or something's wrong. And I'm running up and I literally had like a god run in a fall mountain where you're trying to get to the top of the mountain and grab the crown. I'm completely by myself, at least from my perspective of the game. And I jump up, grab the crown, I see my beam gripping it. I'm already exclaiming, like I'm just celebrating preemptively. And then the screen says, eliminated, actually. How so? When the game does stuff like that and there's real bad D sync issues, I understand when people get really upset at the game, but again, I'm not super competitive. So I did get annoyed, but I just moved on and like, that's just how this game is. But I'm hoping the Epic acquisition will really give them better resources for their servers and stuff. Again, we still have yet to see them introduce Xbox and Nintendo Switch players to this game, so it's going to be interesting. Clearly, there's a whole new audience to be brought in, but how the server is going to handle it, all of cross play and everything. It's going to be interesting to see how Fallguys handles all that moving forward, but I'm hopeful that those kind of issues get resolved once we're all past that. I mean, fingers crossed. I can't imagine adding new platforms and. More people makes it easier. Yeah, fingers crossed. Exactly. So that's where I'm at. With Fog still streaming it, still having a lot of fun with it and I don't think I've had much time to play anything else. I had some family over, so it was fun seeing some family from out of state. But yeah, not gaming too much. Is there anything going on in the news? Maybe we could just talk about stuff in the news before wrapping this one up. Yeah, we can give this one short. Not much going on. There was like an indie game showcase for the Switch. So Indie World is the indie game focus for all Nintendo stuff. So definitely check that out if you got a Switch or if you're just interested in indie games. They announced a lot of new games coming out, like Road 96, which I've talked about is kind of like, life is Strange, but It Feels Good and stuff like that. So new games like that as well. As for a Switch, just a ton of games being ported over to it. Very nice if you were ever interested in the game being like, odd. The only console I have is a Switch and that game is not on there. Definitely check out the Indie world showcase. There's a ton of games that were being ported over recently and a lot of people were a little pissy, little acting like little entitled shits as we know gamers to do. Nothing was announced about Hollandite Silk Song and people were all annoyed. This was supposed to be announced. No, they didn't promise anything. They never told you when they would announce. It'll happen when it happens. When it's like being made by three dudes, relax. So I am very much excited for that. But also, yeah, it'll happen when it happens. Two already have my Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, which we've talked about many times on this podcast. But man, more like screenshots and everything. This game, the art direction, the music direction. I am ready. I've been wanting this since literally a decade ago. I'm so fucking ready for this game. And then Axiom Verge, too. Axiom Verge was a fucking fantastic metroidvania. I'm not sure. Did you ever get around to playing that? No, I'm really good playing it for a long time. That was one of the first games I streamed on our channel. And I mean, that was, man, way long ago. Weird. Yeah. There's also Skatebird, which we've talked about, which is just a bird skating escape. Bird. Oh, my God. Yes. We've been waiting for that for a long time, too. That's still TBD. So, you know, it'll be done when it's done. Yeah, oxenfree lost signals is yeah, oxygen free too. So I'm excited for that one. That's 2021. So we're in the latter half of 2021. So it should be coming out sometime. But probably around Christmas, probably around the holiday season. Yeah. So a lot of games announced that indie world that are either new games or games that are just being new to the switch being ported over. Right. So plan to check out there and I don't know. I guess the other news is fucking interest. Alba is going to be Knuckles in the Sonic sequel movie. Yeah, I did see Twitter losing its mind over that. That's cool. Makes sense. Sonic movies getting a sequel. It was pretty successful, right? I thought you were going to say it makes sense. It yourself is not at all hard to agree with. But hey, I don't know. It's going to be interesting hearing that rendition. I still haven't even seen the Sonic movie, so I don't know how good it is. I assume it's mediocre, like all of those cartoon characters brought to the real world movies like Yogi Bear and Woody Woodpecker and all those. Except it's just got a lot of video game references and Jim Carrey losing his goddamn minds. So I don't know how good it is. But hey, it's going to be weird with it yourself. Listen, it yourself has also been in plenty of stinkers, too. He's a very busy man, so not all of them are winners. But it's going to just be so weird because he's a great actor. He's a phenomenal actor. He's got a very velvety, smooth bassy voice. And it's like I think it's safe to say he's got a very sexy voice. It's going to be weird hearing that from Knuckles. Yeah, that's honestly all the I don't know. Knuckles has a really strange fan base. So they probably want a sexy Knuckles. Listen, Sonic's got a very horny fan base. We all do this. But just like it's going to be weird hearing it. Like Knuckles have this deep, basic voice. Like Ben Schwartz's song that works. I get that. He's got like the young, energetic sort of voice. Like, it's going to be weird, I guess. Sexy knuckle. I don't know, man. It's going to be weird. Yeah, we'll see that. Definitely. No, that's a good one to end on because I was going to say I'm also looking at his IMDb and I'm like, man, I haven't seen any of these movies. I think I saw The Dark Tower in theaters and I don't remember a single. As a bold choice to see in theaters. Doug yeah, it was definitely taking a leap. But speaking of taking a leap, thanks for listening to this episode. Let's wrap this one up and do some plugs. Brendan, where can our listeners find you on the Internet? Find me on Twitter. ABTS brendan. It's mostly me. Just retweeting my other podcast, which is called are We There Yet? Where we watched three episodes of an anime or a movie. Give a recap of it with our opinions. It's a good sampler platter of anime if you don't want to jump into it too quick or if you just don't want to watch shit anime yourselves and you want to hear someone react to it and have a horrible time. Like when we watch Gantz. Oh, good Christ. Was that an episode? I don't apologize for any of that. That was entertaining as hell for me. But wow, that dance sucks on, like, so many levels. Damn it. Fair enough. But yeah, listeners, go check that out. Also, if you like our show, please give us a, like, follow subscribe we're findable at all the places at Abt Silence. Specifically, Twitch Tvsilence is where I'm streaming a variety of games. By variety, I mean Fall guys, but there's a couple of others in there. Pokemon, Harry Potter, Lego and stuff. And speaking of Harry Potter, I have a Harry Potter trading card game podcast. Super niche. It's called renovate. Check that out if you want. There'll be links in the show notes. And our music is done by a band called Kind Of All Right. Head over to Kind Of All Right Bandcamp.com for more music from them, but that's going to do it for this week. Thanks for tuning in. See you guys next time. Bye. See you.

  • ABTS-416: The Man, The Moth, The Legend

    In this episode of ABTS, Doug and Bren discuss the games they’ve been playing, Doug tells about his new TCG obsession in MetaZoo, plus Bren tells us about current the pay-to-win aspects of Pokemon Unite!

    Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/abts/265e43e1-8381-4cfb-baeb-b2c03c07ae45

    This podcast is powered by Pinecast.


    Music, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Almost Better Than Silence. I'm your host, Doug Coleman, and I'm here today with the other co host, Brenda McKella. And I've found a new TCG to be obsessed with. Brandon Sad. I know you were right about just gateway drugs and TCGs and all this. Yeah, like, you should actually be doing hardcore narcotics instead of TCG. It gets easier. Well, and that's the thing for anybody that's unfamiliar, I have a Harry Potter trading card game podcast. So that's what really was the catalyst. It's super specific, is the game that only lasted for, like, two years, but now we have a revival. Anyway, super hardcore into that. I love that game. The game is super fun. It definitely got me interested in other things. Like, I don't know, I had a couple Lord of the Rings trading cards growing up, and there's a game there I haven't played. It seems complicated, but I want to get into that. But no, the one that I'm currently now very obsessed with, and it's kind of hitting me out of nowhere is this game called Medazoo, and I think I brought it up on the program previously. Yeah, it's all thanks to my co host of my other podcast, Emilio. He was the one telling me about it. And man, this game is so cool. The artwork is just like the watercolor, old school, first edition, Pokemon style look. And the idea is, instead of it just being little pocket monsters, it's cryptids and I guess, like, urban legends and all these things that aren't necessarily factually. In reality, it's a public domain free license. That's what it is. Hey, we don't have to pay anyone for these already existed. Yes. Bigfoot. And things like this chupacabra. It's actually super cool and cute. And that's the thing Emilio told me about this deal. He's like, I'm in the position where we're getting a bunch of product. If you want in, let me know. And I was like, all right, I'm in. Let's see what this is all about. And I'm opening my first Booster boxes and building my first decks and stuff. And man, it's just straight addicting. And I love the artwork, the cards I'm pulling. I'm so excited. All right. And that's the thing about this game. There's what people call the chase card in any game when you're looking for, like, the most dragon. Yeah, exactly. Charizard. You know, everyone was after the original charizard in Pokemon Jesus. The equivalent in this game is called Mothman. And I pulled my first mothman. It blew my ox off. It was actually very funny because my wife was unaware of even opening these cards. And she walks into the office as I pull it, and I'm like, audibly gasping. She's like, what? I pulled the moth bed and she's like, what? I was like, oh, yeah, you don't know what that means. Exactly. But no, I was super hype about that. There's other really cool ones out there. This one Frog, the loveland frog, frog man. He's just so cute. But anyway, I'm really interested in this game. I'm learning how to play it. I really want to play it with my wife on stream in the future. But yeah, thought I'd start this episode off by saying I'm obsessed with a new TCG, and it is brand new. This is first edition came I think their Kickstarter stuff came out in 2020. But this this game launched this year. So yeah, if you're interested, check it out. Metazoo. It combines a lot of Facets of Magic, the Gathering, and Pokemon. So if you're interested in that universe, check out this new game. It seems very promising. I have a feeling there's a lot of pressure on it to see, will this game survive or not? Or is it very just much a short lived, like, fluke? Is this where this magic frog comes from? This little frog wizard? Yes, 100%. Okay. You sent a picture to me, and yes, it is adorable. And I want to know everything about this little frog. But looking at the card, like, looking at the bottom where all the it's so fucked. There's a lot of shit going on here. I've played some of these games. I get it. I'm like, oh, this probably means this. There's a lot of shit in here. Yeah, there is. But that's the thing about this. This character is a little bit of like a troll kind of thing because I think the way you activate their ability is you blow them a kiss or something. So it's just like this game is so cute and just interesting. And yeah, the holographics are just beautiful to behold. But yeah, for anybody that has the nostalgia of wanting to pull Pokemon cards, but obviously don't want to sink that kind of money into it. Don't get me wrong, this is going to be expensive because people are all hype about this new product, but it's more accessible than Pokemon, in my opinion, especially if you're trying to get the old school cards. Good guy, Brandon. Yeah. So that's how I'm starting this episode off. How are you, Brandon? I'm doing good. I'll do it in another derailment that has nothing to do with that. Oh, here we go. Perfect. Speaking of Mothman, I got an art print from a convention a while back, and it's one of my favorites. And it's just of a little dumpy like, mothman looking egg creature. And it's from an artist called Jelly. Koi K-O-E. Jelly. Oh, nice. And it's just a little dumpy like egg shaped the Mothman. And it just says the man, the moth, the legend. God damn it. It gets me every time. I like I'm like, that's good. That's a good idea. It's just one of my favorites. And it's like I found it out of nowhere at a random convention one day in like, the artist alley. I was like, these are pretty neat. Some of these are pretty nice. I was like, oh shit, there it is. I just bought it immediately sold. That is good. That's cool. Mothman understandable. I figured Bigfoot would probably be the dragon everyone hunting after the rare one, but Mothman definitely has some gravitas to them. And the Cryptid mythos because everyone knows them. There's movies made about it, but something is just so strange about there's something alluring about them and you see Mothman like creatures in different media and stuff. There's a DND race called the Lira, which is like a homebrew race that you can find on like the Dungeon Master skill online or website, I forget exactly what it's called dungeon Master leads, but it's this home brew race someone made and it's very well done, it's very flushed out. It's this Moth race and there's like six or seven sub races to it and they're all really well balanced and like have their own unique thing to them, which you don't find a lot of in homebrewed stuff. So it's very impressive. But yeah, I've been itching to play one of them ever since I found it. Because Moth people, I don't know, they're neat. I don't know why. I don't know either. It's just interesting. But yeah, and that was the thing when I first pulled my Mothman, I was like, okay, I got to look up how much this is worth. And if you do just like a simple Google search, the first thing that comes up is someone trying to sell one for $1,400. And I'm like, okay, that's not right. Well, that's because there's a Kickstarter edition of these cards. So there's even more rare versions of these cards that everyone it's like, oh, if there's a little K over there, that means it's worth even more. So mine isn't a Kickstarter version, but regardless, even still, I think it goes anywhere from like eighty dollars to one hundred and fifty dollars. It's just like man, that's almost like half the price of a box. Like we were saying on previous episodes when you're trying to get the Chase card and make back on your investment, apparently I got a good box, so I'm pretty happy with it. That's surprising considering how new it is to Kickstarter. I'm surprised it's that high. But you can never gauge the value of something by how much someone's selling it for. Gauge it by how much someone paid for it. Because you can sell whatever for however much you want. No one will buy it. Right? And it's funny we're talking about that. I also sold recently my copy of the card game Monikers. I bought the McElroy edition back when they were Kickstarting that many years ago. I bought it in hopes that one day, I don't know, my family or friends would all get together and play this. It's like I'm the only one who knows what a McElroy even is. I just finally came to terms. Like, this thing is in perfect condition. Let me just go on a Bimbam bino podcaster group and see if anybody's interested. And good god, apparently those things are sought after and yeah, out of print, clearly. I sold mine for $80. I never would have expected that. So yeah, that was pretty cool. Turn a profit on that limited edition Swag. Yeah, definitely. But I'm sad I never got to play the game. But the person that bought it for me was like, this is my only McElroy Merch I'm missing. I'm like, you're the perfect buyer then. I'm so happy it's going to you. I remember I had a bunch of Digimon figurines that were like little plasky figures that were like an inch high. And it was like a series they made. They just made like, every Digimon ever into these little waxy inch high figures. And I had so many. I had a little Digimon branded briefcase thing that fit them all in. I remember selling that some dude off, like Fort Chan back when I was throwing fortune a lot. Gave me some absolute bonkers bullshit. Faking name of exile, like Warlock or something. I'm like, this is a demon from the Bible that's no one's name. And I remember him just going nuts for like, I got to have this site. I got to complete my collection. I was like, I don't know, $50? He said, yeah, I can do that. I was like, all right, cool. And costing me that much just to ship it out to the dude. But he was like, freaking out. Like, right, I can pay you the money right now, but I won't be able to afford to rent. So I might be like, dude, A, it's digit on B. You're the only buyer. See, if you can't afford rent by $50, you got to figure your lend that's good. And why are you even considering buying these right now? Oh, man. Great. Like, I am I'm a fan of stuff. I can be a big fan of stuff. I've never become obsessive to the point where, like, I need to limit in addition version. Like, none of these were even limited. I played with these as a kid that half of them were broken. That's the problem with this limited stuff. Like, I had this booster box and I was even in the back of my mind, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to put this in a drawer for 20 years. This is going to be worth so much. Another thing, I was like, I have this booster box. I'm going to do one booster back per stream. I'm going to make this last. There's like five left or something. At this point, I have no control over myself. It's so fun opening these packs. And yeah, it's very much just an addicting thing. So yeah, don't get into TCG. I think that's the PSA we're starting. Off with it's very literally the same part of your brain that gets addicted to gambling. There's always another chance. What if, what if, what if? And it's like, don't ever say what if, because it can be anything. But then the thing, you open it and it's not that thing. Then you lost 80% of your investment. I think when I have a problem is when I start sending off cards to get graded. That's where people are really taking it super seriously. I think you hit a problem when you're willing to $100 on cards. That's where I draw the line. Yeah. I am an adult, and I can do what I want with I mean. Hey, if you got the money to burn but like. My poor red no, I'm just kidding. The Black Lotus Magic the Gathering guy. Just no, apparently there's an equivalent to the Black Lotus, and I pulled one. It's called the Chaos Crystal or something. Or energy. I think it's Crystal, but I don't. Even know what game you're talking about anymore. No, metazu. They have like, Black Lotus equivalent and it's gorgeous. But that's the thing. If I'm not mistaken, Black Lotus and some cards are, like, banned. So I have a feeling this game is going to get a lot of adjustment as time progresses. But let's see how it does. I'm curious to see if it gains in popularity or just kind of has its core fan base and doesn't really grow. Yeah, I mean, it's really got a fan base already who's willing to spend an absurd amount of money for little pieces of cardboard. Oh, yeah. It's selling out left and right. Yeah, but it's just looking at it. It's all about the barrier to entry for new players because that's how you keep a community growing and expanding is you have to get new players. Yeah. So we talked about that with various video games. I forget it exactly at this point. Like maybe like Rocket League and stuff. Sure. Or like Fall Guys, where you have to get new people. You can't just have the same people playing forever because those people are going to gradually drop off naturally. Either they lose interest, some of them get second, campus could play anymore, some of them could die. If you only retain the certain fan base and never grow, that fan base will slowly deteriorate. Whether eventually, no matter how long it takes, it will happen. Oh, yeah. So you need to that's why people are like, why aren't they catering to the veterans who play this game all the time, who love this game and spend all much money? You need the new players, or else it won't matter how much that whale is pumping into your game because that's just going to be one person. You need to keep getting the new people in and getting a new audience. So if the barrier to entry of the game is too high, either it's too expensive to get these cards or it's too difficult to actually get these cards, or if the game itself is just too difficult to play or understand, it's going to have a rough time getting those new players. Because like I said, even someone who's familiar with a fair amount of card games and a bunch of nerdy shit, looking at that frog wizard who is adorable as shit, that's a lot of text. That's like modern day ugly cards where it's just like two bricks of a. Paragraph and a bunch of icons and just like a lot of symbols. Yeah, I agree with you on that. As somebody that only has played Harry Potter trading card game, which is fairly simple, this looks a little bit intimidating. But again, a lot of it seems like flourish text just goofy. I think they're trying to just kind of put off their own kind of personality within the cards, like world building. Through the cards and stuff. Yes, ugu did a lot of that early on where it's just like here's the monster, here's an italicized sentence or two and that just gives you a description of the world or where the monster is from or what it is exactly. But now to the point where every monster has an effect. Every monster is an effect card. And now the monsters that were previously effect cards are like double effect cards or like fusion forms or all this other shit and now they just have a small novel inside those cards or it's hard to understand as far. There are certainly some for Magic Gathering that do that where it's a lot of text. But as far as I can tell from most of Magic Gathering, they keep it pretty simple down there in the text box, which is definitely a big appeal for people learning on a place like, oh, there's only one or two sentences, I can read that and figure out what's happening pretty easily. The caveat being with magic, as far as I can tell, is there's a lot of key words that mean certain things. Like this character could do trample. It's like, oh, so he can just run over. No, trample is a specific move set that certain creatures have and it does this thing. So it's got certain key words that basically this word represents seven other words. And that's how we're keeping the text box small on these cards. There's a lot of key phrases and words within magic cards. So that's kind of the barrier of entry, of trying to understand what all of those specialty terms are. Same with this game. Actually, with metazu, that's one thing I will kind of dock them points for is they can make it confusing. With cards are called pages. Your deck is called Spell book. And then I feel like as you're contracting a beast or something, those words all suck. But then I think there's another one in there too that I can't put my finger on, but it's just like oh, it's when you draw a card, it's called bookmarking. I'm like, y'all could just not intuitive. No it's not. You could literally any card that says bookmark two cards or something, you're just like, what now? Just say draw two. So yeah, I think other people have made those similar complaints, but again, it's them trying to have their own kind of like established I don't want to say flavor, but you know what I mean? Like yeah, branding identity. Yes, exactly. And that's definitely something you want for a brand. That's something that helps build your brand and cement your foothold in the community and stuff. But with all that terminology, that makes me think that seems like it'd be appropriate in that Harry Potter game where you're doing spells, book and all that stuff. You're not wrong for a wizard based game if it's just cryptids and weird animals. That seems like it has fucking nothing. To do with I guess where they get away with that is the whole point of the game is you're a caster. That's confusing to me. Even Mad gathering, you're equivalently a planeswalker leading your army between different dimensions and your army is the deck you have of monsters even that's kind of confusing. But it really doesn't have anything to do with the game itself. That's just the lore and world building of the magic gathering world. They don't call you like the plane walker rips five souls from this dimension. It's like, no, he just draws cards. We know this is a card game. We're not going to make it more confusing than it needs to be. Right? So yeah, I could definitely hinder it a bit. And the lore with metazu is kind of funny because the world you're in is the continental USA. There it is. It's just like you look at the map and it's like, oh yeah, Mothman's in West Virginia. It all makes sense. That's the thing. If it's based on cryptids, which are just urban legends in the real world setting yes. You're going to kind of be locked into the place they're based out of. And they're certainly cryptid and myth legends and urban legends and stuff all across the planet. There's plenty of them, but I'm thinking. That might be future expansions or something. Yeah, yeah, maybe. But it's definitely going to be harder when it's like someone over in Europe is like, oh, I got Mothman based out of West Point, Virginia. What the fuck is this? I don't know, man. So it's kind of American centric, which could also be hindering. It's tricky. You're writing the known properties of cryptids that people are aware of, but also they're going to be dependent on the myth and urban legends that are out of your control. Sort of. Yes. It'll be interesting to see what happens. But I mean, hey, you got people spending hundreds of dollars on these cards already. Already? Yeah, that's what I mean? The artwork, selling it. The game, I think, has to be good. I'm learning it myself right now. So once I'll report back on that, if the game is actually fun. But already I've said Harry Potter is a very fun game. I could see me playing that a lot. But yeah, we'll see. But this is a video game podcast for anything new? I don't know. At this point, we just do whatever the fuck we do. We almost hit 20 minutes on card games. That's the thing. We don't have too many video games to talk about this week. Go figure. That being said, I guess I'll start with the games. I've been I had like four last week. Stop your bitching. That's fair. No, you're doing pretty good. Judge Graham better than me. But no, I'm playing Harry Potter. The Lego games. Years one through four currently. I think that's what I'm going to be streaming tonight. It's either that or Pokemon sword. My switch was dead when I went to go live with that recently. I was like, fuck. And the thing with the switch is it needs like a charge for like a fucking hour or something before it even comes back. So I was like, that sucks. So, yeah, one of my streams where I'm like, yeah, I'm going to be playing Pokemon Sword, everyone. Turns out we were playing fall guys. Jokes on you. But no, I think it's so we can actually have a decent amount of charge before we start playing. Instead of like, charge it for two minutes, play for two minutes, charge it for two minutes, play for two minutes. We're going to require like a minimum hour, otherwise what's the point of charging it? That's a good point. Yeah, and I've run into that multiple times and it's always frustrating, but it's my own damn fault for letting it get to that point. I just leave it in the dock when I run. Exactly, that makes sense. But yeah. So, Harry Potter Lego game. Pretty fun so far. It is just like very collective oni, which is what I'm setting out for. It's going to be just like a late laid back experience. Hopefully the viewers and stuff in the chat can help me uncover some stuff I might be missing and that still playing Fall Guys season five is pretty awesome. I did get my first crown on the new final lost Temple, so that was very satisfying. And I'm trying to think of anything else important happened. Not really. The game has been pretty glitchy, honestly. I have a few funny clips on my Twitch channel for just like insane glitch moments in that game. But yeah, having a lot of fun with that still. And I'm trying to think what else. Looking for a phone game, can't find one. Please listeners, get in touch with us, tweet at us if you know any good mobile games. That was a thing that people were like, bitching about. They were saying, like, oh, the free games coming to PlayStation for the month of August are going to suck ass. And then it turns out they don't. I don't honestly remember what they are. I'm going to look them up real quick. Well, first off, they're free to, like, chill your nuts. Yeah, true. I mean, technically, it's not for your paying for PlayStation Plus, but PlayStation Plus also does other things beyond just those games. So you could easily not have those free games if you don't want them, actually. All right, here we go. Yeah, I found them. It's hunters arena. Legends. I don't know what that is. Plant versus Zombies Battleford Neighborhoodville, which people say Plant versus zombie games are actually very good. And then the other one is Tennis World Tour two So no, that's right. That's why the internet is complaining. I understand it. But again, like you said, when I say free, you're paying for the service. You're paying whatever it is, a month or a year for the PlayStation Plus service, which really all it does is give you access to the online capabilities of the platform and it gives you access to these free games in air quotes. But yeah, I remember last year in 2020, I think, what was it, march or May 1 of those months was just absolutely atrocious with just games that nobody gave a shit about. So, yeah, everyone's already starting to make comparisons, but, man, maybe I'm just living in a dream world. I could have sworn this is what people were speculating were the free games and then there was different games that were the actual free games. I'm probably just wrong. I mean, it's the same with what games are on the front page of any store, like the Steam store, the Nintendo shop store stuff. There's always some background politics going on and how they decide what game is what. It's never going to be like, hey, the new Lord Crop Tomb Raider game that came out last month, what? It's free. That will never happen. It's going to be either an older game or a game people aren't as familiar with or don't really care about or just not as good games, but they still have the budget or money to put it out there and free and get people's eyes on it. The PlayStation Plus membership allows you to do other things as well. So it's not just a free get, these three free games a month service. So there is other stuff you're getting with it, but also, it is a free game. If you don't like it, don't buy. Don'T load that and don't yeah, don't complain. Yeah, if you do like them, hey, you got a free game. It's that simple. Hey, I went to the supermarket and they were giving out free samples of caramel, salted, shrimp on a stick. I'm allergic to seafood. What the fuck is this about? Hey, don't eat the shrimp on the stick if you're allergic to shrimp on the stick. Like, it's that simple. Just don't bitch about it. Because you don't have to do anything that's people who have too much free time and are feeling entitled, believing that they deserve good quality free games, guess how those games are made? Dipshit. You have to spend money on them to pay the companies. That's how Mikami works. Entitled never. But no. Conversely, the PlayStation Now service, which is their cloud gaming service, that is more expensive, an additional thing you can pay for monthly. They're offering some really cool games now for free again, air quote for the month of August and moving forward, they are introducing Near Automata, Undertale and Ghost Runner. So I'm like, man, those are some heavy hitters. So I was subscribed to PlayStation Now for a month or two just to see what it was about. I remember playing like Jeopardy and nothing like AAAA game. But no, this seems pretty exciting for anybody that does subscribe to that service. Very cool. This is the background politics I was talking about. People already know what PlayStation Plus is. They've had it since PS three. I had it for a yes, exactly. It's been around this new service they're trying to sell that. They're trying to move that and trying to entice people to buy that. How do you entice people to buy it? Give good games that people know about and want to play if they haven't already played them, or play together if they have already played that's. When you do the big triple A titles like Near Automata or the classic indie darling like Undertale or something new. That's eye catching. And also an indie not darling quite yet, but an indie studio like Ghost Runner. I've heard good things about that, but it's definitely more. I think. AAA. Studios have AAAA. Yeah, that's how you entice people to do a new service or product by giving them something to spend money on, as opposed to PlayStation Plus, which is probably still making a decent amount of money or making as much as it ever has, but I doubt it's ever going to grow from where it was at its peak. I think it's probably plateaued and bottomed out a bit, but it's still raking in casually a decent amount of money to keep it. Oh, for sure. Yeah, that makes sense. And it explains now why I was confused to begin with. It's like, oh, the bad games are coming to PlayStation Plus, but the good games are coming to PlayStation now. It's like, okay, fuck, I'm just getting my services confused. Yeah, maybe the PlayStation will eventually get off a service that does both what now and what plus does on one service, and then they have a third service that they can try and sell you on. Oh, God. Jack up the price. This is how digital age works. Yeah, but that's my gaming update. Again. Don't have too much going on. Shit. Did I play anything on the switch? I feel like I did and I just can't even remember if I think of it. I'll report in, but oh, that's something I want to just shout out. It was more or less for show topics, but since I'm talking about the switch, there's a black pink island coming to Animal Crossing new horizons. And for people that don't know what Blackpink is, it's a K pop group. Oh my God, I'm so excited. Okay, I have nothing to contribute to. That's completely fine. That's all good. It's Kpop. I didn't expect much from Brent. Got me singing and dancing. Dude, they've been around for five years. They have like a movie coming. But all I got to say about it is in that little time they've just set the world on fire. Their fucking music videos have billions of views. It's not even like, that's like one 6th of our planet's population. Like what? I've been out of college for more than five years. If you think I've spoken to anyone in that time about anything relevant, topical. Or hip yeah, that's a sad thing. I'm the first person to be like, I don't subscribe to anything mainstream, but they kick ass. Blackpink, I'm coming to your island in Animal Crossing soon. That sounds like a threat. No, it's friendly, I promise. Okay, sure. In your area it sounds like a far cry. Like Far Cry seven. Isn't that a Far Cry plot? It might be. It might be, but how about you, Brandon? Have you been playing anything new or interesting? Let's see. Beat Death store. I talked about that plenty. Last time. There's a game I played a demo of a while back and I just forgot to mention it. But it's a game called Greek. Now this is a game that's going to have some bad SEO. Yeah, like the yogurt. No. Okay, imagine freak, but with a G. Oh, God damn it's. G-R-E-A-K. That is just immediately go back to the writing board. Yeah, no, just throw that one in the trash and start over. That's also like the country. Is it an acronym? I don't think so, not that I'm aware of. I think it's the main character's name. I forget already. It's not like it's one of those classic indie darling, side scrolling metro venue games, QC art style with little fantasy creatures. It's Greek game, but I think the main character's name is Greek. But there's not a lot of dialogue or any text at all really in it. Okay, so I forget already. Also, I played this like a month and a half ago I just forgot to talk about till now. But yeah, it is a good game. But yeah, that name is going to be rough to pin down. Even just trying to find the trailer. I had a little bit of trouble even just saying like, Greek switch game and they're like, do you mean a game that's developed in Greece? My big fat Greek wedding. What do you mean? It's like, no, this specific one. So just name alone is going to be rough for it. But yeah, like I said, indie game size growing, metroidvania sort of game platformer, like hollow knight and stuff like that. Hell yeah. Beautiful colors. The kind of unique thing about this game is it's a fun platforming size growing adventure. But you play as three characters. So that's the thing that kind of breaks it out from a lot of Metroidvanias. And from what I've seen, the demo I played a it's got a demo, which I'd love to see, like, because $60 is a decent amount of money, you don't want to just throw it in blindly and go like, well, this sucks. Time to refund this and deal with that ordeal. Right? With the demo, it's like, hey, I got an idea what this game is about. I'm kind of interested. I'll check it out when it actually comes out. You play as three characters. One of them is a typical fighter, sort of you got a sword, you have a combat role and stuff. You have a crossbow. One of the downsides of the crossbow is you have limited ammo and it's really hard to see the arrows. There's no arrow pointing down. Like, hey, there's an arrow over here. I'll be running around and I'll pick up a few arrows and not even realize it because they're just laying on the ground and I can't see them at all. Right. So there's probably some few things they could be working out with this demo afterwards, but yeah, so one guy's just got the sword and the combat role and the arrows and stuff. And he's just a combat and sort of style. The girl is like typical video game fantasy tropes. The girl is the magic caster and she has ranged attacks, but it's not too far. It's probably like say like ten or 15ft in front of it's. Got a limited range for the screen, but she's got an infinite amount of it. So it just has a cool down after using so much of it. And the magic bar is used for everything. She can jump and float like Peach and Mario Super Mario Bros. Too. But that requires magic. So you got to just manage your cool down. And then there's a third character, which I didn't get to play as, but I saw in the trailer and on the art and stuff, where looks like a big heavy armor, like has a spear shield sort of character and stuff. So he's like the tank, sort of like brute guy. But yeah, you run around, he collects little trinkets, you fight little monsters and stuff. It's pretty standard Metrovania, but it's fun. It's got a cute art style. Incredible. Yeah, man, this looks really cute. Yeah, it's very charming and stuff. And it's not like OEG, where there's big cinematic trailer or animated trailer and it looks fun and it's actually in the game. It's not completely unrelated to the game, like the one game OEJ. Oh, that's right. Yeah. But yeah, the cool thing with this is you're managing three characters, or as far in the demo is concerned, two characters at a time, and you just group them together and you'll just switch whichever one's dominant. The fun thing is, or the well done thing is, the character that you're not playing as will follow along and still has some semblance of control. Like, they'll not control. The opposite of control, autonomy. They will still function on their own. If an enemy walks up to either one of them and they're not being controlled, they'll still defend themselves. They're not going to be as good as you with any real tactics or skills. Sure. But they'll stand there and they'll shoot them to death or slash them with the swords. They'll defend themselves and maybe move around a bit to avoid it. So it's not like, all right, I got to take control of the new fighter. Magical is just going to die wherever she is. Yeah. Because there's nobody controlling her, therefore she has no conscience. Yeah. So it changes from I'm playing three characters, or it changes from like just a generic escort mission as a game to I'm playing as, three characters with their own independence and stuff. That's cool. Which is very convenient. Once I saw that, I was like, oh, they can still be overwhelmed, they can still be killed when you're not playing as long. Oh, sure. So you want to put them in a safe area, but say, for example, I put one of the characters in a safe area and all, some little slime monster appeared to start attacking the warrior character. I'm not playing as. He's still alive, he's still off on his own, defending himself. But I don't have to rush back and micromanage three characters while I'm trying to get the main puzzle done. Exactly. So that was very neat, and they do it pretty well. There was a few things that was not clear. Some of the mechanics for combat was not clear. I got to a boss fight, which is the end of the demo, and I was really struggling with this boss fight. It was really fucking hard. And then I found out you could triangle jump up a wall like Metroid or Mega Man, where you jump and then jump away from the wall and go back to the wall and you go a little higher and you can keep jumping to navigate your way up the wall. That way you can stick to the wall. Sort of, yeah. That made the combat 100 times easier. And that was never made clear to me in the demo. I don't know if it will be in the actual game. Okay. There was never a point where you actually had to triangle jump or like scale up a wall that way. But that is such a useful tactic when the boss who was very simple, it was just a bigger character with like a club that would swing at you with the club and if he got too far away, he would charge you and ram the wall. And then when he got him past half health, he kind of went to berserker mode where he would swing the club three times and then when he charged to do ram attack, he would bounce against the wall three times and then hit the wall on the last one and get like stuns. Okay, so with that character I was like, oh, he's got a club, I just got to stay out of melee range. I'll just do the caster girl with the magic and just shoot him from far away and consistently would get him down to half health every time, no problem, pretty easy. And then anytime he started rampaging, I had trouble and would die. But as soon as I learned that you can climb up the wall that way, I would just climb up the wall while he was running around because anytime hit the wall, he kind of shook the ground and stunned anyone that was on the ground. And your jumps in it are just barely high enough to get over him when he's charging at you. Yeah. But you land almost immediately after that. So when he charges at you and you jump over him and as you're hitting the ground, he's hitting the wall and stuns you and it kind of gets stun locked because the jump is so short you don't have enough time to recover from landing and then jump again when it comes back at you. Yeah. So you'll jump over him, he'll hit the wall, stun you and then he'll immediately run back and hit you again and it's like a guaranteed hit. So being able to just scale up the wall higher and when he ran into the wall, it avoided it. So I would just go way up on the wall when he was charging and then when he got tired of charging, I would come down and way along a bit and became so much easier. But I was going to say not knowing that mechanic. Yikes. Yeah, so it reminded me of like Death store where the final boss and that would slow you down and you would be able to break out of that, but at no point did I ever need to break out of that. I was always able to avoid the textbook. Yeah. So because of that mechanic was never explicitly introduced and you can't really experiment with that type of stuff, especially when it's a boss mechanic, because you only encounter that in the boss fight and sometimes you'll die trying to figure it out and it's not clear. And that's why game design, you want to introduce stuff like that earlier in a dungeon or in a level. Yeah, so stuff like that. So, like I said, there's some stuff they could be working on. They could be fine tuning, but a lot of it's really cool. It's a platform where you can actually swim, which is borderline unheard of in any game I've ever played. So there's, like, little water levels and stuff. And yeah, it's cool. Where you can even go to different areas with the characters. You can go to different sections of the castle you're exploring, wherever it is, the cave system. So you don't all have to be on the same screen or, like, the same area at the same time. You can swap back between them and stuff. Yeah, that's interesting. It's not like Pink Pikmin where you just got a little group of random people following you around. No, they're pretty independent. They're all heroes. You can swap between them, and they'll handle themselves and stuff. So it's pretty neat. It's, you know, like, as a demo, I'm not sure when the actual game is coming out. I think maybe I think I see. The release date is actually this month available August 17. Greek Memories of Azur. Okay, there you go. So later this month, maybe they won't be able to fine tune some of the stuff they complain about. Fair, but yeah, I just was scrolling through. I don't know where I saw this. Maybe on, like, one of Nintendo's, like, directs that they were just streaming randomly throughout the years. Or maybe, like, the E Shop, where it's just like, hey, what demos do you have that I can play around with? An experience. Yeah, and this is one of them. I'd say it's pretty neat for a $60 game. I'd say if it's anything less than $6, it's pretty damn good. Definitely, price wise will be dependent, but for, like, a little indie metro venia game with multiple characters, a unique twist to it, pretty neat. And, yeah, like I said, the art was probably the most compelling thing for. Me, so I definitely as cute as hell. Yeah, so I played that a while back, and then besides that, like I said, not much Hollow Night anymore because I want to save that for the plane ride and stuff when I am not near WiFi. Finished that store we're talking about that Knockout City. You got the new seasons of that. Playing with some friends. My one friend who's pretty big into Knockout City, who's getting pretty competitive with it, he's like, all right, we got to do this. We got to do this. What tactics does this guy use? We got to pull Strategize and me and my other firms. What? No, I'm not paying attention to what they're doing. Are you kidding me? No. I throw a ball. Me, caveman, empty head. I get ball. I throw a ball. Exactly. It's so high energy with that game. It's hard to really strategize because it's just so fast pace. There definitely is strategy, though. I'm exaggerating, but it just like got like one level is a parking garage. In each level has little gimmicks. The parking garage gimmick is there's like tubes, like at the bank. I forgot what they're called, the tubes, where you put like a money order and put in the tube. It's sucked up into the bank and then they launch it back out to you. Yeah, there's those around the level so you can get sucked up in a tube and go halfway across the map really quickly. I hate this level. I've realized probably the most because if it's parking garage structure, it's not in an actual parking garage. It's like a futuristic, post punk, apocalyptic society sort of thing. So it's different. But there's a lot of walls, there's a lot of fences, a lot of ceilings. And the camera is behind your character. And if the camera floating around, hits the wall, it zooms in on your character itself. And it kind of reminds me of Mario 64 where I'm fighting the camera most of the time. I hate that I'm not amazing at this game, but I would attribute a lot of my deaths and not knowing what's happening is because the camera I was turning around as I was moving and the camera hit a wall and zoomed in closer to me and narrowed my field of view. So I didn't see what was happening as well. And I ran off the edge or something. That's relatable. Yeah. So the camera is really struggling with the camera. A lot of the time it matches. So that can kind of get annoying. It'd be great if the camera was not physically in the game. You don't see like a liquido floating around every player, but it's clear it's got physics to it where it will collide with objects and stuff. It'd be great if it went through a wall and then the wall would just be transparent from the other side. Like a one way mirror sort of thing. Yeah, because there are plenty of games that have done that. That's not like a revolutionary idea, but that would be great where it's like, yeah, that way the camera is not moving constantly with my player. But yeah, besides that, we playing a lot of the ranked matches. It's like double expedite weekend right now. There's a lot of that going on. It's fun. It gets really, like I said, just so high paced against chaotic as hell. Still real buggy. Still real buggy. We'll be in a match. The match will start. We'll still see the little thing in the bottom right corner saying, looking for a match as we're playing a match. And then a minute into the match, it will be match bound and we go, what? And then we all get pulled out of that match. What? Throw. Wow, that is real buggy. Wow, that's happened multiple. One of the bugs other bugs. Like I've talked about where I'm like, I just went blind for a round, or that character is invisible and no one can see that. Wow. As fun as this game is, especially with friends, it's a lot of bugs. Yeah, I know. I was alluding to some of the bugs and fall guys earlier. One was so crazy, and I think I even have the clip of it where I won a fall mountain and I absolutely should not have. There was, like, three or four beans in front of me. Sure, some of them jumped early for the crown and missed, but one of them, you can clearly see it in the clip, is grabbing the crown and then get sucked up, up inside of the crown, and then they don't win. And I was like, what just happened? And then I went and got the win, and I felt like I just cheated, but I didn't. It was the game glitching, then. Apparently that's a very common glitch in that too. So, yeah, get your glitches fixed. Games. Do you ever see yourself playing, like, a tournament in Knockout City? I could see a tournament, yeah, because it's kind of I never get competitive with this stuff. It's just like, hey, it's a game. Sometimes you gripped up with a random person who's not good or got a. Shit all the time. But I know playing, like, overwatch, like, Mark would get pretty heated or some of our friends could break, I'm so great. Why didn't I win? It's like, because you got five other people that ain't doing shit. It happens, man. With Knockout City, I could only see tournaments happening if they want to have them. It's hard to do, though, because I don't know. Yeah, like I said, there's a lot of books to it. It's kind of funky at times. Not a ton of lag. There's moments, but not a lot of characters glitching at because a lag or, like, the game slowing down because the lag which is good. So they got something going right with the Net Code, like optimized in that regard. But it would be so hard because some people I don't know if they have faster reflexes and I'm just old, or if it's just like, they have better gear systems. Some people can seem to automatically catch any ball you throw at them. And the only way to actually knock them out is if you throw two balls at them with you and your teammate. That way they catch one ball and they can't catch the second one quick enough. Right? Yeah. There are some people we played against. We're not even that high in ranked. We're, like, probably middle, I think. It's like you start out like neutral, then you get, like, was it bronze, silver, gold? Then, like, sapphire, emerald, ruby and a diamond. Okay, so we're in, like, sapphire. We're quite literally in the middle of the ranks, so we're not that high. But some people, the only way we've ever gotten them out is if we hit them both at the same time with two players. And that's hard to coordinate sometimes and harder to do the game, and some of it's just insane with people. Like I said, I don't see people streaming this. I'm not looking for it. I'm sure there are people streaming it, but I haven't watched people play it or on a higher level play, so maybe they are just that good, but some of it feels broken words. Like, I definitely should have hit that guy, and he's still up, though. Or when they throw a ball at me, it's lightning fast, even though it only has one charge on it, and it should not be that fast. So, like, I don't know. I'd be willing to get into a tournament with my friends and play with them because it's like three man team, so we have enough. But I definitely wouldn't take it seriously. Oh, I'm the best knockout city player in the world. That game's buggy as fuck. I don't trust your skill level. You might have just gotten really lucky. So same kind of like with Overwatch. It was never intended to be a competitive game, and the fact that they're making it esport and forcing it into this position is kind of janky, and it's like, oh, I'm the best widowmaker. It's like, yeah, you're a sniper in a game that's not about sniping. Cool. I wouldn't take it as serious, but I could definitely see Knockout City torments happening. It is a fun game. It is pretty simple to understand. It's dodgeball, but once you start getting into it, it gets nastier and it's hard. But yeah, I don't know. Just the unstable that it has right now, I can't take it as serious as that. Makes sense. Also, I'm just not a competitive person. Fair. Yeah. I'm with you on that whole mentality of just like, we're just here having fun. Yeah. My friend's like, oh, what rank are you? Like, I ranked up like the other it's like, oh, I haven't played rank since the last time. I don't play rank by myself because that's not fun for me. Fun for me is just like, we go into a casual mode, and you just fuck around. You win, cool. You lose, cool. Exactly. But then, yeah, sometimes competitive is really competitive. So it's like, I don't care. My skin that I got is blue instead of being purple. If I got a high rank, okay, that doesn't matter to me. It's all cosmetic anyway. There's no real benefit. Nothing more than bragging rights. I'm just like, I don't care. That's fair. Speaking of that, speaking of competitive and all that, pokemon unite. Honestly, playing that more than I thought it would be for Amoba. Yeah. Wow. Still playing it. Yeah. So they had an update. They introduced a new Pokemon. So now we have Guardovar as, like, the newest player or newest character you can play, as there's rumors of Blissy being a new support character coming up. Blissy is the evolved form of Chansey. Yes. And so for those characters, you start off the match as the lowest form of that Pokemon, and you evolve as the match progresses. And then there's some Pokemon hit like Lucario or Mr. Mine, who are just in that form the entire time and evolve from the previous one. My question with that is fucking why? Because you got Lucario, Mr. Mimes Snorlax all in there, all in that form, the entire match. Yeah, but there's mime junior, there's munch lax, and there's some pre form of Lucario. Wow, I forgot. Yeah, I didn't even remember that they exist. So why is Pikachu? Pikachu is always pikachu, right? Why not Peach? You? Pikachu evolves in a pikachu. Granted, Pikachu evolves in a Rice with Thunderstow, so maybe not Stone Evolutions, but why are some of these in the standard form this whole time and some of them evolve? I feel like there might be, like, a boost. I don't know if the Evolutions are just, like, cosmetic or if there's actually with Slow Poke, if his Attack Speed gets a little faster when he pumps Slope Row or something, right. If there is a change in the actual stats of when they evolve, that's made me skeptical of why they're picking certain ones. Granted, if it just stays consistent, fine, but I don't know. It makes me question why they pick certain ones. Or maybe those are just more iconic than the baby bird. No one really gives a shit about Mine Junior, though. Not a ton of people care about Mr. Mime to begin with, so, like, no, I'm still playing that. I actually have a Pokemon now for every category, there's, like, Speedster, Attack, Defender, Support All Around, and now I actually have a Pokemon for each category, which is convenient when you're doing casual or quick matches, they give you a roster of free Pokemon you can use. So I think there's, like, three or four free Pokemon you can use, and it rotates out every week. But in a ranked matches, you can only play the characters you own. So I never owned an all around character, which could be very beneficial for the team. So that was tough to play in ranked matches when I didn't own that type of character. But now that I do, I can play as Blue Cardio and do pretty well. Nice. Once again, with the ranks, it's very competitive, and at least with this game, it's kind of pay to win. You can get items and you can upgrade your items with material. You can pay actual currency to get that material and upgrade your items higher or faster earlier, and that will actually have ingame benefits. So that's kind of the pay to win element of this. Okay. I don't think it's a ton where it's like, oh, I have a level ten item, that guy's level 20 item because he paid for it, that will single handily decide this battle. There's a ton of other stuff that will decide. I definitely think that helps. And it's not clear you can't see what items the enemy is using or what level those items are. So it's not always clear of, like, that guy's, he's a paid to winner. He's doing this. Unless they have, like, the cosmetic skin, which you can only get through purchasing stuff. Then it's like, I got to spend. Money on this game, clearly. Yeah. So it's not like a ton. It's not like a blowout of like, there's the people with the cosmetics that are just dominating everything, and here's people without them. It's still pretty balanced for effectively being paid to win. But once again, with the MOBA, it's tough of like, man, I got MVP, as, you know, slow, bro. I'm at the top lane. No one even got to my goal. No one scored my goal at all. I'm doing great. And then the four four out of five other players on my team didn't do jack shit, and we got dominated on, and the score is 20 to 930, which has happened. Damn. So it's like, yeah, your team's got to be working well and together. If you're not all working on the same page, you're going to lose. So stuff like that happens a lot where I take screenshots of it when it's just a complete blow. And I think 930 some to 20 was the biggest difference I've ever seen. Yeah. That's intense. Yeah. So it's still fun. It's still real fun and real cool. And they got different game modes. They got quick battles which are only five minutes in different areas and stuff. I'd be interested in seeing different maps for the main arena. That would be nice, but the game just came out, but I'm hoping that will be in future updates. Guardovar is also an attacker. There's more attackers than any other category. That was a problem with Overwatch, where DPS is just the most dominant class. Because I got to get the highest kill to death ratio. I got to get those kills. I'm a gamer, bro. Yeah. So that's kind of annoying. I'd like to see more all around, more defenders or more blissy is supposed to be a support, if that's a real rumor. So that'll be nice to see. But yeah, it's weird playing games where it's like you're playing a mirror match, where you're playing all the identical same players or same Pokemon on each side of the team, and then one of them just fucking dominates you and you can't pinpoint why. It's like what happened? We're the exact same Pokemon. Why is this team doing so much better? They're just coordinating better, and that player knows how to play their Pokemon better. Like Snorlax. Snorlax is a true honestly, god, nightmare, hell beast, if you know what. You're doing? He is unkillable if you know what you're doing. Hell yeah. Single handedly turn a tie to bat up the match. So it's crazy how just one good player can carry a team, but it's not guaranteed. There's no because you can be the best player in the world if you're playing with four other actual babies who don't know what they're doing. Yeah, you're going to lose. The meta is kind of I talked about before. Kill Zapdos at the two minute mark, you get the free scores on the other goals and all those points are doubled. That's still kind of the meta. I've played matches where we got zappos and lost. I played matches where the other team got zapped and lost. So it is possible. But boy, is it hard to like when he gets at this. It's just so powerful. So I'm still seeing if they're going to nerf that in some way. Like we talked about, either you get the fast score on goal, or you can just score instantly or your score is doubled if you score while this is out. Maybe not both is insane. But yeah, still, playing that, it's fun. For anyone interested, I'm primarily playing slope bro. Mr. Mime. Lucario. I don't really do attack, like, attackers and DPS. There's always like one or two people doing that on the team, so I rarely do. But I think if I have to, I'm typically nine tails. The aloha nine tail. Nice. Hell yeah. So that's cool. But yeah, it's cool. Seeing the differences like what Pokemon people like and stuff. My body mind means wiggly tough, which is very strong. You wouldn't expect a wiggly tough to be as strong as they are, but yeah, God help you. Or like with me, Mr. Mime, the combo I do takes out a quarter, if not half of someone's health in one shot. It can be very powerful sometimes. You don't expect wiggly tough to be tough. It's in the name Bran. I expect it to be tough. I expect to be tanky. But wiggly Tough deals that damage with like, a double slap and a rollout move. It does a lot of damage. Damn, it's surprising. That's cool. It's fun mixing and matching different abilities and seeing which one's the best and stuff. Grand Ninja. I just got grand ninja recently. Not a fan. Grand Ninja is a cool Pokemon. It's very cool, like a frog ninja thing. Very cool. I'm not great playing them, though, okay. But yeah, it's cool seeing them. Like, they're better for the quick battles because the quick battle is less about defending your goal and more of just scoring more on the enemies and stuff like that. Because with quick battles, it's just like instant dunks and stuff. So it's fun, it's cool. It's a little weird and buggy at times. Sometimes it'll glitch out, kick me out and stuff. Not nearly as bad as Knockout City, though, so I can't complain. Too mad? Yes, very much. One probably the biggest complaint I have. It's small, very small. But when you're loading a match, you can see all the Pokemon cards of who is fighting who like your teams. If you click on the Pokemon card, it'll turn and show you the trainer profile image, the picture that you can customize and change. It doesn't always show what you picked it as. So you just pick what your picture is, and that's what your picture is and how you always see it. But anytime in a match, you can have three variations of your picture that are kind of different in some ways. And I don't know if that's intentional. Like, oh, it changes sometimes. You never know quite what you'll get, but it'll be similar to what you wanted. Or if it is just like bug, where it's like, we're not loading these properly and it's just bugging out. So that's kind of something. Because if someone sees, it be like, oh, why did they choose that picture? They might not have that might be in between the default pose and what they actually chose, and it just isn't loading correctly. That's funny. Like I said, it's just cosmetics. It's a little thing, but I can't tell if that's a bug or not. And if it's not a bug, that's a weird choice. I was going to say it sounds like it is, but to be determined. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, it's pretty much all I've played. That's cool. Yeah, I guess we can wrap this episode up. I only have, like, one thing for show topics. Maybe if you have anything, we could talk about that too, but all right. The one I wanted to shout out at least was apparently Super Monkey Ball. Banana Mania is getting a new playable character, and it's Beat from the Jetset Radio franchise. And I'm like, Bro, how many years too late is this? I'm very excited. Don't get me wrong. I'm like, this is so incredibly cool. And it's like, don't get me wrong, I love Super Monkey Ball games. So this is already, like a super selling point. I usually don't pay for them because they're expensive. And it's like, you only get so much enjoyment out of those kind of games. And I don't know, but playing as one of my favorite characters from one of my favorite games is like, I'm more interested in this. But yeah, Beat, who the fuck even knows who that is other than me? I'm excited, but man, it just feels very strange. Super monkey balls like, hey. Or rather it be like if the Spiderman games, like Spiderman Miles from her House are like, hey. One of the playable skins you can play as is Rocket the Robot on wheels. You know, the N 64 game Insomniacs made back in, you know, 98 that only I played in rental from Blockbuster. It's like, what? Why? How about the brave little toaster next? Like, oh, yeah, I don't know. But it's but the one thing I will shout out in the little announcement trailer they had for is that instead of collecting bananas, you're collecting graffiti cans. It's so cute. I'm very good. Oh, that's very nice. Yeah. Maybe they see the cyberpunk. No. Was it cyber bomb rush? Yes, the cyberpunk cyberpunk bomb rush. Yes. Maybe they're seeing people getting excited for that and they're like, hey, shit, maybe we should capitalize this. No. Fuck. And that's what made me think when I saw this, I'm like, are they secretly making another Jetset Radio game? I'm not. But all I got to say is watch the cyberfunk finally drop. And then they're like, oh, by the way, we have the real deal coming out. Like, a year from now. It's just like, shitty. It would be everyone who worked on Jessica Radio is now working on Cyberfunk effectively. So it would just be like the IP owners being like, well, we got the C team studio rigging up like there's zombies now because they don't care. This game franchise deserved better. At least we're getting cyberfunk. That's all I got to say. That is, to me, the spiritual successor, and I will be playing that day one. But, man, it feels like Sega did fuck up. It's like, you all had a great franchise. People love it and you just forgot all about it. And now we're bringing it back into super monkey ball. For some reason. For some reason, even me who didn't play it as a kid, so I don't nostalgia for Jetset Radio playing. It like pseudo recently on Steam. It's a great game. It kind of controls like ass. Like the controls, right, is not good. Yeah, but like, a modern game, like any modern game could have easily made those mechanics and gameplay smoother and stuff, and the grinding more easier to play. Jetset Radio Future on the original Xbox, that was a lot smoother than the Dreamcast experience by far. But even still. And yeah, the story of Jetset Radio Future, like the way that game wrapped up was just super psychedelic and fun and awesome. It felt like there could be a sequel, but not necessarily. It did feel like a decent wrap up. But, man, I'm excited for cyber funk. But, yeah, that was just an interesting little Tidbit being like Beat in the year 2021. All right, we'll take a look. Yeah, but I think that's going to do it for this episode. I have one other crazy show topic. We'll save that for another day. Brendan, where can our listeners find you on the Internet? You can find me on Twitter. Just taking out the space and really not doing much with it at ABTS Brendan. And then I also have another podcast called our Weeb there yet, where we watch three episodes of an anime or a movie, give a recap of it, give our opinions of it. It's a good way to get a sampler pack of anime being like, yeah, I'm a little interested in this, but I don't want to watch it. Let me see what this is about. Most recently we watched I don't know what we watched. Most recently we watched Odd Taxi, which is a crime sort of thriller anime with a lot of animal people based on Taxi. It's good. I ended up watching Taxi. Taxi, I'm sorry, that's a really bad K pop song that I don't even like. But yeah, let's do this. Check out that podcast. It's a lot of fun. And if you like our show, please give us a, like, Fall subscribe we're findable at all the places at Abt silence, specifically Twitch TVT. Silence is where I'm streaming a variety of games, actually. A variety. Now I'm playing Harry Potter lego games. Pokemon, Sword and Fall. Guys, eventually I'm looking forward to doing some more trading card game, like actual plays. Like, I was playing Harry Potter trading card game with my wife there for a minute. We're probably going to get around to trying out Metazoo at some point, so if any of that interests you, head over to that account and give us a follow. Also, I have a record label. It's Missed Out Records.com. If you want to see what kind of vinyl and tapes are available for sale over there. I got some really cool, exciting releases coming out this year and the band that does our music intro and Outro music is a band called kind Of All Right, head over to Kinda All Right Bandcamp.com for more music from them, but that's going to do it for this week. Thanks so much for listening, guys. See you next time. Bye.

  • ABTS-415: Gaming By Numbers

    In this episode of ABTS, Doug and Bren discuss the games they’ve been playing, why you shouldn’t feel guilty for using a walkthrough, plus a promising new playtest of a tabletop roleplaying game called Icon!

    Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/abts/09926739-d119-4196-928c-e10c35d90a43

    This podcast is powered by Pinecast.


    Doug Coleman: Subscribe hey, everyone. Welcome back. It's another episode of Almost Better Than Silence. I'm your host, Doug Coleman, and I'm here today with the other co host, Brendan McCullough. How's it going, Brent?

    Brendan McCullough: It's going all right. Got a little bit this weekend, so that's nice. It's just perpetually on fire, as is LA's tradition.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, man.

    Brendan McCullough: It's just so hot. I can't hyperbolically say it's on fire as an exaggeration because it is actually on fire. Fire a lot of the time, but it's just very warm. It's just been tapping out at 98 all month.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, man. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, it's pretty nice. I feel like if it's not raining, it's like, pretty gorgeous out. So, yeah, my wife and I got a chance to go to a local fair, and it was just like, oh, my God. Social interaction again. It was like, wow. But it was very nice. And the food was incredible. Oh, my gosh. We both got to try deep fried oreos for the first time. And I was like, I've heard all about them, and I honestly didn't know what to expect. It's basically just funnel cake, but there's a molten oreo inside. And yeah, it was delicious. I think it was you, though, that said on this podcast, it was like, it takes years off your life. And I was like, yeah, makes sense.

    Brendan McCullough: I can't imagine it's good. I can't imagine it's really boosting you up. And marathon runners are chowing down. I mean, they money. That's a lot of calories.

    Doug Coleman: You never know. But yeah, it was tasty. Didn't go on any rides or doing any the Scam games, but it was just nice walking around and seeing the community.

    Brendan McCullough: I remember going to a little fair nearby with an old coworker, like a buddy of mine, because he's from Japan. So he's like, oh, I've never been to an American county fair. I'm interested. A few of us went. He saw all the rides. He's like, oh, it's kind of, like, dangerous. He's like, he saw the games. He's like, this kind of looks like cheap toys and fall apart the second you actually get them, if you actually win. I was like, yeah, that's a county fair.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: He was like the disillusioned real quick. I was like, yeah, you nailed it. That's exactly what it is.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. Over here is the tractors, the best plants. Actually, some of the things that were on display was, I'm guessing younger people's artwork. And some of it was super impressive. I think there was a theme of, like, just like, Asian art, and there was, like, some really cool anime characters and stuff. I was just blown away by some of the talent there. Yeah, it was great.

    Brendan McCullough: I'm fine with having younger people be like, a better athlete physically than me, but if you just see, like, artwork, it's like, oh, this was done by a six year old, and it's this fucking gorgeous beast.

    Doug Coleman: Master beast, for sure. It was like that someone did a watercolor painting of Ore in the Blind Forest. And I was like, Can I buy this? I'm like, God, that's how good this was. I was like, talented people around here.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, it's always as inspiring as it is down. troding is like just seeing like, god, their talent is so young.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, I wish I had that kind of talent. That's why we're podcasting. But no, that's not too real. This is a video game podcast for anybody new. Let's talk about the games we've been playing. I have a little bit of an update. Maybe I'll start it off with that. I was seeing our browsing the PlayStation Network and there was like a 70% off sale going on. It might still be around. So as you're listening, if you're interested, check this out. But I was looking for a deal that might catch my eye. And what did was the Harry Potter Lego games. I had always wanted to play a Lego game I never really have other than, like, I don't know, what was it back in the 90s, lego island, the one where you're delivering pizzas and that whole thing. So other than that, no real Lego game experience. Maybe I played a demo here and there, but I love the Harry Potter franchise. As everybody knows, I have that other podcast. But that's the thing. It was both games. Each one, I think, is years one through four, and then the other game is years five through seven. Both were bundled together in a collection for $5. I was like, all right, I cannot pass this up. I feel like I got to just play through these games and see how they go. I've heard nothing but praise for the Lego games in particular. So got around to trying it out just a little bit. Haven't gotten too far into it. I'm still on year one, but yeah, it's a lot of fun. It feels very much just like a game where if I don't want to take things too seriously, maybe even a game I could stream and just hang out with people in the chat and then gather all the coins and do all the spells. Yeah, exactly. So it seems pretty fun, but also very kind of like chore based. It's just like do all this stuff that's games where you go, God damn it.

    Brendan McCullough: Especially collect the thons. Like if you were doing the older games with the banjo Kazoos and stuff, where it's like, yeah, it's just a lot of running around, finding every little secret, collecting every little currency piece and unlocking all of it. So it's easy to do and some to occupy your brain while you're talking to someone else.

    Doug Coleman: Exactly. It's like you could be doing the dishes, the laundry, and cleaning your house, or you could have collected all the chocolate frogs. It's like, all right, I've gone to all those frogs.

    Brendan McCullough: He doesn't have that good platforming.

    Doug Coleman: I still think I'm going to have a lot of fun with it. For $5, I couldn't turn up that, so I'm glad to finally dip my toes into a Lego game. Have you played any Lego games yourself?

    Brendan McCullough: I remember actually having the Harry Potter Lego game, but I think it was before the Lego games kind of got an idea of what they wanted to be because they all started following, like, a similar style and writing and sense of humor and stuff between the Star Wars and the end of James the Harry Potter. So I don't know which one was first, but I think one of those set pace what the leg games would be. So they sort of thought me that. So I think that's the one you have. I think the one I had was more of like because it was for the computer back in 2002 or something, right. I think it was more of like a diorama builder, like a virtual Lego set where you could build it and they'd animate and stuff, but you didn't, like, play it, I think, because I remember I remember starting it up, not understanding how to play it and then never touching it again. I remember it was like building the scene, sort of rather than running around playing the movie, but in Lego version.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, wow. I had no idea. That's interesting. Yeah, I'm glad that they're bundling them together. But yeah, that's the thing. I've never played any other Lego game. I've heard the ones that are the best are the Marvel ones from a few people. Yeah, but again, I'm not that big into the superhero universe, so I'd have to watch all the movies. That's the thing. Brent, have you seen all the Marvel movies? Do you recommend going down that rabbit hole?

    Brendan McCullough: All of them? No, I think I missed Dr. Strange and then I started missing pretty much all of them since Endgame Happens, I was like, yeah, all right, that's the book end I needed. I'm out.

    Doug Coleman: Right?

    Brendan McCullough: Because the Black Widow, I haven't seen that. Honestly, probably the last three that came out. I don't even know what they are anymore. I probably haven't seen those. But, like, Endgame was pretty much like, all right, I'm done. I'm chicken out of this universe. It's already messy as it is.

    Doug Coleman: Fair enough. But yeah, so that's me enjoying a new game. Other than that, still just playing fall guys like crazy, streaming it, having a lot of fun with that. Got some crowns recently on Saturday Night Stream, so that was a blast. But yeah. Oh, wait, that's the thing. It's not even worth bringing up. But I tried doing some mobile games because I was like, I don't know, back in the day we talked about phone games, right. And fuck, I think I already uninstalled them. I don't even remember what they are. But no, I think one was called Adorable Home or something. And I was like, okay, I want to give that a try. It just didn't captivate me. I feel like I also maybe wasn't in the right mindset going into them. I was just like, very just like, let's see if this is going to be entertaining. And it was just like a very tedious click here, click here, click here, click here. Tutorial. And it's just like, oh, God damn it, I want something more than that. But it's like, then again, I am just playing a free mobile game. Exactly. So, yeah, actually, nothing to report there. How about you, Bread?

    Brendan McCullough: Maybe there's a reason we stopped talking about mobile games as much. Similar boat playing knockout city still. They did a new update, a new season for that. So there's a new stage where it's like it's like a hollowdeck sort of stage where every round of the stage is a different level.

    Doug Coleman: Nice.

    Brendan McCullough: The premise is, like, you're at the movies and you're supposed to be on stage for the movie. And it's like the different scenes of like a movie of like a warehouse of a castle, something else, like a fairy princess one or something. So it changes per round, which is neat.

    Doug Coleman: That is.

    Brendan McCullough: It takes a while to get used to. Where am I? Because he kind of memorized the maps. So it's like, oh, this one's throwing me off.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, definitely.

    Brendan McCullough: As well as that, they've introduced a new ball, which is like the soda ball, which is basically just the squid from Mario Kart. Like, it just blinds you, but with Mario Kart, where you can kind of see around the edges and still have an idea where you're going. This one just covers the entire screen with soda and you can't see anything.

    Doug Coleman: Damn, you can't see a thing.

    Brendan McCullough: It's nasty. And then, yeah, they got a few new games and stuff. It's cool. It's still buggy as hell. So when me and my friends were playing it one round, my screen was just black. It was just like black. And I had the loading symbol in the corner and that was it. But we were playing. I was in the match, but I just couldn't see anything, right? So I kept just being in a chat with my friends. I kept going to ball form whenever they were nearby so they could use me as a ball.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, that's all right.

    Brendan McCullough: Because I had no idea what to do and they could throw for me. You got to trust your teammates because if they mess up, then you're dead and you don't even know it. I was surprised how much I could tell was happening just from sound cues alone. Without seeing it, I could tell when a ball was coming near me and when I could catch it even without seeing it. So that was impressive. But then in that same match, one of the players in the enemy team was straight up just invisible because of a similar glitch.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, wow.

    Brendan McCullough: So it was for that one round. Once we were done that round, we could see that other character and then I could see anything. But then that happened again in another match with my other team, with my teammate. This time she couldn't see anything. So once again, I got City. It's cool. It's neat. I'm sure it's a small team working on it. It's real buggy. Still. Every update feels like two steps back with new bugs and glitches and stuff. So it's fun. They got clear, dedicated user base for it. And they're making the challenges harder, I think. So people can't beat them as quickly every week, but it's just tough to play sometimes.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, that makes sense.

    Brendan McCullough: So unless you got like a good group of people you want to play with regularly, I'd be surprised if it retains anyone because of that stuff of like, you know what, fuck this. It just keeps breaking. I'm not going to play this game. It's cool.

    Doug Coleman: They're updating it though, with the new season of exciting stuff.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. It's clearly have an idea of how they're going to do this and keep this as an ongoing sports game and stuff. I just wish some of the shit was more stable because Lag is not even that big of an issue. Like people from different areas are with shitty or internet glitching out. I haven't seen too much of that every now and then, but just the game itself breaking while I'm playing it is pretty common at this point. Yeah, that's unfortunate.

    Doug Coleman: Totally.

    Brendan McCullough: And the other thing I played was a death store. I beat that.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, nice.

    Brendan McCullough: The little Isometric top down Zelda game where you're a little rare. Your little crow. With that, I was like on my way to beat it and I was at like 87% completion. I was like, scared. I'm close enough. Let me go for 100. So I just opened up a guide, like a walk through just to tell me wherever the collectible stuff is because there are seeds that you find and then you have to find a pot and plant them. And then with that plant that's health to replenish if you ever lose it.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: So you have to get all 100 of those of those seeds. And then you find like shiny things because you're a crow, you find like shiny things which are just little shrinkage and items around the world. I think there's like 20 of those or so. And some of them help with world building. Some of them actually have purpose. Like there's a rusty garden shovel that will glow if you're in a level where seeds are still available. If you're in an area where there are no seeds, it won't glow. So little stuff like that or one is a picture as a puzzle formula on the back of it. So some of the trinkets actually do stuff. And then when you beat the game, there's like a new game plus where you can get, like, the true ending and do like night mode, like where you change it from day to night and that unlocks a whole bunch of other secrets. Really cool stuff, really great game, decent combat. Like I said, it's tough with fighting because there's no way of healing in combat. You can only heal from those plants after you find them running around, right? So I went around doing the completion, doing 100%. I got all the health and power upgrades or energy upgrades, and there's only two more than from when you start. You start the game with four of each health and energy and then you can get up to six and that's it. So in every combat encounter, you can't get hit more than four or six times at most. So it's kind of brutal in that regard, but none of the ball. I was able to beat it all and without choosing it. Really cool stylized style game, good mechanics, cool world, all that stuff. My biggest complaint is they're not clear with a lot of stuff. There's a lot of things they just don't tell you. Some of it is secrets and I can understand, but not revealing this, some of it just feels like basic mechanics that should very much be addressed. Like the trinkets that could actually be used in the world. If you, like, look at the trinket and read the description, you might be able to figure it out. But it's never clear. There's no obvious example of like, hey, this trinket in your inventory can pay off in the real world, right? Those two examples I gave you of the map and the shovel trial, those are the only two, only times that happens. So there's never one where it's like, oh, we've established this can be used in the real world earlier in the game. Another thing is there are manhole covers around the world and if you walk above them and slam down, you'll do like a drop down attack and you can shoot through the manhole covers, like in Mario and run around underneath the sewers and then jump up somewhere else in another Manhole. That's never introduced in the game. They'd never tell you that.

    Doug Coleman: You just get lucky or don't.

    Brendan McCullough: I found out because I was watching another streamer and she did it and she's like, she was playing new Game Plus. She's like, I never knew that was an option. So you can beat the game without doing it. It's not required to find story progression behind it, right? So she was able to be the game and it figured out in the Game Plus. I was like, oh, shit, I'm still playing it. I didn't know that. But to get all the secrets, to get 100% of the stuff, you do need to know how to do that. And I feel like that's really bad to miss, even if you just did it once somewhere for either a store progressive item or just a checkpoint, or made it very clear of, like, this is how you open the manhole covers. Here's how you travel through the sewers. There might be secrets in here sometimes because that's never intrudes at any point in the game. I feel like there's a big oversight of, like, how would we ever know this design?

    Doug Coleman: I feel like even if they're arguing, like, oh, we want to be mysterious, and the player has to figure that out, then put it in, like, a deep menu where it's like, I pull up the menu, it's like, what are the actual controls? And you don't know, sift through and be like, oh, I can't actually do that. I wouldn't have known unless I opened up this menu and read this shit.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, like, if they had a very narrow alley and it came to a dead end and at the end of it, it was, like, alleged with the manual.

    Doug Coleman: That's perfect. Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: But then if they put, like, an enemy on there, that way it teaches you, hey, if you do the drop down attack from above, it'll go through the manhole cover and you'll be in the sewers. Like a way that forces you to do it at least once in the game. That way you know it's possible because unless I was watching that streamer, I would never have known that's how you did it. So I was like, oh, there's a lot of stuff in there. So what else is another example for the final boss? It's not huge spoiler for anyone to worry about the game. For the final boss, they have one move where they slow you down and you're not fast and you can't roll, which is what you would do to dodge stuff when you're slowed down. And then while you're slowed down, they'll just jump up and then slam down on you and hit you. And it got me every single fucking time. And like I said, you can only get hit six times at most. So if the file boss did that six times, I was dead every time. I couldn't avoid it, right? Anyway, there was no way to roll out of it. You could be faster than there's, no quick dodge or anything. So it's just so infuriating every fucking time and looking it up. I'm like, the strategy guys. Don't say anything about this specific move, like the walk throughs and stuff. I was like, there's got to be a strategy. I just don't know what it is. Once again, watching a playthrough of it, I saw if you try to roll while you're slowed, the slow down symbol on you kind of expands and then shrinks back down. If you spam the roll move, the symbol goes bigger, bigger, bigger, and then it'll pop and you can get rid of it yourself.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, wow. Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: But once again, that's never told to you there was a previous section of that boss fight where it teaches you the individual mechanics of the boss fight and then the final fight, the boss uses them all at once. I was able to just run out of the way of his attacks before when he did the slowdown attack because it wasn't as honed in on me, it wasn't as targeted. So I never needed to roll out of the way like mash the roll bunt to break the slow spell before, right? So that was another one where it's like, you didn't need to do that to get to this point. So I never taught you how to do that. And once I knew that, I beat the boss immediately on my first try after learning that, the rest of the fight was easy enough. But that one move kept killing me over and over. And they never taught you how to break out of it. So there's stuff like that where it's like I feel like the onus is kind of on you to tell the players what can and can't be done in this game. Because that one, for instance, is so situational. You never have another enemy at any point in the game do that to you. Or like I said, I could always avoid the attached valve slowed down before then, right?

    Doug Coleman: Just like a little bit of text on the screen that comes up and goes mashax or something. It's just like, I don't know, something.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, because it wasn't clear of like, oh, if I did it, the simply gets bigger. It's like, oh, I keep doing it, it keeps getting bigger, and it will eventually break. That's not clear to me. I did it a few times to go, oh, I guess I can't roll. And then I stopped doing it forever. So it's a great game. I do recommend it. It's $20. It's a fun little Zelda esque Metrovania Isometric, but there are a few instances where I'm like, I'm pulling up a walk through, I'm pulling up a guide, I don't give a shit, and I'm figuring this out. So that's kind of why I do like the last stuff and the collectible stuff in the game. The true secret ending.

    Doug Coleman: I'm sure I'm going to be doing that with the Lego Harry Potter shit for sure.

    Brendan McCullough: Because at a certain point, it's like, oh yeah, I guess I could have figured this out if I played around with it for like ten more minutes or something. And then there's so many other ones where it's like, no, I would never have found this. And I'm not afraid to admit I would not have thought of this or I just didn't care enough about this, right? That's why I walk through and guides are perfect for that. I'm just like, fuck it. I'm not going to spend another 20 hours in this game trying to find the one seed I missed and the one level because it's a Metro venue where you unlock something, you go back to previous areas to unlock new things with your new abilities. The maps are kind of decently sized, but there's no real easy way to travel around. And it's kind of a bitch. So one of them is like, I went through a full area, I found the sear and I got to the end. You needed this NPC companion with. You ran back at this NPC companion. Got him. I couldn't quit travel with him. So I had to run through the three different worlds that were all connected to get back to that place I was just at and go through the whole maze of the puzzle again with that companion. I was like, this sucked. This is just very long. So there are a few annoyances and stuff like that. But I'd say overall easy. Like 80 out of 100 game.

    Doug Coleman: Nice.

    Brendan McCullough: B plus a minus maybe. So real fun, real good game. The boss fights were boss fights were a little easy. Some were decently, challenging and some were just like big minions out in the world. They weren't. There were like a mini boss, maybe. The mini bosses seem to be harder than the bosses typically, but interesting. Yeah, it's real fun game. It's not a ton of high stress, but like like I said, those secrets are just like, fuck it, let me just find out where this thing is. Because I had like I probably had like 18 out of the 20 shiny items by the end of it. So I was just like, escrow, let me just find these, like last few. But it's a neat little story. Fun little game that I recommend.

    Doug Coleman: Very cool. Yeah, I wouldn't feel bad about using walk throughs either. I feel like it's all about having fun and it's better than getting frustrated and turning the game off and be like, I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to do. I don't know. It's kind of like the equivalent of painting by numbers. It's like, I can do this, but.

    Brendan McCullough: I need I could paint on my own without the numbers. But boy, howdy do I not care enough to do that?

    Doug Coleman: Gaming by numbers. There we go.

    Brendan McCullough: Because I mean, before stuff like that, secrets. Like I remember on Xbox, the original Xbox, you would get scores based on like the achievements you got and stuff. So I remember people were like really achievement hunting back then because they're like, oh, it affects your gamer score. But on stuff like this, I think I have all the achievements in Dust Store except for three, which in order to get those, I'd have to replay the whole game, which I don't really care to do. So I'm not going to like restart the game just to get those three achievements. But all the secrets in the game I got because they were so close to it already. But yeah, it doesn't matter. Especially for a single player. Game if someone cheats and uses a walk through to find all these secrets of a collective on because some of them are cryptic and Vegas fuck. And I'm not ashamed to admit I wouldn't figure it out, but I still wanted to see what the true ending was, which any kind of spoiler for Death Sword. There's a true ending and like, I don't know, it's just another ending. It wasn't like, now I understand the game.

    Doug Coleman: Your mind wasn't blown.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, you honestly could take the true ending out and it would still be perfect sense. If not maybe a little more sense. The true ending kind of confuses shit more. What? But I don't know, maybe they're setting up sequels or something.

    Doug Coleman: Probably.

    Brendan McCullough: Recommend it.

    Doug Coleman: Nice. Let's see. Is there anything going on in the news we might want to talk about before wrapping this episode up? This might be a shorter one. I'm trying to think, what was it that I saw recently? It wasn't video game related. It was actually more tabletop related. So I feel like it might be up your alley since you've been playing a lot more DND and stuff lately, but a former coworker sent me this in a Facebook message. It's a game called and it's actually on itch IO. It's called icon. It's a play test by Massive Press. So I'm going to spell this for anybody that might be interested. In case you're not getting this link from our show notes, but M-A-S-S-I-F-P-R-E-S-S-H Ioikon the word icon. And man, this game looks cool. I remember the reason they reached out to me was they said, I saw on a reddit thread somewhere. They were like, I wasn't sure I would like it. And then I saw that a gun slinger paladin can summon an Astral Guardian and ricochet bullets off of it. I'm like, okay, that sounds interesting enough. And yeah, the artwork has a very strong square enix vibe, the whole visual design, but man, this game looks very interesting for all you DND nerds out there, but it's from the co creator of Lancer and the creator of Kill 6 Billion Demons. I'm unfamiliar with both, unfortunately. But, yeah, a new mythic fantasy role playing game takes the stage. And it looks pretty neat. I definitely recommend you guys checking it out artwork. Oh, my God. So good. These characters look ridiculous. Yeah, I love the cat oh, my God smell coming out of his mouth or something.

    Brendan McCullough: Mystic cat looking figure. Yeah, this looks cool. Yeah, he got, like a teeth flank paladin sort of looking at the top kind of, but it's funny for anyone who's not familiar, teethlings are, like, demon characters. Like, half demons.

    Doug Coleman: Yes.

    Brendan McCullough: And the books, officially, the book always says, like, they could be any skin tone or red, like any variations of those colors, and almost everyone just like, hey, what if this tie floor is fucking. Blue or purple or green or any other color the book says they're not, and it's pretty widely accepted. Yeah, it doesn't matter, just do whatever. So when I see a skin tone tiefling, I always kind of get thrown off like, what the fuck? That's what they're supposed to be. But I'm just like every time.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, no, it also just kind of blends in with their horns there, so it's just like, oh, gosh, is that skinned horns?

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, there's no separation like hellboy or.

    Doug Coleman: Anything, but it reads you take the role of an icon, a larger than life hero caught between the turning of two ages. Long ago, the cruel and prosperous arkan empire ruled the land until it fell to the doom. Over time, the land healed and the idyllic pastoral green age came to pass. Now, however, that peace is threatened by the coming of the churning age. With dungeons literally erupting from the earth and monsters pouring out of its great blights can increasingly turn their hearts to plundering their depths for riches and power and their hands to their sword hilts. Will you have the strength to resist this age? Or will you claim it's terrible power for yourself? So? Yeah. I don't know. Sounds interesting enough. Check it out. If you're a tabletop fan, it's currently a free play test for a future project.

    Brendan McCullough: Interesting.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. Typically what we talked about on the.

    Brendan McCullough: Show, but hey, who are you telling.

    Doug Coleman: Us how to do? I'm kidding.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. And if you do the play test stuff, you can be that small. Guyshole, that says back when they were doing the beta of this, this is a lot better.

    Doug Coleman: Exactly. They had skin colored tee flings now.

    Brendan McCullough: Back in my day. Yeah, that's neat.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. And another show topic I have, which isn't really super gaming related, but it's twitch related. This twitch streamer. Ray naves jr. I hope I'm not mispronouncing the name naveas. They basically were doing some pokemon unboxings and the one pack they opened had five wheels in a row. I think that is an actual record because people say, I think there's five or six commons per pack and it's just like impossible to draw more than that number in a row. And I'm just like, man, that's just unheard of. And his reaction was priceless. Yeah, if you haven't seen it, just google that. Man draws five wheedles in a row.

    Brendan McCullough: God, it had to be weird. It could have been something useful.

    Doug Coleman: No? Yeah, super upsetting.

    Brendan McCullough: Also playing a lot of pokemon unites still.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, nice. How's that going?

    Brendan McCullough: Good. It's real hit or miss. I got buddies who are doing the ranked play, so it's like you go from rank, which is like beginner, to great rank, to expert rank, to veteran rank, to master rank. And I got some buddies of mine who are already an expert in veteran rank and I don't know. Damn, because if you win around, you go up a point in your rank. If you lose around you go down a point in your rank. I don't know how they're consistently winning matches because anytime I joined with random people, it's a crapshoot of like, hey, this team is pretty good and knows how to play this game and hey, this team is actual toddlers who have no idea how they got here and are so bad at this game, right? And it's fine for free for casual playwater, but ranked I'm in. What is it? It's great. So it's beginner and great. So like the second rank. It's the second rank. You at least had to win a few. You have to understand how to play to get here. I'm not saying you have to be good, but you have to at least understand how the game works. And I still see people just running head first into like four enemies and dying and then doing it over and over and over again. It's like what's happening? So I don't know how you win consecutively in that game, but something domaining Mr. Mime, though not as much, I got a few other ones, but because the way I play Mr. Mime, he is still support but he's mostly attack with the guard swap psychic combo because he's mostly just doing the damage. So it's still good. But then there's other people like Cinese which is the fire bunny from Sword and Shield spinal form. He's just broken and you genuinely feel like you're bullying people when you play as him because it's so busted. He has so much damage and he's so far range or gang guard. I saw a video of a gang guard, one gang guard taking on four other people on the enemy team by itself and winning and it's just like, oh, that's genuinely broken, that's busted as fuck. So there is some janky unbalancing elements to it. Talking to a friend of mine that plays league legends all the time. That's kind of the nature of MOBA. It never is balanced. There's always going to be someone who's op and someone had gotten nerfed to hell and is useless now and then. I have seen people who are like a shitty gang or like a bad snorlax. But genuinely some of the Pokemon are easier and better to play than others. But they just added a guardovar. It's the newest addition. Okay, but there was no big song and dance. Like we're revealing a new champion. So it seems like they might just be casually dropping new Pokemon like left and right.

    Doug Coleman: Oh yeah, they could do a shit load.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, you got finally 890 some Pokemon to choose from. One downside is you can get cosmetics, which are fine because you have to pay real money to get them, but it's just cosmetic with the items you can have. You can have held items up to three of them and you can swap them out for what's your better build. The downside is you can pay money to get the material to upgrade those items and the more you upgrade, the stronger they get. So there is kind of a pay to win element of you can buy all of the heroes if you want. So you always have always have a Pokemon to use in a good situation. But you can also buy held items and upgrade all of them to their max and that will have in game results.

    Doug Coleman: Right.

    Brendan McCullough: So it's a kind of pay to win in that element. And some people are starting noticing like, hey, this game guard touched me briefly and took out three fourths of my health bar. What the hell? And it's because these items are maxed out and built for that exact build. So kind of tough in that regard. Still fun. It's still early on, though. But I wouldn't be surprised if with that pay to win element, if it kind of gets beyond unbalanced. So it becomes unplayable unless you also pay to win.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. Hopefully everyone just refuses to pay and it just remains a normal game.

    Brendan McCullough: No, not happening.

    Doug Coleman: God damn it. Yeah, but that's the thing. I never was interested in mobile before. Now that they're just dropping Pokemon in there, it's like, you almost got me. I don't know. Yeah, but I don't think I'm going to be playing this.

    Brendan McCullough: I had a vague passing interest. I played league in high school and college for a hot minute and seeing some other people playing it who are good at wow, it's pretty interesting, but Pokemon is kind of there. It's kind of like, yeah, this is fun, but I also wouldn't be surprised if I just drop it at some point and never go back.

    Doug Coleman: Sure.

    Brendan McCullough: Because it is so, like I said, a crapshoot of like, hey, I'm doing really well. Too bad the other four players on my team are garbage. And we lost a big screenshot of some of the most polarizing scores. I think the highest I ever got was my team got like 931 points and the enemy team had like 75. So there are matches like that where it's just like, good Christ. It was a blowout.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: And then another match I played last night, we won by literally two points. So it's impressive how close you can get and how one signed it to give you two at the same time.

    Doug Coleman: Super cool.

    Brendan McCullough: Good game for now. We'll see how it goes. It is a mobile.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, it is brand new, so we'll.

    Brendan McCullough: See what else is going on. We got a few was it four minutes of gameplay trailer for Stray, that cat game?

    Doug Coleman: Oh, yes.

    Brendan McCullough: Oh, my goodness.

    Doug Coleman: I don't think I got around to watching this gameplay is it cool?

    Brendan McCullough: It's neat. I mean, you're playing as a cat, you're just like interacting with stuff and walk around. It didn't seem like much, but it's like there's robots all over the place and stuff, so it is a weird setting, but gameplay wise it's like, yeah, you're playing as a cat. I don't know what you expect.

    Doug Coleman: Fuck yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: I can't say the gameplay is compelling, but the world certainly is.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. No, I'd know a perfect streamer that would enjoy playing this game on their stream. I am Mosho the Cat rapper.

    Brendan McCullough: There you go. What else is going on? The team from Hyper Light Drifter is making a new game called Solar Ash and very much has Hyper Late Drifter vibes to it. So anyone who is looking for more of that game, keep your eyes out on this one. It's 3D. So hyper late drifter was top down. 2d this is going to be three D. Oh, wow.

    Doug Coleman: Now I'm super excited for this because the visual style of Hyper Light Drifter was interesting for a 2D style. But man, for that team to go now to can't wait to see what Solar Ash looks like.

    Brendan McCullough: It looks real cool. I never got around to hyper light drifter. I think it came out where people were like, oh, this game is super challenging and really hard to get the pinpoint percent. I was like, that sounds like a lot of work on my time. I don't need that right now. I think I was in college, I was like, I'm stressed enough, but visually, yeah, they look amazing. So seeing this in the 3D space is really cool.

    Doug Coleman: Oh, yeah. Looking at the trailer now. Wow.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, that's stunning. Keep an eye out. Stylized action platformer coming out. PC, PS four and PS five. But I don't think they in October actually. There you go. Sooner than I thought.

    Doug Coleman: Hell yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: In order to avoid ending on a bummer, I'll go with this one, actually. So all the news going on with Activision of Blizzard. There was a protest of Blizzard where people were trying to boycott their products during the day. And all the employees came out and did a walk out for Blizzard and activision in their studios. Good, because all this horrid harassment shit is coming out and it just keeps coming out. There's a lot of stories and a lot of people. Executives in Blizzard had a Bill Cosby suite, which, whether you named it before all the allegations and charges came out about Bill Cosby, the fact that they kept it around after that also speaks a lot. Yes, but also Blizzard has been seen hiring a law firm that is quite notorious for busting unions. So this is a law firm, I think, that worked against Amazon to break up the people that were trying to organize a union for Amazon workers. This is a law firm that is what's the word, shitty. Super shitty. Known for being a real shit peace company. Because this is kind of the bread and butter for breaking up unions. And people are seeing like, hey, that's kind of interesting that Blizzard is worried about their employees unionizing and trying to get some of their employer rights back instead of dealing with these horrid sexual harassment claims. You think they would just fire the people that were being accused of being sexual harassers and assaulters. But instead Blizzard is focusing on unions. Interesting. That's interesting. They're more concerned with that deflecting. Yeah. And kind of hoping that people will notice with one big news story going on, you're hoping you could do with some other shit and get away with it. Good to see where Blizzard's money is at right now.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: And then on a less shitty note, the only Blizzard game I actively played was Overwatch, and I haven't touched it in years. So easy enough for me to boycott it.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, same here. I was only ever really playing the Diablo games and even that was very loose.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, but so we don't end on a bummer. We got good news. Outer wilds. DLC got announced. All right, so that's coming out September. It's called Echoes of the Eye and talked about it nausea before Outer Wild. Fucking phenomenal game. It's so cool. An amazing space exploration game.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, I love the concept.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah, it's like stylized and you just go around in a small solar system. It kind of takes a bit to load the beginning, but it's because it's loading the entire solar system every time it doesn't load in the world as you get closer to it. There's not like progressive loading. It loads it all at once. So it's cool because that just allows you to go anywhere at any time. And it's just so fun for exploring. And a lot of the news about the DLC looks like you see the sun in the center of the solar system being eclipsed by something and kind of like seems like darkness is a big theme of it, of not as much light and finding a secret that maybe you didn't find. In Outer Wilds. There is a story to it. There is kind of like a main plot to it so it doesn't fully wrap everything up. So it looks like this was intentional, that they were always going to do this eventually. So it's cool to see them expanding on it after it's been so long. But it's also very cryptic of like, we'll tell you this is the first and only expansion for Outer Wilds and you're going to have to get used to the darkness. And we'll leave it as vague as that. They're kind of intentionally being like, no, we don't want to tell you anything. If you like Outer Wilds, you'll want to play more of it.

    Doug Coleman: God damn it. I want Mickey Mouse to pop out of nowhere. Just like Kingdom Hearts tie in. No, I'm drawing.

    Brendan McCullough: It is really fun because it is this kind of got ahead of the very big trend I've been noticing now of just the live, die, repeat sort of genre of stuff. Now for an anime fan, there's ReZero, which got very popular, that premise of a show. There's a few other ones that come out since there's the Tom Cruise movie of Edge of Tomorrow, which got rebranded as Lived, I repeat, because that was a catchier title for everyone. But there's like four TV shows that are doing this now of the premise of some new dies and God has to learn his mistakes and he relives the same day over and over again. Like crowntalk day.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah.

    Brendan McCullough: So it's kind of a weird trend of like I'm seeing that a lot in Sci-Fi and stuff now. Right now it's definitely exhausted at this point, but I remember Outer Wilds kind of being one of the earlier ones to do that premise. And that's not a big spoiler. That happens really early on.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah, it's the premise, pretty much.

    Brendan McCullough: But it was fun watching. I saw another streamer finally get around to it. Adelaide was on the recommended list for years and they finally got around to it. And it was funny seeing the different reaction to the space exploration because the whole time I was like, oh, wow, this is cool. And even though I couldn't handle the ship most of the time, control wise, I was still having fun bouncing around and being like, I drifted into the sun by mistake. I turned too close. And then seeing the streamer play it and kind of losing our mind, freaking out, like, this is too stressful. I don't know what's happening. The biggest thing is like, momentum in space. If you're flying towards a planet and miss it, it's not a car. You can't just stop, turn around and go back. The momentum will carry you for a good long while until you can use your momentum, go to the other trajectory, slow it down and then turn around. It's funny seeing them, like, miss a planet and then just collide into another planet behind it because the speed was too high and she just flew past it. Or on the one planet. Like she landed the ship to repair. As meteorites were hitting the planet. She was kind of getting freaked out, like, oh God, am I going to hit one of these? And then the ground just collapses out from under her because it's like a dying planet where it's hollowed out from the inside. There's a black hole inside of the core of the planet, so it just absorbs the planet every rotation. It's crazy. Adorable is fucking nuts. It's just really cool. That's another one where I had a walkthrough. I was just like, Fuck it, I'm sick of these secrets. I'm too dumb to figure these out on my own. Give me a walkthrough.

    Doug Coleman: Fair enough.

    Brendan McCullough: I'm happier for it. I'm like, I'm glad I solved the secrets, but no, I never would have done that on my own. So cryptic and vague puzzles. But God, that's a fun exploration game. Especially if you want space, like goofy, stylized sort of space hell yeah. You're in, like, a wooden ship. So yeah, it's fun. It's really cool.

    Doug Coleman: Cool.

    Brendan McCullough: Excited for more DLC.

    Doug Coleman: I know you wanted to end on a positive or not a negative note, but I'm going to bring it back to negative. No, it's also kind of related because we're in space and stuff, but rapper Lil Uzi Vert is trying to buy a planet larger than Jupiter. And I'm thinking to myself, that's depressing because first and foremost, couldn't that money be spent on something better? Second of all, who are you buying this planet from? And if it's a gas planet like Jupiter, you can't even go land on it. What's the point of this purchase, little Oozy Vert?

    Brendan McCullough: I'll sell them a planet. Yeah, I got six planets I can sell them.

    Doug Coleman: Exactly. That sounds like the easiest scam in the world. It's like, yeah, that's your planet. Just give me whatever you are thinking it costs.

    Brendan McCullough: I mean, people are buying stars for a hot minute back a few years ago. Oh, yeah, for your birthday, I bought a star for you up there. That's your star. It's like, cool, prove it. Who did you buy this from?

    Doug Coleman: Exactly?

    Brendan McCullough: Can I go to that star? No. Is it real? Maybe not. Maybe it's millions of light years away. By the time the light gets to us, it's already destroyed.

    Doug Coleman: I purchased the sun and named it Zunkey. Now, all of you must refer to it as such.

    Brendan McCullough: Yeah. How do you enforce that rule? So I don't even know who a little oozy for it is low on me either.

    Doug Coleman: I was going to say, could you name a single song of his? I was hoping you could because I'm so out of touch.

    Brendan McCullough: Oh, God. I was driving somewhere the other day, and there's the lineup for Lola Paluza, and I knew two of the 30 musicians they named. I was like, fuck, I'm old.

    Doug Coleman: Yeah. A name like Will Uzi Vert, though, makes me think of someone skateboarding with a machine gun. So that's pretty cool. Nice. Anyway, we can wrap this episode up. Let's do some plugs. Brandon, you have another podcast. Tell our listeners about it.

    Brendan McCullough: Another podcast called Rweeb Theory, where we watch three episodes of an anime or a movie and give a recap of it with our opinions and takes on it. It's usually a good way of just getting a sampler pack of anime, being like, yeah, I'm a little interested. Let me hear what this show is about before I commit to watching it. Recently we did Blood Blockade Battlefront, which was a goddamn nightmare. We did Fair Retail, I think on the most recent episode, which I'll apologize up front right now about my energy on that episode, it got weird. I have no excuse for it, but I was punchy that day. I don't know why shit happens. Fairytales got real weird. Like, the show is fine. It's a standard showing. You have already watched it if you thought you would be interested in it. But I don't know. Recapping that made me a fucking lunatic. It just got weird. But, yeah, you find me there.

    Doug Coleman: Sweet and listener, if you like our show, give us a, like, fall subscribe we're findable at all the places at Abt Silence. Specifically, Twitch Tvtsilence is where I'm streaming a lot of games. When I say a lot, mainly Fall guys. But you never know, you might Lego Harry Potter or some Pokemon sword and stuff. We'll see. But other than that, I also have a record label, Missed Out Records.com, to see what vinyl and cassettes are available for sale over there. Got some new records in, so definitely check that out. And the band that does our music is a band called Kind Of All Right. Head over to kind of all right bandcamp.com for more music from them. But thanks for listening, guys. We'll be back next week. See you.

    Brendan McCullough: See you. You.

  • ABTS-414: Birds With Swords

    In this episode of ABTS, Doug and Bren discuss the games they’ve been playing. Doug goes over his recent Kingdom Hearts speedrun attempt, Bren tells us about the game Death’s Door, plus they briefly cover the recent Blizzard lawsuit.

    Send us your feedback online: https://pinecast.com/feedback/abts/3e26ef0d-abc3-4b14-9067-3430a204aa69

    This podcast is powered by Pinecast.


    Subscribe hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Almost Better Than Silence. I'm your host Doug Coleman, and I'm here today with the other cohost, Brendan McCullough. How's it going, Brad? It's going all right. It's it's cooling off a little out here in La. Instead of 97 degrees, it's 94 degrees. It's real nice. It's not. It's still real balls hot. Oh, really? Yeah. I was gonna say oh, you're lying to me. Yes, I'm a liar. That's why I'm in La. GoDaddy mean, that makes sense. It's just been like I think in early June, it was like it's a bit of heat wave. We're going up to like 100. And almost all of July has been like 98 degrees as a high, like the entire month. I was like, man, this sucks. God, wasn't there a boy band called 98 Degrees? Oh, there was. Yeah. And then the one guy married Jessica Simpson. Did he really? Oh, great. Oh my God. And they had a TV show. My sister was a big fan of it. It's one of those things where it's like, why is this the show? And why are people, like, fanatical for it? But like, some people were really into it. She was. She had the DVDs and everything. Wow. I don't know. And she has a picture where she met her. I'm like, that's fun. But yeah, that's how this episode is starting. Did you expect Coherent thought by now? Yeah, I know. I never know what to expect when we hit record. But that's the thing. This is a video game podcast for anybody new. There is some pretty cool stuff going on. Brendan, do you want to maybe start this one off? Is there anything jumping out at you before we get to the show? Topics and stuff? Biggest thing for me I'll say it's for me because I don't know anyone else who's actually played this game personally, but there's making of the Spirit Fairer documentary out about game. Spirit Fairer. And they premiered it on the Escapist YouTube channel, which I believe the Escapist helped produce it. Produce it and publish it. So they're the ones, like hosting it. But yeah, it's about like an hour long documentary about the video game Spearfare. And it's much like the video game, it's very good, and I very much enjoyed watching it. So anyone who was curious about Spearfare or wanted to see how stuff went on behind the scenes, highly encouraged watching it. It's really good. And God damn it, that game is very good. And an emotional kick to the nads. That's awesome. Yeah, it was really cool singing because I remember playing it, they say in the credits, like, Odd, this character was kind of inspired by this person in my life where I said how the developers use people they knew as the spirits in the game. And it was cool seeing the people that made those characters and talk about like, Odd, this person was based off my uncle, who was really, like, really fighted for union rights and worked with his coworkers a ton and saw him all his family is really good. He was a great, generous guy. He loved cooking, he was a hard worker, and then he just disappeared out of my life one day and I've never really gotten closure. It's like, oh, man. Yeah, so it's cool being able to put a face to, like, the developers and stuff. And yeah. Thunder Loaded Studios. They made Johten spearfare thundered like three three games. Ten out of ten. They're all fantastic games. Yoton is a boss. Rush sundered is like a platform or castlevania or metrovania. Yeah, I think we covered all of them over the course of this podcast. Definitely yton comes to mind. I played them all and they're all fantastic. I genuinely believe every game they've made is, if not perfect, like, way up there. So small studio that's just killing it every time they make something. And it's really cool seeing them get their recognition, I think. Yeah, definitely. This is definitely deserving of a documentary, for sure. That's so cool. I like to imagine this story going untold. I'm glad they covered this stuff. Yeah, especially with a game like this, where there is so much, like, emotional weight to it, especially with the person investment into it. It's great hearing more about it rather than Limbo or it's like, hey, Limbo is a great game. Not knocking that, but it's like I can't imagine there's a ton of personal investment of the developer's history in the game, and Spirit Fair has that, like, extra layer of it and stuff. And there's still more content being put out for Spearfare DLC currently. And I think there's two more spirits they're making for it. So I'll probably go back to it once all of it's out. It's still a phenomenal game, and I definitely highly recommend anyone playing it. It's great for people who aren't really into video games that much because there's no pressure, there's no time limits, there's no rush. It's really like the platforming can kind of get a little tricky, but even the platforming is not essential to the plot. It's more of, like, for extra bonus stuff. If you want to do all the platforming puzzles to get this bonus secret thing, you can. But if you want to just play the story, there's not really that much challenge to it, right? But it's just a very chill, grounded, relaxing game and it's great seeing more information about it. Cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Good thing to shout that out. Well, as far as the games we've been playing, I guess I'll start off with Me because it's not too much, but I did do the Kingdom Hearts 1.5 any percent speedrun Challenge for my Twitch Channel the other day. And that went very well, surprisingly. I remember when I first started out, I was thinking to myself, it's like my goal is to be under 5 hours. It would be even cooler to be under four. And I was thinking, that's really unrealistic. But we'll see. Turns out I was under four. My end time was 3 hours and 43 minutes. And I was like, damn, I'm really happy with that. So, yeah, it went really smoothly. There was a few hang ups, of course, things that I was expecting to get stuck on, but not too long. I guess it was riku one or not riku one, riku two and fuck, what was the anthem? Two. I was getting hung up on and it was just like, God damn it. But I was having a lot of fun. And the people in Chat were very encouraging. There were like, at the one moment, oh my God, the way the stream started too. There's a there's two or three, I think three or like two and a half really unsippable cutscenes that you can't do anything about. One of them being the very opening of the game. And during that, my one viewer nostalgia collectible decided to spend the thousand bits to play the five minute long clip of Donald Duck singing simple and Clean. And what was interesting is it actually I muted the game audio. Yeah, I muted the game audio for the viewers, but I was seeing how it synced up and it was pretty spot on. I was like, blown away. And it was just a really bizarre experience. That's how we started the speedrun with Donald singing it instead. And most of my viewers are used to that at this point because it's just like a common occurrence at this point because they're crazy. But yeah, it was really fun. And I think at one point someone also did do the goofy singing Evanescence Bring Me to Life. And I was like, God damn it, we don't need this either. And it was insane trying to focus during both of those moments because it's like, I'm trying to not fuck anything up here. But no, it was a lot of fun. And I overall look back on it as a success and never doing that again. But I can say I did it. You checked it out. Was there one world or level that was, like, particularly like, God damn it. When you the Pooh, you got to speed this up a little faster because I know the bosses always suck. I think most people would instant think of, like, Monstro the whale and stuff. But no, honestly, that was a breeze. I flew through that. I'm trying to think where I struggled the most. Let's see. You know what it is, honestly, I skip Little Mermaid and the Coliseum in my run. Since it's any percent. There's a couple of worlds that I skip. Those two specifically, the world that bothers me the most is the most challenging time sync, in my opinion, is agriba because some of the bosses specifically fuck what's his name jafar, jafar. The first time you face him before he becomes a genie, there's this moment where he can just fly across the map anywhere he wants. And as a speedrunner, it's so infuriating. I've seen a few strats where you can kind of just lock him down and just get him in the loop where he doesn't go anywhere. But I'm not that skilled yet, so I was just like, I'm just going to have to take him out the long way. And boy, it's so frustrating because he will literally talk to you, be like, as you're approaching him on this one platform. As you get there, he flies to the opposite side of the mat and he goes over here. And I'm like, bitch, I'm trying to beat you as quick as possible, and you're making this like, a really long accord. So, yeah, that is frustrating. And then just like, some of the navigation in that area too. It's like, oh, go here, unlock this thing, go to Aladdin's house, trigger this. And then once you get to the Cave of Wonders, it's like, oh, you got to navigate through these areas. I have it pretty down pat through the back of my hand, but for anybody getting into it, I could see that being very daunting. So, yeah, Agrabah is a bitch. I don't think Halloween Town is too bad because it's very much just back and forth between Finkelstein's Lab and the cemetery. You go like, you do a couple of fetch quests, and then the most challenging thing is actually well, it's not challenging, but it's a pain in the Dick Oogie Boogie fight. That one sucks because that's another RNG that just takes up a lot of time, and he trolls you the whole time. And then after that, you have to take out these orbs throughout the house. Like, you're kind of destroying the entire Oogie Boogie's manner. And there is, like, a strategic way to go up the house in order to take them all out at once. And if you know that, it's not that bad. But yeah, again, it's definitely challenging. And it was daunting. I remember when I just first said it in passing, like, kingdom Hearts speedrun. That sounds fun, right? And it's like, oh, wait, what does that all entail? And it's like, Well, I did it, and it was really not a bad run, all things considered. Even when I looked it up on how long to Beat.com, it was like, oh, like rushed 17 hours or something. I was like, what? I guess. And that's like, obviously people aren't skipping cutscenes and everything, but like, even still, something felt wrong about that, maybe. I don't know. I think that's like 100% sort of because how long to beat is like, how long to beat and get all the collectibles and do all the bonus stuff. It doesn't really account for speed runs in particular. Yeah, I wish they should add that too, as a little category or something. But yeah, I'm sure there's a speed run, like website specifically dedicated to speed runs. Yeah, I think I saw one on YouTube somewhere. Someone was like 2 hours and ten minutes for Kingdom Hearts or something. I'm like, God, how just actually how. Some people find it. We're talking about those little small incremental things where it's like, oh, this saved me like half a second. They add up. And you got to do all of them. Perfectly efficient. Yeah. And it eventually adds up and will shave like ten whole seconds off your time. Time. Yes, definitely. And there was a few of those that I opted out of. Like I didn't even fuck with dumbo. This summoned because there's a few areas you can use him to fly to different areas. And I'm like, no, I'm just going to go the long way because I'm going to fuck it up. You risk spending more time if he messes up. Exactly, for sure. But yeah. So I'm considering that a success. And it was a lot of fun. We'll see if I ever attempt another speed run before. That. All I ever really fucked around with with speed runs was Mario 64. Yeah. So that was a fun little experience. And it was all thanks to the twitch community I have. So thanks to you guys. Nice. Yeah. Was it really different playing more modern game with King Martin like Mario 64 or you speed run by Abusing the Glitches and like yeah, it was just. Weird playing an RPG in general because it's like, oh, and now I have like I have to go to this shop and sell this item and buy that item. There's honestly very little shopping, which was surprising considering how RPGs are. But then the other thing was just like menu management of just like I got to quickly go through the menu. That's another thing with the gummy ship. It's like I had to delete my gummy ship entirely to remove all armor because the armor actually slows you down. And then you just put down just a cockpit, just an engine, and maybe a gun if you're feeling spicy. Honestly, by the end of the game you're going to need the gun. But early on you could just dodge shit. But yeah. And as a Kingdom Hearts player, I never fucked with a gummy ship menu ever. I would just go default the entire game because I'm like, this isn't for me. It's like perfect for people that love customizing things. In fact, some people on Chat were like, oh, growing up, my friends were all about having the most decked out gummy ships and shit. I'm like, man, makes me feel like I missed out on something. Fuck, I should have just done that. I don't know exactly. It's just like a goofy little if you want that, it's there for you. But yeah, it's funny how you do benefit from speed if you get rid of all the armor and start with just a cockpit and an engine. So I was like, all right, I'm going to do that for the run. And it did seem to work. So yeah, all in all had fun. Nice. I mean, that's what matters. But yeah. King of Hearts. Yeah, that's a game to do it for. Exactly. I have no other reason to play that ever again. But how about you, Brent? You'll get wistfully nostalgic for it and just play through all of them all over again? No, you know what? I'll do. I think I saw you Song, former guest of the podcast. He's also a streamer. He was playing, I think, a level one run of kingdom hearts where it's just like you never level up past level one and try to beat the game. And he was on riku fight one or riku fight two. And I'm just like thinking to myself how. I remember a buddy of mine did that back with Fable, the original Fable, back on the original Xbox. Because me and my friends got really into that game series for a while. And he beat all of Fable with just the stick you get as a kid in the tutorial area. That just pisses me off how he still had magic, I think because some boss fights require ranged weapons, right? So he had like chain lightning but like a level one or something as minimal as he could. And he beat the boss of the game. Jack of blades. Yeah, that's it. With just a stick. I'm just like, why dude? You know that fight had to take like 3 hours of just like yeah, hacking away of the the health of it and just like dodging. And even if you have the skill. To do it, the weapons aren't meant to do that. Like the stick does one damage or something. Like it does so little damage you have to hit them like a thousand times. So yeah, it's just the patience to do it. I'm just like, no man. Never in a million years. Oh my god, that's Fable is great. I don't have the patience for it to play that much though. But that's the thing, there's no real achievement for that other than just bragging. Right. And you can't prove it. So you could easily just be lying. True. That's how I beat Dark Cloud. Everybody with the dagger. Could my friend have actually done that? Sure, possibly. I'm sure it's possible to do that. I don't know why the hell you would though. Yeah, I'm sure it's possible. Much easier to lie. Yeah. There you go. Anyway. But yeah, that's really all I've been playing. I've been playing some fall guys, but honestly been fucking up. Haven't been getting crowns. The new season is lit. I think we already talked about it. But yeah, the new final is a lot of fun. But again, just lots of RNG with the maze and everything. Yeah, but how about you? I've actually been cracking open some new stuff. Listeners might remember how I talked about playing Devil May Cry Five for the longest time? Yes. Still not playing that. Where did that go from? Got you. Because I just remember I keep saying, like, I'll get into that someday and then I'm picking up new games and not playing it. That's funny. Playing Knockout City still, there's a new season coming out. They're kind of doing like a send off for the first season where it's like night mode, where all the levels are at night and there's a lot of holographic images and stuff on all the buildings and stuff, like lit up and moving. And it's double XP for the remainder of the season. So if you just want to hop in and grind easy XP, you can do that now. Nice. It's a cool little send off. It's cool. What's the word I'm looking for? They're tweaking stuff, they're adjusting stuff, they're changing stuff constantly. There's like a two V, two V, two mode. Now there's like a one on one mode. There's modes where it's all special balls, no regular balls. And they keep it fresh. Like it changes, like, every week. And they give you new challenges and stuff. And apartment crew, so we're trying to do those and stuff. It seems like there's always one challenge that's way harder than anything else. So one of the challenges was, like, with teammates or with crewmates, die fewer than four times in a match and each match goes to ten points. So it's pretty rough with three people at various skill levels to die less than four times in a match total. Right. But then we did that. We were able to get all those done and then the new contract came out. And one of the new challenges is in ball form. So anyone doesn't know you can ball up yourself and a teammate can throw you as a ball and it's more powerful. But if the enemy catches you in ball form, you're trapped in there. So it's a risky play. Right. One of the new challenges is in ball form. Travel a million feet. Wow, that is a lot. So it's between the whole crew, so everyone that does it contributes to it. So it's not okay, well, that even that's what I'm trying to say. A million. That's a lot of zeros. Yeah. So we're like, okay, maybe we move around a lot more than we realized. I played a game with a crewmate, so I was getting the points for it, and I was actively trying to do that. So anytime I was rolling around and I wasn't at risk of being captured by the enemy, I would be in the ball form to try and just get those points, get the mileage. I got maybe 1000ft in a rounds. In one full round, I got maybe 1000ft out of a million. I'm just like, we only got like until Tuesday to do. We only got like four more days. This one's not happening. You would have to just throw your match and only be in ball form with two other crewmates the entire time for all three rounds. I don't know how people will do that one. So there always seems to be one challenge that just stands out as way harder than the rest. Yeah, that's crazy. That's a big ask. Yeah. But they also did a stream where they previewed what's going to happen next season. They're having a new stage where it's like at the movies and it's basically the hollow deck of Star Trek where it's just like a flat level and the stage will change throughout. So it'll go to like a haunted castle, a zombie apocalypse, like a spy, like big corporate building sort of thing. So the level will change around you as it builds up and it goes down and builds up and it goes down. So that's an interesting idea. That's going to be one that will take a while to get used to. And then they have a new dodge ball they're introduced where it's like a soda ball, where it's like the squids from Mario cart, where it will blind the character on screen for a few seconds. Nice. So it's cool seeing them doing new stuff and introducing new balls and stuff and new modes. It's real fun. It's really fun with other teammates and stuff. I have one friend who's really into it, so she's kind of dragging us into it and stuff. It's really fun. But good God, is it buggy. Even this far out of launch, it's still really buggy. And it's like, oh, my game crashed and it can't open up. My game crashed and it's still running, but it's frozen and I can't close it now. And now I have to restart Steam or my whole computer. So it happens pretty frequently. Or like you'll get into a match and it has in the corner, like looking for a match. You'll join a match, get into the match, play a few seconds of the match, and then the thing at the bottom says, like, looking for a match will say match found. And it'll yank you out of that match. It threw you into a new match. Oh, yikes. And that's happened multiple times. Or my friend playing the other day, everyone was default skins and default, like taunt animations and default, like everything, including me for the whole match. But I was fine. So it's a really fun game. It's really not polished, though. There's a lot of game breaking bugs in it that are I thought would have been fixed. But it seems like with every update they're fixing a few bucks and then. Introducing making bugs that's always with updates and this new model that games are experiencing, it's just like, oh, just patch it. It's like that patch broke more. That's just how things work in a development environment. But also, I don't know, I just feel like this is also the same game that was the model free for a time, and then once you get to a certain area, you have to pay for it. Then you're paying for a broken game. That's insane. Yeah, it's free up to like level 25. I don't know if that's still happening or if that was like a temporary thing to get people into it. Oh, sure. But yeah, it's pretty janky, and I'm surprised by the level of because it is like a third party studio and it's being published by EA in origin. So I don't think they're actually working on the development side of it. I think they're just the ones getting people into it and using their platform to get people into the game to promote it. But it's real change. It's not getting better. It's been a few months or maybe a month. I don't know how time it works anymore. It's been a few weeks and they're still pretty regularly I'll jump into a game, it'll say something like error net code thing. Like, okay, that doesn't matter. Nothing's broken so far. I'll play a match and then when it queues me up for my next match, it bugs out and breaks. And that's what the error was for, right? And yeah, there's plenty of times where it's like, oop, it crashed. All right, let me start. Open. Crashed again. It's crashed again. Let me roll back to the previous update because literally, this one's not ringing. Like, it's pretty jacky. That sucks. Yeah. So it is fun if there's anything that's going to hold it back, because like I said before, when I first started playing, it's very quick to understand how the game works and it's very quick to, like, be pretty competent with the mechanics. At the end of the day, it just becomes reaction time. So that's the only real skill necessary. You have to really focus on. And there's different tactics. You can curve balls, lob shots, all this different stuff. And teammate ball. There is a strategy to it, totally. It's very quick to understand. After three matches, you'll get it. If there's anything holding this game back from becoming really popular and potentially an esport, it'd be weird if it does, but I'm sure someone's trying because everyone's trying to do it because that's the moneymaker. Now. If there's anything holding it back from that, it's the jank, it's the bugs and the unpolishedness, where it's just crashing constantly. Well, you know what? It's almost like I'm curious. Once Epic is done with fall guys and it's got them boosted up and it's like, okay, new servers, we got Xbox and Switch players in. It's like, let's buy a knockout city and give it the old treatment to kind of give it better servers, fix the bugs, open the door to all platforms. Actually, that already might be, and maybe that's part of their problem. If they're having trouble keeping up with that, I'm not really sure. Yeah, it is cross platform, but I don't know if that's necessarily what's doing it. Right. Yeah, I'm not sure. It's a smaller team, it's a small studio. It's incredible what they've accomplished with it, but a real overhaul on some of this net code stuff because it's not holding up well. I would hope some bigger producer, or publisher rather, would be able to buy them up and be like, let's give this game the justice it deserves. But we'll see. Time will tell. I have a feeling it's definitely turning heads and that's what everybody wants, like you're saying as a player of the game. Yeah, it's fun. It's definitely a great game. But yeah, we got like three matches into it and then my game just continued to crash. I guess I'm done. I guess I can't play anymore tonight, guys. And I had to step out because I couldn't get it to load. Yeah, that sucks. Yeah. I definitely expected that at lunch. I expected it to be kind of fine tuned by this point, but it seems like I said with every update, there's another one that's breaking something. So it seems like it's just in flux of stability. Right. That's a rough go of it. Besides that, played a little more Hollow Knight. I think I'm pulling back on holiday just so I have something. I felt like I was progressing a little too fast because even in my original run of Hollow Knight, I only had 35 hours in it and there was still plenty I could have done. But I beat the game. I beat the main story of it within 35 hours. Yeah. So I think I was progressing to throw them. Like, you know what, let me save something for myself when I have to fly back on the plane because it's a single player game, I can play without the Internet and on the plane. That's the one I'll probably be using when I'm flying back. Good airplane choice. Yeah. So I'm like, let me pull back on this just so I don't spoil myself. And I still have stuff to play by that point. But I made a good crystal mines, I think is where I left off, but good God, the fucking holiday is so good. So good. I love that game so much. Hell yeah. There's one with the crystal mines. You get to that area early on, but you can't progress through it. Like in Metrovania, you need a certain ability to get through further. So you just kind of stop there. But you see one little bug that's like mining away and singing a little song and say, oh, you're a friendly old fellow. You go away and come back with the ability to get through and the corruption, the infection that's kind of destroying all of Hollow Nest in Holloway. You see the little bug binders. Not digging anymore. She broke through the other side. She's just standing there, not moving. And you see a little orange tinge in her eyes as she's not moving. And then we get further into the mines. You see all the other minors like her are already corrupted and possessed. It's this character that's got maybe five lines of dialogue the whole game just hums this little noise when you first see her. And then she gets possessed and you never really want to see her again. And the second time I played, it fucking broke my heart. Dude, that's crazy. Yeah. She's just this little inconsequential little NPC where it's like, I'm just doing what I'm doing. I'm minding that crystal. I love my job. And you come back and she's just like a zombie. It's like, no. Yeah, that sucks. So bummed. At the second play through, now that I know the story, it's just like I don't know, it hit harder now because I'm just like, no, it's just a little pillblog. Let her be happy. I love when you revisit something and it means something new. That's great. Yeah. It carries more weight once. Exactly. That's a better way to say it. Yeah. And now with all the cryptic messages now that I know the story I'm seeing all the cryptic messages. I'm like, that's what this is alluding to. They were hinting at this from the very beginning. Makes sense. They knew the story. But it's just like good story writing, good world building, good game, good God. It's a good game. Hell yeah. So that's still great. But yeah, kind of shelving that a bit just for myself. Besides that, I got a Death store which we talked a bit about way back before it released. So that came out, I think, a few days back. Yeah, five days ago. This is being published by Digital Developer, who have a good track record by me. Love a lot of their games. Oh, digital, Devolver. Yeah. What else have they done? A boatload. Enter the gungeon. It's a big one that I got real into. A few other ones. Can I see the studio? And now I'm forgetting who the studio is. Bring up the store page. Because he had digital Publisher studio is acid nerve. And so I think this might be the first game they've done. No, they did. Titan souls. That's right. Oh, hell yeah. That game rocks. Yeah. So these are the same developers as Titan Souls and it's being published by Digital Evolver. So I got maybe like 7 hours into that game and last night checked. Last time I played I was like 20% of the way through. But that was like when I was like 3 hours into it or something, or maybe 4 hours. So it doesn't seem like that long of a game. And it's very kind of Zelda esque. It's isometric top down, sort of like Bastion Combat and like Hades and stuff like that. Yeah. And it sets it out very early of, like, you're this little crow. You're a reaper of souls, reaping souls. It's just bureaucratic pushing paper stuff. So it's just very boring and mundane. But it's like, hey, you got to punch the clock. You got to reap those souls. And early on, you get a big soul. You fight this boss. It's like the tutorial boss is pretty easy and then ready to go to collect it. You get bopped on the hip by a bigger crow who steals the soul from you. And then when you go to chase it down, he takes the soul and pushes it through death's door, which is, like, locked away, and he can't get it through, and he's like, oh, I stole your giant soul because I thought a giant soul would open it because the creature I'm hunting, the creature I was tasked to reap, went through that door. And I can't open that door until we have enough souls. So I put yours in there hoping to get through, but it didn't open. So now we're in the same boat. So now you have to go and get these three other giant souls to try and open death door to then get your soul back. And then he'll get his soul back or the soul they're trying to reach, not their souls. Okay? And that's kind of the main plot of it. So it's like, okay, cool. You go to these three areas here. There's kind of a middle hub world that kind of connects them all that you can travel around and get puzzles with as the basic layout. It's like very Zelda ask kind of a dungeon crawler stuff. Immediately, though, with that plum, hey, fuck this big crow. Fuck this guy. Because he basically said it's basically like, hey, I'm trying to get into my apartment building, but my key is locked inside. So I stole your key and decided to get my key, and now both of our keys are locked inside. It's like, well, what the fuck? Yeah, I wasn't doing anything. Why do you drag me into this? They portrayed us like, oh, it's this wise and old crow who's been on the force for a long time, and he'll kind of give you a hints on. I was like, no, fuck this guy. Fuck him and everything he stands for. I'm so mad at this guy because he has no reason to have done what he did, and he just drags you into this. One thing I love is playing as a little crow is you're basically just a bird with a sword. Like, you're a link where you don't speak at all, you don't really emote at all. You're kind of just this generic JRPG sort of character, but you're just a little crow. And anytime someone's talking to you, his head twerking and, like, not twerking. Twitching. Yeah, he says, twitching and bobbing around and going back and forth. And he's just, like, fidgeting around like a crow. Like, it seems like all the other crows in this establishment are Cynthia beings who have established a society and worked. And it seems like you're just a literal crow. You're just a real ass bird who just happens to have a sword. Basically just a bird with a sword. I love that. Yeah. At one point you get food and it's like Ramen. So he has, like, chopsticks and the soup bowl, and you see him just throw the chopsticks away and just start pecking at it like a bird. I was like, this is just a feral animal. This isn't a person. And I kind of love that there's very little real interaction beyond just those two instances, but I think it's just a lot funnier. Like, all these other people being very well spoken and sentient beings. It's like you're just a crow that happens to have arms and legs. That's it. You're not a person. But, yeah, there's a ton of little characters in it that are really fun. The guy that serves you, Ramen, is a sea captain. Wink, wink. He's clearly a dead body being puppeted by a squid. And he's like, yes, let me give you the soup with my human mammalian digital fingers. Here you go. And it's just, like, very obviously being just puppeting a corpse, which is very macabre and funny, though. Yeah, it's a great little world. It's really stylized. You have to hunt down, like, three bosses. One of the bosses I beat was the Earn witch, who's got different Earns and Vases on people's heads. She says if you wear Earn on your head, death doesn't see you. And that's how she's avoided Death this whole time. So you have to kind of collect her soul to find the laws of nature. Okay. And she's got a real studio ghibli. Spirited away. Witch. Five, two. Yeah, definitely real big, wide character. And hey, that design works. People love that design for a reason, for sure. Use that. It's really charming gameplay wise. There's not a ton. There is some collectibles, but not a ton. It's kind of linear because, like, it's metrovania in the sense of like, you get upgraded and you come back to areas, but you're not going to be pulling your hair out trying to 100% perfect run of this game and get every little collectible because there's not a ton. I think I'm probably about halfway through, and you find different crystals to upgrade your health and your energy level. Like, your power level. You find four of those, and they give you another slot in either of those categories. I'm probably about halfway through, and I've only gotten one health upgrade, and I got three out of the four crystals for my energy levels, and I'm halfway through. Yeah. You don't get a ton of health. That's one thing with this. I don't really think Dark Souls combat because it's evolved out beyond that point we can't just pinpoint it to Dark Souls. Sure. But it's very much just low HP bob and weave. You got to be real precise with your attacks and just hope for the best, because you start the game with four hearts, four health, and four energy bars. And about how I did the game, I got five hearts or five health and four energy bars. So the way you healing this is if you get, like, a seed, you plant it in a pot and a girl flower, and you take that flower, and I'll heal you, but you can't take it with you. You can't carry it with you. So if you're ever in a fight, you just have to survive with whatever health you have. So every boss fight, you have four health, right? And you just can't get hit four times. You can't heal mid combat. You can't take a potion out, you can't take the flower out. So it's pretty rough because it's just like, you have this limited amount of health, and that never upgrades, and you can't heal mid battle, you can heal after. So it's pretty challenging in that regard, but you learn the tactics. It's not Dark Souls challenging. You learn the tactics. You can get around them pretty quick. It's simple enough. Yeah, it's like Titan souls. It sounds like the spiritual successor. Yeah, very much so. Yeah, it's really stylized. It's fun. It's very cute. The writing is charming. There's signs pointing, like, this way to the Forest Temple, and you cut the sign in half like in Zelda. And then when you read the sign, it says the letters are cut in half because you've cut the sign in half. That's funny. So it's, like, charming in ways like that. After I got a little spoiler, after I beat the Earn witch, I got her soul. I ended up running into the big boss of the company, and he's like, oh, you're a burp? Like, oh, you came to my office directly. I didn't expect that. I haven't seen a crow in a long time. And he seemed just, like, sitting there, like, drinking like, a cup of tea. He's like beeks, huh? What are they about? Weird, right? And it's just kind of like the dialogue is very casual, but kind of, like, witty and funny, and he's like, you brought me a giant soul. You want your reward? Here you go. And he just gives, like, a golf clap. He's like, well done. Congratulations. You did great. Get the hell out of my office. So it's pretty funny and charming a lot. Regards. Nice. My biggest complaint would be you kill a bunch of enemies, you get souls, and you can upgrade your abilities, so you can upgrade your strength, your speed, your kind of dexterity for ranged attacks. So you get a bow and arrow. You get different spells so you can do those faster, or you can upgrade your spells themselves so you have four categories you can upgrade. They don't seem to do anything. I haven't noticed a marketable difference. Whenever I upgrade them, one of them is speed. So you can attack faster. I can see that I'm attacking a little faster than when I started, but I have four upgrades in the speed, and it's, like, barely noticeable. That sucks. With strength, you can get different weapons. So I just got, like, a big lightning hammer recently. My sword does a base of, like, one times the damage. The hammer does 1.25 times the damage with some enemies. When I first started, the sword took three hits on the basic enemy to kill them. With the hammer, it takes three hits. With the base attack to kill, I've upgraded my strength to do more damage three times. Now it takes three hits to kill all these enemies. Wow. Maybe the lower enemies. With the hammer, it'll take two now, but that's kind of it. That's bizarre. Yeah. So with these upgrades, I don't see a difference and I don't have anything else to spend the souls on. I can't buy items or consumables. Yeah, but there's no noticeable difference. I would kill an enemy in three attacks. I'd go get a strength upgrade, attack the hammer, that does a little more damage, and then it would still take three attacks to kill that enemy. So I'm just like, what? Yeah, what did that do? So that's kind of my biggest complaint. And like I said, you can still play the game. I still beat the bosses and stuff. I'm two bosses into it, and I think there's probably, like, a third and fourth boss. You can still play it. It's not like it's stopping you from playing, but it's just like, why are these upgrades here? They don't seem to be doing anything. So, like, wow. Right? It kind of feels like an afterthought of like it feels like there's no progression. Let's put a progression system in there. It's like, oh, well, that'll change the mechanics of the game. It's like, no, just put the progression system in, but don't tie to anything. It's like, okay, so it just feels like a placebo of, like, an upgrade tree. Right. I'm upgrading stuff, but nothing's happening. That sucks. Hopefully they fix that. I don't know if it's intentional. I don't know if it's just, like, so minuscule that I can't really notice. I can shoot and draw my bow and arrow back pretty fast now. That's the most noticeable one I've noticed, but, like, damage and actual speed of my tax really slightly. Maybe that's the joke, though. You're just a bird, though, so just like, maybe no, I'm teasing. Maybe the actual hero is being upgraded somewhere off camera and yeah, I'm just the bird, who knows? But yeah, that's probably been my biggest gripe with this. That's reasonable. With the health. They make it a point of saying, like, you're a reaper of souls, you're immortal, but when you're going out to get a soul. When you're out, like, the material world, you're immortal again, so you can die, so be careful. I was like, it's like a rogue. Like, I die. I had to go collect my souls again. I come back. No, if you die, you reset at the door. You came through last, and then you just do it again. There's really no punishment for dying other than you just have to run back to where you were last. Interesting. So, like, that's not that big of a deal. If I'm dying on a puzzle or I'm just dying against a horde of minions or something, I'll die, I'll respawn, I'll run back and just do it again. It's fine. There's no real consequence to death, despite it being a big part of the game. Well, that's, like, kind of chill it's. It's nice because it's not brutally punishing, and it's nice to play. Like, the game is only $20, so I don't imagine it's much longer than what I've already played, but it is very cute. It's very charming, well written. The mechanics, it works well. I haven't noticed any bugs or anything. Like, nothing glitching through stuff. It's a little cryptic at times. I don't know if there's certain areas that are puzzles or not puzzles, and I know there are secrets in the game, so there's an area, a bunch of pots sitting around, and I break them, and they'll reform themselves after a few seconds. And I don't know if that's a puzzle, if I break them all in time, if I find a secret, or if that's just environmental set dressing. So it's kind of vague in regards to at times, but, yeah, it's fun. It's great. Definitely recommend it. But, yeah, my biggest complaint would be just the upgrade tree. Seems pointless, but like I said, you do the rest of the game without it, it feels pointless. But I'm still progressing through the game without any real issues, so I guess it's not a bad thing. It's not like it's holding the game back and I'm too weak to progress, but it does just feel kind of weird and vague. And another thing of, like, being a bird, you just find trinkets around the level, and you find little knickknacks, and when you come back to the hub world, they're piled up on your desk and in your items. It doesn't call them trinkets. It calls them shiny things. So it really makes me think I'm just a bird. I really think I'm just a bird. That's awesome. Yeah. But yes, I'm enjoying that. Like I said, it's $20. Definitely recommend it. It's very charming. It's very fun. It's you know, it's a little challenging if it's this kind of if it's your kind of game, if you like being challenged, like Dark Souls, it might be a little underwhelming for you if you want to chill sort of Zelda esque kind of dungeon crawler and just a very cute world. Yeah, this is great. Good game so far. Death Store was the name of it. Yeah, sounds amazing. I'm excited about that one. Yeah. And then the other thing I've been playing a lot of, put Holland Night down. I picked this up on the switch was Pokemon Unite. Oh, that's right. I did see that. I was going to at least mention it in our show Topics. I know nothing about it other than I've seen a few streamers play it. It's a MOBA and it's free. Yeah. So for anyone to know, MOBA is I'm going to look this up right now, just like you. Mobile online battle arena. Right? There it is. Yeah. Mobile online battle arena. So that's akin to League of Legends, Dota two here's, the Storm, Smite, all those kinds of games where it's just team of five e five Pokemon, or depending on the match, it's different. Teams go into an arena, they fight, you fight minions to get points. Pretty standard stuff for a mobile, or. Actually multiplayer, maybe not mobile. But yeah. The caveat with this is it's Pokemon. The downside of it is I noticed right when it start, it was made by Ten Cent and Timid Games, which is a studio owned by Tencent. Tencent is the parent company, two League of Legends and like a thousand other game studios, and unfortunately have a lot of game studios under the belt. So I'm not thrilled about playing one of their games because they're kind of monopolizing a lot of this stuff and they're not great. So I'm not thrilled about that. You know, there was a deal behind the scenes that allowed them to do this Pokemon thing and yeah, it's going to take off. Yeah, it wasn't like legalized. It's very much the parent company of Ten Cent being like, hey, Nintendo, trust us with it because we have four other mobile games, we know the formula, and we're also gigantic enough where no one can beat us in this market. We own a monopoly. Let's go and say, all right, fair enough. So Pokemon gives them the IP. Totally. Yeah. So that's unfortunate right off the bat, but it is a good beginner game. Well, it's a good beginner game because everyone's starting off and there's no professional mobile players that are dominating the scene quite yet. That's already gone. They're already there. It's already a ton of them. Oh, of course it's going to happen within the first week. It already happened. It's already here. Yeah. I don't know if it is a good one, though, because it's a good beginner MOBA if anyone wants to try it and not be in League of Legends and all that hellscape, because it just settles you in. And it is for mobile in September, I think it's coming out on mobile, but right now it's just a switch and it's pretty limited in what you can and can't do. And it teaches you a lot. There's a lot of information in it, and then there's a lot of information not in it that should be in it. So, for example, if you play a match, you finish it, you see your scores and rankings. Some people get medals, like, different medals, depending on how well they did most damage, most healing, most assists, most scoring, all this stuff. Those medals aren't anywhere in the game. They don't tell you what those are. Me and my friends who are playing it had to find a third party website online to tell us what those medals represented because no one knows. And if you go into your items, you can buy different items to help improve your abilities. You can upgrade those items to get them stronger. We found out there's a little recommendation page where it recommends, like, what the game recommends you item builds you do for a character, and what, like, the master ranked players are using for their item builds for this character. I didn't find that until, like, last night. I've been playing for, like, a week now. There's a good amount of information that it doesn't tell you. One item, for example, is it increases your Special Attack damage for a Pokemon. Do you know what your Special Attack damage is for that Pokemon? No. It's not in the game. It doesn't tell you that anywhere. Yeah, so I'm just like, mr. Mine focuses on special attacks, while Machamp focuses on physical attacks. I had to once again find that on a third party website because it's not in the game, telling me that anywhere. Yeah, that's annoying. So there's a good amount of information in here to tell you how to play the game. There's a lot of in depth information that tells you how to master to the game and get better at it that's not in the game, which is kind of frustrating. It relies you on being a hardcore Pokemon fan. It's like, well, clearly this Pokemon has this, and it's like but even that. Doesn'T matter because, like, typing advantage, like fire being weak to water, that doesn't matter. So some of the stuff you know about Pokemon doesn't matter, and some of the things you do know about Pokemon does matter, right? That's what yeah, that's confusing vague. It is fun, though. It's broken up into different categories of, like, support class speedster, class, offense class, defense class, all around class. Like, for the different Pokemon, like I said, you got Mr. Mime. You got pikachu. You got Machamp. Some of the classics venus or Chars aren't yeah, Mr. Mime everyone's favorite. I, unironically am in a Mr. Mine main. God damn it. So here's the thing with Mr. Mine, he's support. He start off when you're starting the game, you get two abilities sorry, thing. You start playing the game. As you progress, you level up in the game, and at different levels, you get abilities, and you can upgrade those abilities. Okay? So when you start off Mr. Mike, he gets fake out, which is like a clap. And then you get a little stronger and you get barrier, which he puts up walls, which is his main support. So if you're being attacked by an enemy, you can put up a wall to give yourself some distance and run away. And then as you level up, you get tempered abilities. You can get Confusion or psychic, and then you can get light screen or Guard swap. So those are the different abilities you can branch into. Light screen is just a stronger barrier, same thing. But now you can stack them and have multiple light screens ready to throw out at any time. Confusion is just like a beam. It'll hit the enemy, stun them for a bit, and do some decent damage. The trick is with Mr. Mine, you get Guard Swap, which swaps your defense, a special defense with the enemy you hit and it'll slow them down as well. And then if you hit an ally with Guard Swap, it'll just speed both of you up. So it'll take a boost for you and a teammate and a deep off for an enemy. Oh, nice. Hit an enemy with Guard Swap and then hit them with psychic it combos and you take out like a third of their health. Guaranteed. It does massive damage. Damn. I don't know if people aren't aware of it or if they're not ready for it, but like, I'll be in the thick of it. You're not ready for the truth. Hey. Ready for Mr. Mime? Tip these hands, bitch. Yeah. I'll go at it with like a Machamp and he's like, oh, I'm going to dominate this guy. And he's doing big damage. I'll hit guard Swap and sick and take out like half of his health instantly. And you see the panic of them go, oh, fuck. Like oh, no. And then they try to run away. Get him a guard. Swap again. They're slower now. You catch up to them. You just hunt them down. Mr. Mime is terrifying. Yeah, he really is. And then you always have an ultimate move as well. So it's a fun game. It's a mobile. I don't play MOBAs a lot, so this is a fun learning experience for me, getting involved. The two friends I'm playing with that are big into MOBAs, so they know the strategies. Big differences between this and City Heroes is city Heroes, I would jump into a throng of people going out of the cluster and just tear shit up with a reinhardt something. MOBAs are different. Mobus is all about poking. You have to run in, poke the enemy, and then run back. Run in, poke the enemy, and then run back. You don't want to get caught in all of that. So that's a very different strategy. I think it used to and it's really tough to play. Got to poke some Pokemon, pretty much. It is fun it is fun. There's clearly some Pokemon that are just way stronger than others. Cinder Ace has massive range of damage. Camera Ant, which is just this bird that shoots fish at you, is currently the meta because it does so much damage and has so much crowd control and range that you can never escape from it and it will hunt you down like a goddamn nightmare. I hate that bird. That horrible. Birds ruining the game. Damn. There's already articles saying like this dumb fucking birds ruining Pokemon. People are already tilted because it's so strong. So there's definitely going to be balancing issues they're going to have to address. Sure. My biggest complaint though is something I got pointed out recently by a friend is during the game, during the last two minutes of the game, zaptos appears in the center of the map. And if your team teams up, no one can defeat Zaptos by itself. Or you shouldn't be able to. If you're strong enough to do that, you got fed like crazy. So a team is supposed to go into the center to feed Zaptos. If it feeds aptos, you can go to the enemy's bases and throw your points in to kind of destroy them. Normally when you're throwing your points in to destroy the base, you have to charge it up. And if you get hit, you're interrupted by it. With the Zaptos buff, you can just do it instantly. You don't have to charge up at all. Right. And then when you do it, it doubles the points you throw in. Oh wow. It's easier to destroy the bases that only have like 80 HP. You throw in 40 points, you take it out instantly. Right. So the thing is, Zaptos is essentially the golden snitch of Pokemon unit. That's a good yeah, that makes sense. Because once you get this, you win. That's not a for debate. That's an objective fact of do whatever you want for the first eight minutes of this game. You can fuck around, you can die all you want, it does not matter. You get Zapdos, you win, your team wins every time. And that's what the Meta is. That's the most effective tactic I have. Here what meta means. It's an abbreviation, but that's the best thing to do. And there's casual matches, there's like fond side matches, and then there's ranked match already. And that's what every single ranked match is. It's just defeat Zaptos. Everyone's just doing whatever for eight minutes. And then when Zapdos appears, everyone's either attacking Zaptos or stopping the other team from attacking Zaptos. Their team is doing it behind them. That's all it is. Because that's how you win every single game. Well, that's the thing. It's such a brand new game. I'm sure they're going to introduce new modes and stuff like maybe a multi's map or something. But even with that, it should vary. Yeah, so they already got new Pokemon. They're going to introduce. I think Blissy is rumored to be the next one for sporting character. Yeah. So I'm sure they're going to introduce new stuff. There's only one map right now for the basic match, so yeah, they're going to introduce more stuff as it goes out and they'll have to rebalance and address different stuff. But yeah, right now it just gives up to some win. And as soon as my friends pointed out that to me and I saw it in action, I lost a lot of interest in the game because it's just a golden snitch where it makes the rest of the game pointless. I'm just wasting eight minutes until this big lightning part appears and then we're just dog piling on it to see who gets it first. And that's the game. That's not fun anymore for me. So I do hope they kind of rework the legendary bird mechanic. And if they keep it, if they do something different with it, if they just take it entirely, I'd be fine with that. Maybe it just doesn't need to double the points you're scoring on the enemy base because that would literally just balance it instantly. I don't know. But it could still give you the benefit of doing that instantly. Exactly. It's some edge, but not like an insane edge. That's the thing. The fact that it does both. Yeah, exactly. There's Rotom up at the top, who's another Pokemon you can attack, who's a little bit tougher, but you can take him on. If he makes his way to one of the bases, the enemy team can intercept him and stop him before he gets there. But if you get him, he'll join your side, go to the enemy base and make it so you can do the instant dunk where you can just you don't have to charge up anymore. You can instantly do it, but it's not double. So there is that mechanic with another Pokemon. Interesting. The fact that Zaptos gets both, where you get instant dunks and double the points for it. Yeah. That's insane. You just clear out whatever bases are left and then you storm the center, one that can't be destroyed. It's nuts. And I understand they wanted to be big and powerful and that's the incentive to get it, but it's too big and powerful. Right. They'll balance it in the future, I'm almost certain. Yeah, I'm certainly they're going to do something with it. Like I said, I'd be fine if they just take it out entirely and give you some other buff or boost for defeating Zaptos. Yeah, it makes sense to walk away until they correct it or something in the meantime. But it seems like a fun game and people are losing their shit over a free Pokemon game. That's the thing. It's like free to start and all that stuff. It's free to play. I've been playing it for a while now. I'm like level 13 or something. No problems. It's just microtransactions that are in there. So, like, all these games with microtransactions, there's in game currency of, like, four values, and you can spend money to get those quicker, so you can upgrade your items faster. You can buy all the Pokemon. You only have certain Pokemon. You unlock them different ways, but you can buy them with money. So there's that incentive of, like, it's pretty much pay to win in some regard because you can buy items and upgrade them really high. The only thing I noticed that is exclusively purchasable that you can't get in game is the cosmetics. Some Pokemon at different costumes. Like, I got one for free where my Venous or is in, like, a Hawaiian shirt and, like, a scuba mask. Mr. Mime has, like, a golden tuxedo and a top hat. If you want to buy those, that's real money you have to buy to get them. Okay? Everything else is like, that in game currency where it's like, yes, you can farm it for, like, five months to buy one thing, or you can just drop $5 and buy ten of them right away. So other than that, though, it is free, so I expect it to be worse. I expect to be like Knockout City, where play up to level ten. Then you have to purchase the game. But no, it seems to be just full of microtransactions, which suck, but I don't think it's paid to win enough yet. Zappa is kind of the biggest thing right now, so once they balance that stuff out, maybe the pay to win items will be more of a problem. But like we said, it's new. It came out, like, this week or something, so it's still real fresh. Yeah, time will tell. Yes, it is fun, though. And it's free. You can dabble in it. There's other smaller modes if you don't want to do ranked. Ranked is the competitive one where everyone dog piles and zaptos. I do the casual just free to play or free modes where it's not as strategic and it's still fun to play. So, yeah, anyone who's interested in it, it's definitely fun if you want to learn what a MOBA is, you can do with us. It's very much a particular game, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't capture anyone new who's not already interested in MOBAs. Sure, that makes sense. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I guess we can maybe wrap this episode up and do some well, actually, before the plugs, let's see if there's anything in the show topics. I don't have hardly anything. I did just want to shout out that Jeff Bezos flew off in a rocket ship that looked very phallic shaped, and there was all these Austin Power memes going around, and, man, it's just insane how Dr. Evil and him look very similar. And yeah, the dick shaped rocket joke that was in that movie, it's like, what timeline are we living in? Brin the capitalism one. Yeah, the bad one. The one with a literal Dr. Evil flying a space dick. Yeah. It's weird how all these billionaires are trying to get off this planet instead of spending the money to try and save it. Yeah, that's disgusting. I saw that meme where it was like, yeah, the guy's sweating and trying to decide between a button and what was it? Yeah, spend ten minutes in space or end world hunger. It's like, God damn it. It's fully possible to do it. They're just choosing not to. Exactly. And then the other one that I had is another real kind of just like goofy one. Snoop Dogg's been twitch streaming recently and it's like, oh, it sounds like, yeah, I want to go check that out. Right? Well, maybe not. He's been muted the whole time, like for at least three streams. And the problem there is I feel like he probably is like confident in just like going in being like, I'm just going to turn off the chat feature because of all the trolls and shit. And that way I can just be me and do my thing and stream stream for everybody. The problem is you're not getting any live feedback from everyone being like, bro, you're muted. And it's been consistent for a while that people are writing articles about it being like, we're watching his streams and it's like fun and everything, but we can't hear a damn thing he's saying. Hopefully he's getting this feedback some way or another. So it's like his mic is muted, not like DMCA where he's playing his own music and the stream is being muted in the VOD later. It's his mic. Yeah. It's just insanely. Crazy. And what's another thing that happened? He's also famous for kind of antics like this, where he ended a stream and walked away and was live for another like 8 hours of just streaming his chair because he didn't realize he didn't. And then when he comes back, he has like this moment where he's just like, oh, I'm still alive. Yeah. So. Yeah, poor Snoop Dogg. I mean, I'm not surprised he struggled a little bit. I also don't think he gives a shit. No, not at all. That's what makes him Snoop Dogg. Exactly. I feel like he probably got all sorts of subs and shit. Just a muted stream. But you had the shaped out. I saw a streamer. You get locked out of his office, like while he was streaming for like 6 hours. And yeah, sure enough, there was a massive substrate. People were gifting something crazy and stuff as a joke. It's like, hey, that worked out great. I'll do that more often. Right? Oh, man. Anything from you, though, before we wrap this up? Yeah, real quick. So EVGA, I don't know if you're supposed to say that their video cards apparently being burnt out and destroyed. This is clearly a hardware issue, but it seems like the game that's stressing them the most, that is reporting the most cases of these games, of these cards being burnt out is New World from Amazon studio is that we talked about a bit. The beta is out for it right now. So I know some people in the bait. I think Doves is actually in the beta. I saw him on Steam playing it. I am myself, I could be playing it, but I'm not. I don't have a computer. That's good enough and maybe it's good or not. Yeah. Wow. It's clearly a hardware issue that game alone. No game should be burning out graphics cards by themselves. That's clearly a hardware issue with the card itself. But apparently it's pretty common with New World of like, stressing it to a breaking point. So that's wow, that's crazy. Yeah, look out for that listener. Yikes. And those aren't cheap. The RTX 30 90s, those are the most recent ones. Yeah. So it's clearly like, hey, that money was not well spent. That's got to go back in and get some tune ups. As is tradition ending on a depressing note. God damn it. It's a big enough story we're really addressing, but we're not nearly close enough to professional journalism to go in depth about it. The state of California is suing Activision and Blizzard for inhospitable workplace environments. This isn't just like a flippant. Like, this isn't like Naughty Dog where the people were overworked stressed and harassed and all this stuff, which is very valid and bad and shitty. And Naughty Dogs definitely does have a problem with that, that's for sure. This isn't a former employer suing an old company. This is the state of California had a two year investigation into Blizzard for harassment and poor working conditions and they are suing them. And they have lots of material that they put online. You can read the deposition of all of the things they are suing them for. It is horrific of male workers being just aggressively drunk at work and having females crawl on their hands and knees between their desk as they parade them around like a frat house. And just a lot of various degrees of assault, but emotional, physical and sexual assault, it's real fucking bad. So Blizzard, remember a few weeks ago when I said Blizzard sucks ass? Here's definitive proof. Yeah, no, for sure. Omega Yikes doesn't even cut it. That's the thing. I was in a while of all places and I heard some guy loudly talking on the phone being like, yeah, it's Blizzard men who are talking about this exact same thing. I'm like, I can't blame you for being upset. He's probably like a huge Blizzard fanboy. And then it's just like, yeah, the way they treated women was absolutely atrocious. And I'm like, dude, as any fan of anything, it's just like you can't support that kind of behavior. So I'm glad what goes around comes around. At the end of the day. I do wholeheartedly believe in karma. The problem is sometimes karma doesn't fully get delivered and it's the full state coming at you, you know you fucked up. So I think it's going to be interesting. Yeah. And there's a lot of people coming out, especially a lot of women saying like, hey, Blizzard is horrific and definitely like one of the worst of this. But there's plenty if not every game studio has done that. I've heard stuff about that. It's so sad. Our industry is just plagued with this problem. It's just disgusting. It's super shitty. So if anything, hopefully Blizzard gets nailed with this and that'll change the tone of like, yeah, hey, Blizzard is one of the biggest. They're not safe from this bullshit. So instead of slapping the wrists on the perpetrators or firing the people that report the issues, maybe just fire the people that are doing the issues and stop protecting them because no one's good enough to be able to get away with sexual assault. No, it's insane. But it's so unfortunately prevalent. Not even very much a video game. Industry, but other industry, music industry, TV and film. Oh my god. Yeah, all of it. So it's super shitty. But that's probably a news story you'll be hearing a lot about for the oncoming few weeks. Yeah, that's huge. I'm glad that's our coverage of it. That's as much as we'll do with it because we are not professional enough to touch that. Yeah. That being said, I think we're about at time. Let's wrap this episode up and do some plugs. Brand, you have another podcast. Let's tell our listeners about it. Yeah, I got a podcast called Rweeb there yet where we watch three episodes of an anime or a movie and give a recap of it with our opinion. It's a good jumping end point for different animes if you're interested and want to hear a brief summary of what they're about, if they're really good or not. We've done a few. We've done. I think the one that coming out today is Blood Blockade Battlefront. And I'll give you a little hint listeners. I watched the whole first season of that show after doing that podcast and I don't know what the fuck that show is about. It is objectively confusing as shit and. Not good anime for you sometimes. Yeah, we found some good ones that are really good and then there's a lot of just how did this get made? What is this? Yes. I love that. And listener, if you like our show, thank you. But if you want to find us on anywhere we're findable at all the places at Abt Silence, tell a family member, tell a friend. I'm also streaming at Twitch Tvtsilence. Lots of variety fall guys. I did just do a speed run of Kingdom Hearts just to say I could do it. And then I'm trying to think if there's anything else on the horizon. I'll probably be finishing Pokemon Sword relatively soon. So, yeah, stop by and say hi and then yeah. I also have a record label. It's missed out records.com. If you want to see what tapes and vinyl are available for sale over there. And the band that does our intro and Outro music is a band called Kind of All Right head over to Kind Of All Right Bandcamp.com for more music from them, but that'll do it for this week. Hope to see you guys next time. See you. See.

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