Big Hops, Auto Modellista, Eternity Egg | Noclip Crewcast

Thank you, hello friends and welcome to episode 264 of the noclip podcast.

We got a full crew here today frank in the house, the j squad and a bunch of new video games well, some of them are new to talk about.

Um, this week.

We hope you have enjoyed our game of the year splurge over the weekend.

If you missed it, and make sure you check back in your podcast app of choice Or on the YouTube channel.

We posted three relatively long podcasts about all of our favorite games of 2025.

Did I say 2026 earlier?

I might have.

Who knows?

I'm already doing it.

Does anyone?

You know, if you write the wrong date on the check now, you just have to add a line and it works.

You know, the five to six transition is not super hard.

Five, six.

No, I'm hoping that this is all done.

We have to kill the 6-7 meme in the next 12 months.

I know there's a lot going on, but I'd be willing to give up Greenland's sovereignty if we can get 6-7 out of the culture.

That sounds like a bad trade.

I feel like we're losing out on that one.

I feel like I'll start saying 6-7 if we leave Greenland alone.

And you know how much that will cost me.

Yeah.

Think of all that land, though.

Think of all that real estate.

I know you want to set up your beautiful Northeastern American abode, but how about a little bit Northeastern?

A little farther north and farther east.

Get some polar bears.

It's okay.

When all the ice melts on the planet, it'll just be a bunch of little islands.

That might be nice.

It's like everyone gets their own little island.

You can fight for it.

Is Greenland secretly a bunch of islands underneath?

Isn't it underneath all the ice?

Yeah.

It's not like one big landmass.

Well, see, I don't know.

I don't know.

You're not here for your geography lessons, are you, dear listener?

I don't know.

I'm an island boy, but Greenland seems too big to be an island.

You know what I mean?

Where do we stop?

Is it a continent island?

Is Greenland as big as it looks on the map or is this like a Mercator projection thing where it's actually tiny?

It's a Mercator projector.

It's still pretty big.

It's still like, what is it?

Is it like a Texas?

Two and a half times the size of Texas or something?

That's how we measure things here in the North American part of the world.

Yeah, a Texas.

How many football fields is it?

I actually find that really easy.

The meters thing never clicked.

How many hamburgers wide is it?

Wait, what?

You never got me.

You're from Ireland.

Does Ireland really?

I mean, we did.

Yeah, but we like, you know, we adopted it at a certain stage.

Like we had all these ancient ways of, you know, measuring a cow's leg.

Oh, yeah, I guess that's true.

The average length of a piece of hay.

So we'd literally use I I was jesting.

But Jeremy brings up a good point in that we do literally weight ourselves in stone.

That's awesome.

Which is about as accurate as the length of a piece of hay.

I remember I knew a friend went to a different school in high school that I was.

I would go hang out at their school sometimes.

And there was an Irish exchange student at this private school who was like, oh God, I've gained so much weight in America.

I'm like point whatever stone heavier and i didn't know the conversion, but i was like god, that sounds like so fucking much like you should go to a doctor stone.

If you have to express it in stone that i'm concerned for you.

Yeah, it's not pebbles, you know.

Yeah thank, thank god it's not boulders.

You might be in real trouble.

That's such a caveman way of measuring things.

How many pebble, how many stone you weigh?

I think a stone is 14 pounds.

I think it is okay.

I think you know nice round number i.

I mean, it's as arbitrary as feet, where it's like I don't know.

I don't know if this is apocryphal, but they're like oh, it was like the king, the size of the king's foot at the time.

I'm pretty sure it was that, yeah.

Yeah, that was the apocryphal tale, is it?

Is that like, wouldn't you want your king to have really big feet though?

Or would that be like a clown feet thing?

You know, the way like, you know, being a bit heavier was seen as a sort of status symbol back then.

Maybe having small feet was was, was also good in some cultures.

Yeah, maybe back there, who knows, maybe he made his foot bigger and like we all just think that that's not that big for a foot.

But actually i've never measured my foot with a ruler.

Now i'm curious, like what's your shoe size, isn't that?

Do you guys not measure that?

Is that inches?

Is a shoe size inches?

Because you're about what it's different.

I have no idea it's, it's i'm.

I'm a size bigger in america, i'm size 13 here.

Wouldn't it just be easier if we just all wrote down a number?

Oh, yeah.

Try buying children's clothes.

Oh, forget it.

Anywhere in the world.

It's just like, I don't know.

It kind of looks like she's that big.

I don't know.

This is a three.

She'll grow into it.

You know, that type of stuff.

You know who's going to grow into their big shoes, our Battle Pass holders?

Lil Toast Lovepreet, Yacht Dwayne the Rock Lobster, Anthony Thomas, Nico Passateri, It's-a-me Ferrario.

Senator Armstrong, Reed Dredge, Harry Flanagan, Joosh Arno, Matt Pearson, Mark Ross Quote, Tucker Morgan, David McGarry Goddison, Sven Hooster, Pez Bone, Malt John Akers, You and Nate.

Tim Robinson.

Forrest Pruitt.

Dark Insanities.

Jonathan Kremen.

Just adding in some pregnant pauses here for no reason.

Jonathan Kremen.

Eric Hamilton Schneider.

Christophe Fatui.

Enox.

Grizzly Mug.

Cameron Laird.

Zachary Snader.

Alex Goucher.

George Sakotis.

Jacob.

God serve.

Entheogen.

James Med.

And my favorite pill to take.

When I want to party.

Rycen, thank you all so much for your incredible support.

And all of our patrons.

Patreons?

Patrons.

Over at patreon.com slash noclip and patreon.com slash noclip2.

We have some fun stuff coming to two in the next month, folks.

We're pivoting to op-eds.

That's the pivoting to videos over.

We're working on some stuff that's a bit higher production, a bit longer production uh, production time and uh hopefully, stuff that we're you're you're vibing with stuff that i know uh, jeremy and myself and the rest of the crew have wanted to get out.

So it's uh, it's pretty cool.

We're gonna have some, some fun stuff landing this month.

We've also got plans for kind of like a secret, a secret thing happening in march that we're gonna be building up to in february and that thing i was talking to that person about.

Jeremy, you know we're all the games, that thing.

Yeah, We might have some fun with that in February or March.

So keep your eyes peeled to Noclip 2.

All right.

Shall we talk about frogs?

Sure.

Frogs are cool.

Sometimes they appear in the garden here and they mess up recordings of podcasts that I do here.

And let's first talk about the frogs that like to jump.

Big hops.

It's out.

We talked about this.

Did we talk about this?

We played a demo of it or something like last month, a couple of months ago.

I'm not sure if we talked about it or was it under embargo or whatnot.

Jeremy, do you want to take this one from the top?

Big hops.

It's a 3D.

What do you call it?

3D adventure platformer.

What is it?

Yeah, I would say that's accurate.

I think Jesse has probably played more of this, but I'll intro it and tee him up.

Big Hops is a 3D platformer from Luckshot Games.

You play as a very cute, adorable frog and you use your tongue to swing on things and your tongue to grab things and store items and throw items and climb stuff.

It's got kind of like a little bit like a Breath of the Wild climbing mechanic in there as well, but it's got some very sort of uh, i guess like shmovementy movement.

Where's music?

Oh, it's the big hop steam page.

That scared the fuck out of me.

I was like, what's the big hop music sound like?

It's like it was like a swell of orchestral music and i thought oh wow, i thought god had come to take me away.

Finally, that legitimately frightened me.

Um, it's got this, like i said shmovement, and i thought maybe i was being punished for it.

Um yeah, stop using that word.

So it's got sort of like that we'll kill, we'll kill six seven, we'll keep that and we'll keep friend slop.

We like yeah, movement is that?

If that's not in websters yeah, they should add it.

Um, it's got sort of momentum based movement kind of things.

It's got a little uh, it's got like a mario 64 byahu kind of thing, where you're, you jump and then you jump and you get like a little extra uh, a little sauce on the jump.

Um, it's got like a wall run.

It's just got like a lot of individual satisfying mechanics that together make for yeah, some just like really interesting kind of little movement puzzles.

It's funny because I'm going to talk about another 3D movement platformer today.

And we recently talked about Hypergea.

I feel like there's been a rash of particularly good 3D platformers lately.

Jesse, I think you were on this earlier than I was.

I hopped on the bandwagon late to get credit.

So to speak.

Did you hop bigly onto the bandwagon?

Yeah, I used my tongue.

Bigly.

I leaped up there.

His big tongue.

Yeah, big hops is, I think it's phenomenal.

I'm having a lot of fun with it so far.

I think I'm about halfway through.

Yeah, I think Jeremy really got across everything about it that works on a gameplay level.

It's a 3D platformer with just good feeling movement.

It's.

It has this thing I like to call um fidgety movement, where 3d platformers the ones that are the most fun, at least for me are the ones where, between the things you want to be doing and where you currently are, you can press a couple of buttons over and over again to just get there a little bit faster not quite running like running is boring.

I don't want to hold a button to go between locations, but when you can like in big hops, you have this role you can do and you can dash out of the role and maintain your momentum and keep basically just like frogs skipping through levels.

It feels great.

It's one of those little things where it's like the better you get at it, the more used to it you are, the better you are.

The rest of the game you get better at judging how far the dash can go.

Like it feels if you've played a mario galaxy or mario odyssey uh hop, the character in the game uh, has a dash.

That feels like that.

You can do it in midair and completely kill all your momentum and just go forward in whatever direction you want, but you'll also still like you'll maintain your forward momentum but you can stop going up.

Um, There's lots of good little movement stuff there, like Jeremy's saying, but I think I really like this game for the reason that I like a lot of good 3D platformers.

I think there's this and it's not a bad thing, but I think there's this trend in revival 3D platformers where the focus is on making areas that are fun to do the platforming in exclusively like good challenges, things to do, wall runs off of and all that sort of stuff like more focused on hardcore platforming.

Big Hops leans, I think, a lot harder on what makes like Mario Sunshine fun or what makes like a hat in time enjoyable is going around and talking to characters and like the novelty of doing new things over and over again.

Big Hops has a lot of moments that are harder, more challenging platform segments, but it also has bits where you're like doing a stealth mission through a base somewhere and like taking photos with a camera, and there's also it has it's way more involved than i thought it would be.

I think the demo does a good job of introducing the platforming but, like everything else that i've done in this game that isn't just jumping around, which is still very fun, is such a like enjoyable.

It's almost like a break from doing the platforming and the platforming is great.

Like it has a lot of allusions to other games in the genre, or like Sonic the Hedgehog bits, stuff like that.

Donkey Kong inspiration in certain points, especially Donkey Kong Country.

You see that throughout the game.

So I do think Big Hops.

I really I'm enjoying it a lot.

I'm having a lot of fun just playing it, just going through the world and seeing what's going on.

I think there's like three worlds, three main worlds that you can see throughout the entire run.

The first one's this like uh desert area which is uh does there's like interesting little things you could do.

I will say the polish on it is, is really, you can feel it in certain points.

Like there's not enough, um, not enough polish in certain aspects of it.

Like there's a platforms you can bounce off of and they maintain your momentum.

But if you approach them with no momentum, you fall through the platforms.

I've done it every single time that I've tried to do that usually on accident.

And it's not a nice feeling when you're doing a long platforming segment and you fall through.

Or like I've lost a save that I think lost me like an hour or two of gameplay.

It wasn't too bad because now I'm better.

So it was easy to get through it.

But just little things like that.

It's the sort of stuff that can be buffed out over time.

So I'm not too negative about it.

But overall, I'm really, really enjoying Big Hops.

I'm excited to finish it.

And I think it's probably my favorite 3D platform I've played in years.

I'm having a ton of fun.

I was about to say, it's my favorite game of 2026.

We're already there.

Yeah.

Game of the Year contender?

I feel like I hate that curve of people bringing up game of the year.

It's like from January to March, everything's a game of the year contender.

Everything from like September to the end of the year is a game of the year contender.

And in the middle, I don't even know what game of the year is.

I can't remember.

It drives me crazy.

I yeah, I remember when I played the demo thinking, oh, it is a little bit rough for any edges.

They must have some time left to finish this thing.

And I will say, from watching the videos and the stream's um uh, prior to recording today, the i i think it got a lick of paint like for sure.

Graphically it looks.

I think i played it two months ago and i think graphically i don't know if it's some sort of post-processing effects or distance or whatever it is, but it does seem to have gotten sharper.

It looks really good.

I wonder if also me playing on a massive screen doesn't help.

That is this uh, have you been playing steam deck?

Because this feels very steam decky to me.

I've played it, steam deck.

I've played a docked steam deck on my tv and also on my pc.

It's great everywhere, feels good on all the platforms.

Um, i think like part of what i was worried about was the.

There's like technical bits to it as well.

Um, it's not just platforming exclusively.

Getting around some of the levels requires using this.

I would say almost like immersive sim style setup for interacting with the world.

So there's these fruits and like other like objects lying around that you can pick up and put in your backpack, and you'll get more slots for your backpack over time.

You start with like four.

Um, and you can get these like a ball that when you throw it at the wall it shoots a zip line from the point where it attaches to the wall to the next perpendicular wall or whatever, like the farther, the closest one across from it.

Um, and it adds a little challenge and like lets you solve things in ways that you can't with just the platforming.

And because there's that bag you can like, I brought an item from a previous world like two hours earlier in the game that I wasn't supposed to have at a certain moment.

And it let me skip part of a challenge because I brought an item with me totally.

Yeah.

Like it was, I skipped over this whole thing where they're like, yeah, you gotta do all this, man.

All the voices, all the characters are voiced by the way.

I think the voice acting is very funny or at least charming.

I enjoy it.

Um, And they're like, hey, you're supposed to go over here, man.

What are you doing?

And then I like I jumped over.

I think I don't remember if they commented on it, but I think they might have.

They're like, I don't know how you did that, but that was kind of cool.

So maybe that was like a time on it or something.

No, it's like a like a barrier, like you're not supposed to be able to get up there.

What I was doing at that point.

So, yeah, lots of really cool interactions.

I'm digging it a lot.

I think it's one of those games that I'd have to see through to the end to see if it does enough with its systems.

But so far, I mean, like I said, I'm about halfway through and I haven't felt bored at any moment in this game.

It's so much fun, cool.

Yeah, the little bits of uh, like jesse mentioned, like the platform stuff, i i feel like those moments to me are so forgivable in this game because i feel like it does things that are very mechanically ambitious.

Um, like even the fact that you're comparing this cutesy 3d platformer about frogs and like little like raccoons who make like little devices and stuff, to uh, to an immersive sim, i think is telling um, there were moments where i was very, very surprised that this wasn't just sort of a straightforward, like you jump and you wall run and you kick stuff and you do the mario byahu.

Um, i feel like yeah, i don't know there's.

There's like a proportionality where it's like When I can tell a game is trying to do things that are mechanically ambitious and giving you a wider degree of freedom.

I'm more willing to overlook moments where that drives them into buggy areas.

Because it's like, as you widen the net of complexity, that stuff is bound to happen.

And especially for uh, you know an independent video game.

It's like there there's only so much you can do to catch every bug whatever, like a week after release.

It's the same attitude i come into stalker 2 with.

You know where you're like you guys are trying to do a lot here, so we're gonna let that pass.

Um, Big hops, yeah.

Available on PC, Steam 1 and 2, and on PlayStation 5 as well.

Steam 1 and 2?

You mean the Switch 1 and 2?

I'm sorry, the Switch 1 and 2.

They got a Steam 2 now?

Yeah, if Steam's so good, why didn't they make Steam 2?

Oh my god, he leaked Steam 2.

What does he know?

I know, I just leaked that.

Oh no, all the stuff I saw at Valve, it was Steam 2.

That would be the worst fucking release of it.

Because Steam is all about concentrating games into one place.

They're like, let's comply...

Let's add another one and complexify this.

Tabula rasa.

We're starting from zero.

There's no more.

Your old library is on Steam 1.

There's no backwards compatibility, even though it's just a fucking EXE on your computer.

Yeah, Steam 2 is for Source 3 games.

It's bright green again.

You can only get Steam games on there.

They'll allow some on later in the future, and then they'll add a new green light system.

They're just repeating history.

There's a new version of Ragdoll Kung Fu coming out, especially for us.

It'll be the first non-Valve game that gets released.

Ricochet is coming back.

I was trying to remember the name.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All that good stuff um, you know what?

I just let's split the indie difference here um, and i'll talk about the one game that i've played that's new in the past week or that i've newly played uh, which is fortnight.

Um yeah, so we were at uh in ireland, obviously for for christmas, for you know, i was over there for five weeks.

In the end um, because i had to travel over a little bit early for some family stuff And the we were hanging out at my brother's place and my nephew, who's like 11, I want to say um, was playing fortnight sometimes.

And like I'll sit down with him and play FIFA sometimes, or you know, we we got them Lego party for Christmas or for my brother's birthday.

And we played some of that, which was good fun.

Um, but, uh, we, uh, yeah, decided, you know, he was just playing away in the background.

Um, it was my wife who was like reading Hamnet, sitting in the corner with a cup of tea, would like occasionally glance up and then watch him play for a while, and after a couple of days she was like, i think, i think i want to give fortnight ago now.

She's never like played online shooters ever like.

She plays lots of different types of games but, like you know, drastic world evolution would be one.

She really likes the the two point stuff on pc and on console.

She plays Jurassic World actually, and then games like you know the Far Cries she'll play.

So she's used to like gunning fools down in first person.

But um, has like and has watched me play PUBG a bunch in the past, but has never played these games before, and so she started getting.

When we got home I, you know, installed it and then she started playing away and then, because she's been playing, then I started she'd like, do you want to have a round?

And then I'd I'd play some Fortnite and I can see why it's so addictive, because everyone on there is fucking terrible.

It's a lot.

I don't know.

Well, I think they do.

I think the bots, I think they do a PUBG thing where they they get you know her characters level 68 or something you know she's played like hundreds of games.

They're still not very good.

Um, I think they probably do the bots early.

I know PUBG did that and stuff on mobile.

Frank, what's your, what's your take on that whole thing?

Your first game.

They give you bots.

That way you get the dopamine hit of getting the victory royale.

Your first time playing Fortnite, they also do it every time the season resets.

So every time it's your first time in a new season, you're paired with bots.

That way you get the victory royale.

And then there's the pressure of like oh, if you play again, you can keep your crown.

So there was also a period where we like, when i was like most into it, i was always trying to get friends to play, because if we got a new friend to join our lobby, that was a guarantee.

Oh hey jordan, make an account, just for a second, just just get in here for a second.

Oh cool, we got a victory royale.

You don't like the game uninstalled?

All right, we'll see you later.

That's devious.

So they always yeah, your first thing.

They threw a box at you.

Yeah that's, that's a hilarious thing to do, because it's like you're not getting like it's it's, you're just getting the dopamine.

Like you're signing up for a free subscription.

You're using their free subscription to get you just like dopamine, not like achievements or something i don't know.

That's very funny to me.

What?

What is your take on the difficulty in fortnite frank?

Uh, so the the real thing, the real like insane mode is if you're playing the original build mode right uh, so like like, i don't know, it's like this is during quarantine.

Are you playing ranked or unranked?

I don't, i never don't, i.

I never touched the rank thing.

But like um, There's build mode, the original, where you're you know the term cranking 90s, you're building towers and it's insane.

That is like extremely high skill level like, like it's insane to play at that stage because you'll see people, just you'll shoot someone, and then they will literally like construct a giant tower in like a millisecond.

And this is in just to differentiate it.

This is in not just because there is build mode and not a no build.

But then there is also OG Fortnite build mode.

Is that what you're talking about?

Oh, I see.

I see.

I'm like, see, like they always update.

So I'm not as like, so we, we found it harder in the no build in the build one.

It was just like people who are throwing up little boxes and you're just like okay, I'm just going to shoot through your shitty box until it dies.

They weren't doing the whole go higher stuff.

And then I turned off cross play on hers because I realized that she was getting to the end of a lot of games.

And then clearly you could see on spectator mode.

Somebody was on a PC and Or using keyboard and mouse, I guess on their console.

So we turned cross play off and then but then it was too easy.

Then on no build, it was like it was like, you know, you got like four chicken dinners in a row.

They were fucking terrible.

And then so now she does predominantly no build with cross play off to like even the playing field.

But yeah, did you find it like easier than games like Call of Duty to like get to the end?

You're playing in groups mostly though, right?

Yeah, like the most I was playing was like five years ago and like god yeah, it was always easy to be like, i would say, like the final four squads, and that's when it feels like the real game begins, and then like, depending on what season, every season has like a bullshit item, that's like a one hit, you know, like so yeah, and there's different strategies but, like i do, i do like the build mode because yeah, a lot of times will happen is people will be so concerned trying to build stuff and if you just shoot the base, everything collapses.

You can kill them with fall damage or they'll be so worried with building and it's like i'm just gonna keep shooting, i'm not gonna try to build anything, And it's almost like who drops first?

Yeah, so I would still stay in build mode.

I didn't like no build mode because my muscle reflex as soon as I get shot is to construct a tower.

And so I never unlearned that.

So I kind of stopped playing when no build mode.

Just kind of on the ground, flicking around, nothing's happening.

It's a genuine skunk repelling.

It's a genuine muscle habit.

And so it's so weird to not have that.

And my favorite thing when playing Fortnite is is when you're driving a car with friends, you can still build.

So I always will build ramps as they're driving to fuck up my friends.

And then it's very funny to act coy.

Like, who's doing this?

Stop doing this.

Someone's pleased.

So I like the Fortnite build just because of all the chaos and stuff.

And I truly never really care who wins or loses.

I just like smashing stuff with a hammer, collecting loot.

Like, that's the fun...

The playground of Fortnite is generally fun because it's like you're shooting the shit with friends.

Now they have music tracks you can play in the middle.

You're just messing around shooting bots.

And then the last two minutes is like, oh, crap.

Okay, now let's – okay, now everyone pay attention.

But the first 20 minutes is like collecting – it's like very, very relaxing and fun and silly.

So it's got a – I don't know.

It's calm, calm, very intense, and then reset.

And then obviously there's sometimes when you drop in and you're killed immediately, and then you just go again.

But, yeah, it's always got a good rhythm to it.

Yeah, it's very more ish.

I can see why people keep playing it like tactically.

I don't find it to be, you know, coming from a lot of our creators time as well.

It's it's a whole other set of there is some PV stuff like there's those bosses you can engage with and stuff like that.

You know, I like the way that they they refresh the map and do all that stuff.

I think that's an interesting way to sort of focus people, because having it on one map all the time definitely helps I think probably younger players and less experienced online players to to get to grips with you know what where stuff is and all that stuff.

Um, yeah.

And it seems it's a, sorry, not Simpsons.

I missed the Simpsons one.

It's a South park related at the moment themed.

So.

If you grab your cheesy poofs, they heal your energy real fast.

Those are my cheesy poofs.

Exactly.

There's lots of lots of that going on.

Lots of Mecha Cartmans running around from that one Gundam episode they did that time, I guess.

I don't think I ever saw that one.

Can you catch Chimpoko Mon?

Can you do that yet?

No, you can't.

But I did see, you know they have the little, like pets, like little, you know, friends that will follow you around.

They do have one for Towley.

So that's pretty good.

Yeah.

He is not smoking a reefer.

He's not asking if you want to get high all the time?

No.

What's the point then?

And his eyes are not bloodshot.

They cleaned up Towley for this game.

They woke my Towley.

They woke Towley.

They whitewashed Towley.

They bleached Towley.

Exactly.

How awful.

Poor Towley.

Rest in power.

I see why people like it.

It's popcorn. you know what i mean like it's just it's just silly silly popcorn and i and i get it and the shooting's interesting but yeah i think all the the stuff that i find interesting in there which i have not touched at all but for me purely sort of um games cultural perspective is the sort of more roblox stuff they've added in there like all the custom games and and that stuff looks did you play any steel brain rot did you get into that i know my my my nephew was playing italian brain rot um levels when i was over there uh which were yeah did you parse that at all was that even like anything to you when you looked at it what the brain rot stuff he was playing the brain yeah were you just like is this i've i've googled enough brain rot stuff i know the shark the italian shark thing i know that yeah there's a lot i can't do it man it's like scp but way more boring like i already found that not that interesting so that's scp um oh my god i don't have enough time it's a wormhole yeah you know the back rooms it's kind of like oh yeah sure that's part of that if you want okay all that yeah all that creepy pasta weird yeah there you go shit that's also what kind of informed the lore of control like that's pulling from the same stuff yeah same sort of vibe yeah you telling me the shark with trousers is going to turn up in the brain rot shark will be in resonant great he'll be one of the enemies uh i think i think i told you i was at a at a like a like a flea market about two months ago and there was this very sweet lady selling italian brain rot figurines and i almost bought them i almost my god you should have i know put that on a millionaire exactly that that is the most grailed thing i can think of actually isn't it is an italian shark on a t-shirt or you know with a freaky chain or some shit like that I saw a shirt on Grailed that I really wanted to get, but it was $200.

And it was a 2XL white t-shirt from one of the Harvest Moon games.

And it was the protagonist of Harvest Moon, surrounded by, like a cornucopia, a wreath of different fruits and vegetables.

And all of the romanceable women in the game were on the outline of the cornucopia.

And I don't know.

I just thought it was fucking tough as fuck.

I just wanted it.

Like it was $200.

Yeah.

Like a harem night out.

Yeah.

There was.

There was something, something about it that had swagger of like this, all these cutesy chibi characters, but it was like this guy and all of the all of the women who with whom he has romantic relationships.

Wow.

Why, why choose one, I guess.

Yeah.

That was sort of the implication of the t-shirt is that this man was, that he was a player amongst the very small village, that he was romancing every woman in the village.

And every chef by the sounds of the cornucopia of food as well.

That's true.

It's pretty good.

It's strong.

$200.

Sounds like something you could print yourself, I'll say.

That's a good point.

I should just learn to screen print.

Right?

Two XL shirts.

You could probably just send them to some company.

Although, we had some weirdness where one of our shirts got taken down one time because...

They were like oh, it's copyright, because it had like a drawing of a cartridge with like something written on it.

So, yeah.

Woke's coming for T-shirts too.

That's why we got to take over Greenland.

They have all the anti-woke serum.

It is in the ground.

We need to drill for it.

Drill, baby, drill.

It has taken one podcast for us to settle back into Jesse puzzle mode.

TR49.

I guess, is this an adventure game, puzzle game?

What are we calling TR-49?

You can call it an adventure game, or a research game, or an obsession game, whatever you want to call it.

I really liked your description of... You started Obsession by Calvin Klein.

No, you started it with calling Blueprints an obsession game or a game that teaches people how to have obsessions.

I liked that a lot.

I think that's a good description of what it is.

Thank you.

TR-49 is the latest game from Inkle.

It should be... It's out...

Now, as you're listening to this, I got a little bit early.

Actually, I got a lot early and the holidays were so busy.

I didn't get much time to play it, but I did play a couple hours of it.

This is if you've played any of Inkle's other games, like 80 Days or oh, do you pendragon?

I think that's pendragon.

I remember that, yeah.

Yeah, they've done a ton of great video game like.

I think everything they've made at this point i've enjoyed at least a little bit.

Like heaven's vault is one of the coolest games i've ever played.

Like, if you like chance of sonar, you gotta play heaven's vault.

They have such a crazy god, i forgot their catalog is all over the place.

Right, it is because i i played both expelled and overboard as well.

Right, all those are great.

Yeah yeah, overboard from last year was great.

Yeah wow, that's crazy.

Well, they're prolific.

Been going for a while and i don't think they've ever gotten worse.

What was the last one they got?

Highland song, or the last one that i played fully?

Oh, my god, that game is life-changing.

You, you asked what soundtracks we listen to outside of work from last year, from 2025, 2024?

I listened to the hell out of that.

I think that was 2023 when it came out, but it was like end of the year, something like that.

Regardless uh very, very good game.

This one, tr 49.

Their newest.

This is a.

It's kind of Like all of their games.

It's sort of hard to describe, because they haven't done anything like this in the past for you to point to.

Essentially, it is a word search game in some way.

Like if that not a literal word search, but like you're given this computer that you walk up to.

It is like a one screen game.

You can play it on iPad.

I think it's on mobile as well.

They won't launch.

Um you, you are essentially interfacing with this computer by browsing through a bunch of articles, but like they're corrupted, right.

And the articles in order to unlock what the information is in them.

You have to figure out one, what the title of the article is and two, what the uh code to unlock stuff is like.

You have to get the title but you cipher sort of yeah, it's the setup, for it is.

It's a computer at in the basement of the Manchester cathedral, uh.

And you are working with another person outside of the building.

There's no setup.

You just immediately wake up.

This person greets you and you start working on this machine.

You learn over time about what's going on outside of the world.

And it's all sort of piecemeal delivered to you through this computer.

It's implied that the computer isn't like alive, but it is sort of like a 1940s version of AI.

They're not being coy about it either.

Like they say this computer eats books.

It consumes them and then spews their information out back and like revises all of it.

Uh, it just like it saves lives, literally saves like on a computer, but never the lives that deserve it.

Only the rich and powerful.

Like it is, they are punching you in the face with the point.

I love it.

Um, but the gameplay of it, I find really enjoyable, I think because of work for me.

So, like I'm saying, the way that you play this game is yes integrate, interacting and reading these books and sort of like piecing out what the code is.

There's this next to the computer on the screen.

There's this, for I don't know what the type of display is called, but it's just, it's like a flippy clock display.

Google flippy clock display.

You know what I mean?

It's a circular like.

It's an old, old computer with like a like a almost almost pre-computer, vintage looking computer with like a circular monitor right uh yes, circular monitor.

But then the thing that you interact with is this uh this, where you can click and like, interact and move the cursor around with your controller.

Uh, on these it's like a gear stick yeah, it's like a gear box.

I should say yeah, it looks like that.

Yeah um, it's like a rotary dial pops up on the computer and you have to pick a series of letters and numbers to make a code.

Uh, the you know, the name of the game is also sort of telling you what you're looking for within it.

TR 49 is a, is a code.

Uh, and there's a bunch of them in the game.

You have to figure out what they are and you input them on this little dial rotator input machine.

And then that gives you a page, but you don't know necessarily what the codes are going to be.

Sometimes they're literally on the screen.

You have to type them in, but then sometimes you have to sort of parse them based on the information.

So you have to actually read and pay attention to what's going on.

I know stop falling asleep guys.

Please stay awake.

It's interesting.

I promise.

But it's like it's one of those games where it appeals again to me, because part of my job when I'm working with, like Matt Muscles or other YouTubers where they're like hunting for information and trying to present the video in like a week, we have to find stuff that is gone, stuff on the internet that, like you, have to search for.

But like you, i'm danny, i'm sure you've been through this before where you've like gone on internet archive or any of you guys really you've got an internet archive, clicked on a link and the link in the archive page is dead and now you have to play like internet detective to find the information you were looking for and figure out.

This is also not that dissimilar to just what it was like using the internet when you were, before you were using it Oh, certainly.

I'm sure back when it was back when you were 10 and I was just born, it was probably not too dissimilar to this.

Yeah.

But it was always like for me anyway, that aspect of it.

I think the game is obviously written from a sort of contemporary perspective, but also one that's examining the past of like the way that information was stored.

I felt at times like this is the end of the internet.

This is what happens to it.

Like if the AI truly takes over the, the singularity occurs.

It's like all the information is on this machine and all the real information is gone.

Cause why did you need that?

That's what we had the computer for.

Um, so I don't know the act of playing it.

It's a very fun experience.

I have found it to be deeply, obsessively intriguing, in the same way that her story was of like typing things in, trying combinations and seeing what you find.

And like, sometimes like, most interesting rabbit hole or thread that i find myself falling into while playing tr 49 a game that's not very long um is when i accidentally type in a code and it takes me to a page i wasn't trying to go to one that has no bearing on the progression of the plot but is more information on the world outside or the connections between different characters that like the story is told from your perspective of reading this information but also obviously there's uh it's sort of like People are on a message board in their Wikipedia page computer.

It's such a weird, unique thing that I've never played anything like this before.

How long do you think of this?

If I were to guess, maybe five, six hours to get like a run.

Uh, i played like two or three and it feels like i'm sort of coming up to something leading to a conclusion.

Um, they tell you what you're looking for pretty early on, but obviously the the path you take is winding.

Just to clarify you're using run, you're not saying this is, it's not like a roguelike just to play through the campaign.

Okay, your playthrough, i guess, is a better way of saying excellence.

TR-49, available now at time of publishing this podcast.

Yeah, I'm going to check that out.

It's got an interesting look to it for sure.

How difficult would you say it is?

I mean it's difficult in the way that all other games are is that if you're not paying attention and not actually reading and parsing what's being said, you're just not going to remotely have a good time.

Do I have a notepad?

How about that?

No, the game actually has built in document stuff, like there's pages you can pull up in the menu.

That'll keep track of everything for you.

You can do a notepad if you want, but like most of it, the words are highlighted on the screen.

Like.

Either they're literally highlighted and you can click on them, or they're bolded and like please, the information is in a bracket.

Please pay attention.

It's trying very hard.

Excellent.

TR 49 is a hyphen in there as well.

Yes.

Your dash 49.

Frank, you've been diving into old computers yourself by the looks of the games you have on here.

What have you been playing?

Some racing games?

Either racing in the sky or racing on the ground.

Yeah, they're kind of similar.

Yeah, over the holidays I've been trying to find a good racing game to play, because I like having a game to grind so that it's quick to play.

You start your day and then when you end your day.

I kind of exhausted Gran Turismo 7 over a year ago and nothing has really scratched that since.

Um, but then I had the flash of a thought.

There was always a game I've I've always wanted to play, but never did, called auto modelista, which was Capcom's racing game from 2002.

I think like the USA port was finally like 2004.

And I remember like as a kid flipping through like magazines and being blown away by the graphics.

Cause it's like a cell shaded racing game.

It has the same art cells like jet set radio.

But all the reviews since time began.

All the reviews are always like yeah, the game looks good, but it has the worst handling of all time.

Don't play it.

But I was trying to find a cool Japanese racing game.

And I'm like, you know what?

Let me just try it.

So there's no retro achievements. but I still played it.

Um, so I loaded up on the PS2 emulator and yeah, I think auto modelista is the greatest looking racing game of all time.

And it's insane.

There is no like fandom love affair for this game.

Like it's the kind of thing where it's like history got, got it wrong.

Everyone was so mean to Capcom.

This should be a series.

This should be a flagship thing.

It is truly incredible.

Yeah, so it's Jet Set Radio Graphics.

It's got faux manga lines as you're driving.

Everything takes place in Japan.

You're driving Osaka, Tokyo yokohama freeway, it's got like the um, initial d uh, drifting hills, you're going down.

There's a level where you're drifting down the hills and it's like golden hour oh, no way.

It's like.

It's like autumn graphics, the sun is like i don't know how they're doing it 2002, but it's like.

The sun is like hitting you in the eyes, but it's.

It's like it's so.

It's so phenomenally hyper stylized.

And it came out 2002 around the same time they were doing capcom versus snk2.

So it has the same announcer.

It's like, all right, welcome to the garage line.

Pick your car, tune your brakes.

It's auto modelista.

And it's like this is this is like the great it's, it's the amount of like.

It's definitely like style over substance, but that's what I like.

I don't care.

It's phenomenal.

It's so, so good.

So, and the progression of it's really cool.

So the so the thing that makes auto modelista really unique is the appearance of the game.

Looks like a, like an arcade game.

Like, yeah, it's cartoon graphics race, whatever.

It is extremely sim focused where you have to custom tune your car based on what race you're doing.

So if you're doing a downhill race, you have to shift your suspension weight braking grip, all that.

If you're doing uplift, change it.

If it's a rainy track, you have to change it.

So like the handling is insane because you have to specifically tune it for that mission.

And it took me a few days of like Googling and trying to game facts and like I think they did this for the American releases.

In the game there's a thing called easy tune-up, which is literally like you pick your car, tell us what race you're trying to do and we'll just automatically tune your car.

And knowing that, now I'm like, oh, I can get it.

So actually playing the game, it does feel like every single map is on ice.

Like you're skidding.

You're skidding.

But what's also funny is the AI has that same physics.

So the AI is always spinning out and crashing the.

So it's like, once you learn how to play the game, it's like okay, I know how to play this now.

The other thing too, that maybe reviewers got wrong, I don't know is when you start the game, your car sucks because you don't have any good parts.

Your level one brakes, level one engine, level one computer, all this stuff.

So it's like, I've experienced this now with lots of games.

Like when you start, even Ace Combat, which we'll get to in a second, is like they give you the crappiest plane, the crappiest car.

So it handles like shit because you have a crappy car.

Once you start grinding the different missions and tuning up, it's like, oh, wait.

Oh, I can actually drive this better.

And so like Yeah, it's like I'm falling in love with this game, even though there's no retro achievements, there's no remaster, there's no modern things to unlock.

It feels good to go back in time and like pick up a game that everyone dismissed said was bad, and picked up something like oh wait, this is maybe it's bad.

But to me, this is a 10 out of 10 game.

This is incredible.

Like it feels like just it looks I cannot believe this is a PlayStation 2 game.

Like that's right.

Like graphically, it's like this thing looks absolutely insane. the frame rate seems pretty great too um uh with the with the the graphics but the art it's the art design it's like the the way the like flowers pop in the the the grassland downhill one the the the tokyo highway like the amount of buildings and lights that are happening on asaka highway there is as absolutely insane like this is a there was no pc release for this this is like a Yeah, I think just PS2, Xbox, and I think GameCube.

So just Capcom threw it out on every contemporary console at the time.

I wonder if there's something to be said for a misunderstood game because, like you said, it has that arcade-y feel to it.

And also, I feel like, on the PS2, unless you had Gran Turismo written over the top of your banner, which is sort of a fake sim, I always consider it.

I can see how somebody would assume that this is just a shitty handling car game and not something a little bit deeper.

In the same way that it took people a while to get around to the idea of a game like Dark Souls.

It was like, hmm, a difficult 3D action game?

Aren't they supposed to be like power fantasies, where I'm destroying 7000 people in a massive Japanese field?

Yeah, so I can see how it could easily be uh, lost to time.

It looks dope.

Have you guys seen this?

Oh yeah.

I've seen a ton of this.

The soundtrack's fantastic.

I've listened to it a bunch over the years.

Uh, the visual style, it's just off the chains.

Yeah.

That's sick.

Like it's in that sort of jet set radio, uh vibe of of visuals, but not quite as as vibrant and, like you know, visual puke, as I find not in a bad way, not derogatory way uh, that I find the jets at radio games.

Um, Yeah, Automodelista.

Yeah, I'm surprised you went back to this, Frank.

I guess not because it's Capcom and you love Capcom, which is totally valid.

But I'm surprised you went back to this one in particular.

Why didn't you go play something cool like, you know, Midnight Club Dub Edition?

So I did.

I did download Midnight.

So I downloaded like six games on my Xbox.

I downloaded Need for Speed Unbound.

I downloaded Need for Speed Heat.

I downloaded Midnight Club Los Angeles, which I did not know.

There was an Xbox 360 Midnight Club game.

I downloaded Forza Motorsport.

I downloaded.

God, i feel like two more race.

Uh ea, fwc.

So it's a rally racing game.

Oh, wrc was yes yes yeah, so it's.

I think jeremy mentioned the porridge effects, or like, in his game of the year video of like this one's too hot, this one's too cold, where i'm like i'm trying to find the game that like is perfect and autumnalista is like.

Oh my god, like That's it.

Although I can dive into Forza in a second.

This one's picking it up, too.

But yeah Automalista, I think.

I think going to the Capcom Museum a few months ago and just like being reminded of it, it's just been in my head.

And like yeah again, visually it's just like there's just so few the games that look at this are so few and far in between that I'm like God dang, I know I like now.

I'm like I'm sure, I'm sure copies of this game are cheap because no one knows, no one cares about it.

And now I'm like, damn, I want this game.

Um, so yeah, I, I really like it.

I, I, I think I'm almost done.

The the, the.

The main mode is called garage life and that's where you're level one, do these races, you get tuning parts and you can get it.

And by the end you can go back and complete every mission.

Um, so yeah, it's, it's incredible.

So I, uh, God, I know I love it.

I'm sad.

Capcom is never going to like remaster or do anything with it again.

They did one more racing game. like two years after without that art style on xbox um so so it's like a kind of thing where it's like they didn't get that affirmation or approval so they're like oh okay we're sorry we're not going to do this anymore and i'm like no what the why please um so i don't know and i'm sure there's like indie games that are like there's so many drift games and like like stuff like this and i think there's a ps3 initial d game that is close to this art style uh it's japanese only but yeah full-blown uh cel-shaded game from 2002 that still holds up and looks better than anything i've ever played since is mind-blowing um that's pretty cool i love the um i love the idea that it has the uh you know the end of episode one and initial d uh as as a race but like i it doesn't have an initial D art style.

You know what I mean?

Like initial D is not cell shaded like that.

And the mind nor neither the manga or the anime.

Um, so it is cool that it was doing its own thing.

You can pick a copy up on eBay.

It's not cheap.

It's like 35, 50 quid for PlayStation or Xbox one.

There's also a game cube copy here for two 10.

I bet that looks real good.

I bet that game cube edition looks real good.

Um, That's pretty awesome.

And then, yeah, a little bit on Forza and Ace Combat.

You said you were playing those two.

Not as classic.

Yeah, so just same with the racing game stuff.

So I... even, even the bridge to it.

And I can't get into this deeper.

There's a racing game at round one called one gone midnight maximum tune.

Oh my God.

I'll drop in the document just so people can look it up.

I had a friend recommend this to me.

So again I'm trying I was just like literally trying to find um Japanese racing games to just find something that scratch grants Rismo or initial D or just just just get hit with something.

And at round one, this is produced by Namco Bandai.

So I don't know if it's the exact same team, but it's the same lineage of Ridge racer.

So, so again, it's so weird realizing, like at the arcade, it's like, Oh wait, there's new games being made that aren't on consoles that are actually good.

You know, I was like, I completely ignored this whole scene for so many years.

Um, so one gone midnight maximum tune again, similar to initial D vibes.

Uh, it's got a career mode.

There's like manga characters talking to you as you're driving.

Same thing.

All the tracks are in Japan, but the soundtrack is phenomenal.

The soundtrack is by the guy who did streets of rage.

Oh, no way.

And all the music's on iTunes or Apple Music.

So, yeah, so I forget.

It's like Yuzo Koshiro.

Yes.

So it's like it's a little different.

Like Initial D has a very significant like Eurobeat feel.

This is more like city pop.

But I was sitting down at the cabinet at round one playing this.

I was like, oh, my God, this music's incredible.

What the hell?

And so I started listening to that on its own.

And it's phenomenal music.

So then I started playing, again, looking for my different racing games.

I booted up Forza Motorsport.

This came out in 2023.

It was on Game Pass.

I remember when this game came out, I was interested.

It's the more not open world Forza.

This is when you're just picking your race courses, doing that.

I guess more Simish.

I don't know.

Remember Jeff Gerstmann talked about in his podcast.

There was an insane roadblock with this game where you pick your race but before you can do the race, the game forces you to do practice laps and like so, which ultimately means like you have to do the race twice, which seems like such an inflated waste.

Like why why why, why you would not like formula one games?

My friend, you got practice one, practice two, practice three, then qualifying, which is three sections, and then you get to race.

That's crazy, i mean.

Again, if it's yeah, so that makes more sense with the context.

Um yeah because, like i was just looking for, like arcade, let me just get in a race like entries with seven in 2024, like many months after the game came out after, like the sales window they patched.

That's like, okay, you can skip the practices.

So I didn't know that I downloaded it.

And I remember that was the block.

And I, and I was like, let me try it.

And so immediately I could just dive into races.

The thing I like about Forza Motorsport, I've already caught up with horizons.

There's one this year coming out in Japan with Forza Motorsport.

It's still connected to online servers.

So you can download anime skins to your car.

So I have that.

There's no sound.

It's very fun.

I don't know if it's like this with F1 games too, or other more sim racing games, but there's like no music.

It's just the sounds of the cars and the engines.

Yeah.

So it's like oh so I'm listening to the Wonga Midnight Maximum Tune City Pop Japanese, like music, playing forza with an anime car.

And even though this is not a japanese game, it's like oh, this is this, is this is this is scratching that itch, because i'm getting achievements, i'm getting progression, this is how you solved your porridge problem.

Is you just made your own weird sort of version of forza?

Yes yes yeah, because i'm picking like toyota's.

I actually have the like 1985, like hatchback little, like initial d car and if you go on online, look at the anime skins like everyone's made the initial d like thing.

I have some random car that's like Pepsi and it's a bunch of like anime bikini girls on it.

For whatever,

I just grabbed that.

I was like, great, that looks good.

Have the midnight tune music.

I'm getting XP.

The one thing that's really funny with Forza Motorsport is, like during the race, you get points based on how well you do, like segments of the thing.

On a one detail tends to scale.

Your car has an XP bar and, like throughout the race, your car levels up.

Wow.

That's fucking awesome.

So I'm getting this, like, Call of Duty dopamine while playing, like, car level 7, car level 8.

So it's like it's enough where I can play a mission for 10 minutes.

I'm leveling up my car and, just like Automodelista is, between races you get car points, abbreviated as CP which, if Call of Duty also has CP, melty blood has, all these games have it.

Um, what is it?

Uh, you can then tune up your car so it gets stronger and faster, so it almost feels like a roguelike in the sense of you pick a racing series okay, you can only use these five cars.

Pick one of these five cars you want.

Boom, pick your anime skin boom, do a mission and then you can upgrade your car.

And so i'm doing this racing series.

My car is getting stronger.

When i finish the series, i'm done with that car.

I go to a new series, pick a new car, pick a new anime skin, and i'm like oh, i like found, i like yeah, by mixing elements and and knowing what i like from my research, it's like oh, i found a good racing game for right now.

So i don't know when i'll exhaust it, maybe by the time forza horizon 6 comes out or something else but i'm like this is this is this is good.

My brain was like racing for a month trying to find like, what's the right racing game.

Automata list is perfect, but there's no achievements.

But it's good.

Forza horizon i started it.

Within like an hour I got like 10 achievements.

And it's like, oh, cool.

Great.

Like, again, I know this is all nonsense.

None of this matters.

But like when it comes to like things I like in video games, it's boop, boop, boop.

It's like, oh, this is perfect.

And then I still want to keep going around one.

And the nice thing with discovering one gone midnight maximum tune is I experienced this.

I think I went to round one.

Yeah, I think it was Saturday night, so it was a little bit busier.

I get there, the DDR machine, there's a line.

Okay, beat mania, someone's on it.

I walk around.

Oh, there's no one on the racing game.

All right, let me sit down.

It's like picking gym equipment.

No one's on this machine.

Let me race here a bit.

I did a thing.

You got to wipe it down, too, afterwards.

I was just going to say, you got to wipe that shit down.

I had a friend tell a story that a kid, like, peed in one of the racing seats.

That's stupid.

What the fuck?

What game?

That must have been a good racing game.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know.

Holy shit.

I don't know.

I don't think they say which one.

Kid shat his pants because he thought it was real.

Or the vibrations.

I don't know.

Whoa, whoa.

He sure was.

So, so. doing midnight racing tune whatever is good at the arcade and i can still do ddr or beatmania but now i have like three games at the arcade i can like bounce around if there's a line it's like the elliptical machines in the fox news uh headquarters gym you go to yeah and still that my my room is still completely empty every time i sometimes there's people like doing yoga in the same room but it's it's a yeah and they're charlie kirk shirts or yeah yeah it's funny enough in that room with the no fox news tv no one in that room is wearing charlie kirk shirts but if you go in the other room it's it's It's like God, guns, and family in that order.

Something like that.

God, guns, and Greenland.

Guns before family, baby.

Keep the alliteration going, you fucking numbskulls.

Do you know what version of Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune you're playing?

There are over a dozen, according to Wikipedia.

I wish I took a picture of it.

It's either five or six.

Round one always keeps it up, so I think it's six, but it could be five. um but yeah it's uh that in itself is cool again just like with ddr you can get the namco namco bandai card whatever yeah you scan it it you it um you pick your car you get your license plate and then every time you play just like forza automalista you unlock car parts so it's like oh okay now you've got this braking computer your handling's better so it's the kind of thing where it's like All arcade games now are doing this for player retention.

It's like, come back to this machine.

That way you get progression.

So it's like, oh, cool.

I like that.

And then you can play with other friends.

So now I'm trying to get my friends to play this machine.

And I don't know.

It's kind of fun.

It's been cool to rediscover arcades again and just see what's there.

And again, I want to look at the development process. uh history of this of this series because yeah ridge racer is like a dead series too but namco is still making racing games which is now called long gun midnight and um like even japan still you can still find original ridge racing cabinets and i think when i go to japan this next trip i really want to see what are what are the arcade racing game scenes because in akihabara you have all the cars with the yetashis and anime skins but like it's kind of cool seeing that reflected in the video games too yeah check out what the latest version of uh one god midnight apparently they're working on speed ignition is the next one uh that it'll be coming out but there's little known about it and the first one came out one god midnight is a uh i never watched it or read it but it's a manga an anime and maximum tune started in 2004 and way back when so yeah they've been running for a good while something tells me i've seen these machines before i've just never liked the name i don't think is sticking in my head like wangan i don't play wangan midnight maximum tune that's just like it's a lot of words there's a there's a meme that came up when i searched one gun midnight which was uh it says additional d it's not the car it's the driver and then it says one gun midnight it's not the driver it's the car that's great that's brilliant i like that it's an inversion of initial d where it's like the characters are the cars of the people driving them are about secondary that's great oh yeah this is all about yourself and like it's like what's the other one i watched there's a great um formula formula japanese formula 4 i think it is uh um manga or anime and it's oh it's so good i've future gpx site no overtake overtake it's fucking brilliant it's absolutely i think they only did one series of it um yeah it's japanese formula 4

It came out in 2023.

It looks incredible.

It's really good.

It's I think there's only 10 episodes, 12.

Yeah, it's it's absolutely awesome.

And it's all about like, you know, it's like Dragon Ball.

It's all about just training and preparing and being in the moment and doing the thing.

And your friends around you help, you know, it's fucking you've heard of anime, right?

It's one of those a good time.

Uh, thanks for checking in with us and all that good stuff.

Frank, there's a lot of uh classic games to to check out and and have a better idea of automata lista.

I will say i'm glad that is now on my radar.

I don't think i had ever really seen that before.

Uh jeremy, you are playing a game that came out probably during our game of the year stuff.

Is that fair to say, it was like sometime in december last year.

Another 3D platformer with this one.

Dear Lord, it looks like, I don't know how to explain this.

It looks like the Sonic in-between level puzzle from Sonic 2, the racing one where Tails is running behind.

You had a baby with like A modern 3D platformer and an Amiga like demo.

It had a baby with balls 3D.

Yeah, if you were playing balls 3D in one room and then a Sonic 3D platformer in the other room and you had an IV drip of DMT going into your arm, then the result you would get is Eternity Egg by Userlands.

This is a game I've been following the development of for a while, just because it has a really unique aesthetic and visual style and like presentation.

It's very it's.

It's like the something about the, the use of color and the use of the materials and they're sort of like.

They're like roughness and the reflective qualities of them.

Everything is kind of like shiny, like everything looks like it would make like a squeaky noise if you rubbed up against it.

I don't know how to explain it other than that um uh, this is an early access, so i have not played a ton of this.

Uh, because i kind of i i feel like my brain only gets one go at a game.

But i wanted to check this out a little bit just to see if it was as cool as i thought it was going to be.

Uh, and it, it is it this?

So this is a.

It's a 3d platformer.

You are sort of like a jester type figure.

Um, You have like a staff with a bell kind of thing at the end and you use it to just beat the shit out of weird like DMT jesters who attack you.

The game handles amazingly.

It has, again, sort of like momentum based things.

You can do sort of like subsequent jumps to gain momentum.

You can do like a jump up and hold attack and you float midair while it charges up.

And then you shoot like 100 feet across the room with a sort of thrust attack.

And all that feels very good.

But the thing that I think is notable about it is I would love to interview user lands.

I don't know if they would want to say this on camera.

I feel I truly.

Let me preface this by saying I hate when people see something weird and they're like well, this guy must be like doing drugs, because it's such a.

It undercuts so much the creativity of the person that it's like you know when.

Because you know, like the Beatles were doing drugs.

But that's not the reason their music is good.

It's not the only reason.

The drugs love the songs.

Yeah, exactly.

They stopped doing drugs and the music got worse, all right?

That's all I'm saying.

Yeah, that is a good point, actually, as has happened to many artists I've loved over the years.

They got rich.

That's what happened.

They had nothing to sing about anymore for the common people.

Rappers, same thing happens.

That's true.

What's Snoop Dogg going to tell me about the streets.

I think it's Andre 3000 said it best.

I'm 40 years old, man.

I got nothing to rap about.

What am I going to say?

I got a colonoscopy.

Like who cares?

You really want to hear about that?

Playing the flute and fucking around on the piano.

It goes crazy though.

I can't lie.

That album is fun.

No respect.

Like, if you're, if you're an aging rapper, I would much rather see you release a flute album than a pretend to still be like pushing against the system while you do a special with Eminem.

Tell me how you hate your mom and you're 50.

Yeah yeah yeah, for sure I'll see you at the Riyadh festival whatever did he do that?

No, that was a comedy festival, but there was like a music thing going on lately where I think Ludacris was supposed to go and I think he just signed on because they were like we'll give you two million dollars and he was like yep, if you bring the big hands, we'll give you three million dollars.

If you wear them the whole, we'll give you all of qatar.

We'll do whatever you want.

Um anyway sorry, so no no, it's.

That was well worth the detour.

This game kind of looks like the ludicrous big hands It does.

I could see this being a music video in the late 90s early 2000s.

That was on right after I came home from school on TRL.

Yeah.

But there is something about the.

The intro cutscene to this blew me away so much because it is.

It is again it's, it's such a it's to say like well, this dude must be taking drugs.

It's such a fucking it's such a trope and I hate it so much.

But legitimately, like the intro cutscene to this has moments in it that are one-to-one analogous with with experiences that i had on psychedelics years ago that are and and like things that are not like tropey, where it's like whoa, and then the walls start breathing, not shit like that like hyper specific, like the, the sky shattered and there was like a large being behind the shattering.

That like reached through the like hyper specific, weirdly specific tropes that i was like holy fuck, like i've never heard anyone talk about this uh, and i it i, I don't know.

Maybe they don't do drugs.

Maybe they're tapped in in a way that I could not without you know, taking some fucking hate street acid or whatever.

But... But goddamn.

Maybe you both read the same you know drug writer's account of something that happens.

Maybe you know.

That is, i think, a very rational explanation for a lot of stuff, though i have.

I i could not, a i could not pinpoint a specific reference that uh, that resembles that particular experience anyway.

It could also just be a weird coincidence, but anyway it's it's.

It's not out of the realm of possibility that someone just came up with it, but regardless, the like, The aesthetic, the weird gesture-y shit, the eyes that are everywhere, the colors, it just has this.

It is psychedelic in a way that most psychedelic media, especially games, to me sort of falls flat and feels like it's pastiche, or it's underselling what that aesthetic is, or it's too cutesy, or it's trying too hard to be like whoa.

Does this look weird when I move my hands like this?

This game is just fucking weird and jester-y and psychedelic in a way that I think is so unique and interesting.

And so yeah, I only played maybe like 30 minutes of it because I was like okay yeah fucking, I'm going to play this whole game.

Um, but, uh, yeah, I wanted to put it on people's radars.

And if you are someone who likes to play games multiple times or play early access games and then come back to them, then it is available now.

Um, but yeah, eternity egg is, it's fucking awesome.

This game is so cool.

Nice.

Very cool.

Uh, 20 bucks on steam.

Uh, according to the steam page, it will be in our access for between six months and a year.

Um and uh, early access is to improve refined core gameplay and mechanics by gathering feedback from player community.

So, still chopping away on how it feels and everything but sounds like you, sounds like you dug it.

What are you doing in it?

You're just jumping around, fucking yeah shit yeah, mechanically it is is very sort of um, you know, through a 3d platformer you're, you like you start in an area after the intro cutscene.

You go in there's a bunch of enemies.

You have to hit a bunch of switches by sort of schmoving between them.

Um, and yeah, it's combat.

There is combat.

Yeah, you're hitting weird, uh little fucking entities with your staff and doing stuff like that.

Um, but uh yeah, and just everything about like the ui is so like weird and sort of like not telegraphed, it's like very symbol driven and stuff.

Everything about it is just very interesting.

I like when a game just is is doing its own thing so hard that i uh, You know when, when opening a menu feels like nothing.

That's usually ideal.

But when opening a menu is like, oh, this is interesting.

Like that's fucking, you know, it's like editing.

We always talk about how the best editing is invisible.

Like if you can see your eyeball, something's fucking wrong with your eyeball.

Right.

But like if your eyeball is a kaleidoscope, then maybe something is right with your eyeball.

I want that on a teaser show.

That's fucking amazing.

Sorry, I'm the only one who laughed very loudly at that.

No, that joke was specifically for you.

Holy shit.

If your eyes are kaleidoscoped, then maybe there's something right with your eyeball.

That's fucking beautiful.

Stick that on the box, fucking eternity egg.

Unbelievable.

There you go.

User lands, eternity egg stick check it out on steam right now.

Very positive, all reviews for 445 reviews.

Got a little, got a decent amount of heat there.

That's pretty cool for a for a game that looks like if you saw it had 10 reviews, you go.

Yeah, just based on on the on the screenshots, i i'm definitely gonna play this.

This looks completely fucking deranged.

Um i'm, i'm all about it.

Uh, big hops.

There's no combat in big hops jesse, right?

No, not really.

I guess you could argue eating the bugs is somewhat combat related.

It's a crime.

No fighting.

Terrible.

I feel bad when the bugs die in Big Hops.

Do you feel bad when the bugs die?

The bugs die?

So you can eat the bugs.

Oh, yeah.

They make like a little... But like if you pick up some of them, it'll be like, oh, this bug is red.

Sometimes red bugs are poison in nature.

And you can throw them.

And when they land, a little like skull sprite comes out of their dead body.

I've never done that.

I just eat all of them right away.

I don't even think to do anything else.

The frog says it's poison.

That's all right.

You still eat it.

Were they poison?

I ate the dung beetle.

I picked up poop and I ate the poop.

All right.

Well, Jesse ate the poop, but I threw the poop away and it died.

You're a fool.

You're a coward.

Did you throw it hard?

Because maybe it was close to death anyway, because that's spongy.

It turned into a skull.

That's true.

I threw a ladybug and it died, which I don't think I don't think that would happen in real life.

So. just fly away wouldn't it be like yeah i'm free yeah yeah true it's not a fainting goat um speaking of um animals and bugs and birds uh i was playing alba again with my daughter i think i talked about this before this was the um i think it's called alba a wildlife adventure maybe it's the full title for it uh it is a 3d so it's it's like zelda you're a 3d zelda where you're a kid and you take photographs of animals like you're just exploring a land and um find it doing little quests with like little people with like text bubbles that pop up and stuff um but uh yeah i'm trying to teach you how to do um thumbsticks at the same time so it's a good way to you know it's like an easy platformer and you have to aim the phone at the bird and you're like it's a it's a snowy egret and you get some points for finding the thing so i always confuse that game and uh to chaya or yes 100 yes i have similarly i was playing it with her yesterday and i was like what about that place and i was like that's from to chaya to chaya or whatever yeah um which is not a great game and a similar thing it's a very sort of nature focused 3d platform where you play as a child girl like yeah you know they're they're not I will say that one is way more mechanically complex and you can turn into shit.

And she used to love watching me play that, but it was just like a bit too much, because there's combat in that as well.

So yeah, there's a bit to do.

Cool stuff though.

Cool games out there.

The year is just warming up, folks.

And that hasn't stopped you sending in some emails, though.

Frank Howley, what we got from the good folks here in the Noclip community?

Yeah, if people want to send us an email, please write to us.

Podcasts at noclip.video.

Our first comes from Bilbo Backshot.

Excuse me, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa.

What was his name?

Bilbo Backshot.

Oh, okay.

That was a great name.

Bilbo Backshot.

That is...

That is that Bilbo Baggins is like you porn community name or something.

Is that the who's he giving back shots to?

Anyway, sorry.

What's a gamer gripe you never quite understood or never had issue with?

I was thinking about people having meltdowns over yellow signposting and a lot of games.

This has never bothered me.

I'm not sure why everyone hates it so much, as I find more and more that I would prefer that over wandering around for ages unsure of what I'm supposed to be doing.

And frankly, I'm getting older and there are more games where it's getting harder to discern what is the correct path in the given environment, especially bigger budget games.

I sometimes appreciate when an area is just a network of corridors instead of a giant sandbox of nothingness.

Yeah, I mean, if those are the two extremes, I agree with that for sure.

I can't think of anything in particular that gripes that stick out to me.

How do you feel about the yellow thing?

Yeah, that's a good point.

I got feelings about this.

Yellow paint is so interesting because on the one hand, I hate it.

Like.

As someone who understands the language of video games, I can parse it well enough that I don't really need it.

You know, I'm usually good at being like the other signposting works for me.

But then I watched my wife play a game and I'm like, no disrespect to her.

She's fucking one of the smartest people I know, but she'll be playing video games.

And I'm like, don't you speak French?

How are you, like you know in the video game version of that you don't speak the language of this world?

How dare you not understand it?

So on the one hand, it's like, yeah, obviously it's, I don't need that.

But there are people for whom that is a necessity.

You do need those sort of those large signpost things.

There are other ways of doing it for sure.

And other games, it's worked like that.

Like The Last of Us is pretty well regarded and widely.

I know a lot of people who don't play video games, who like that and can play it because they do a lot of that visual signposting.

But for big open world games it's hard to.

How do you do that right without distracting players in the wrong ways?

I don't know if there's a better solution necessarily, but stuff like that always sort of gets poked and prodded at as being like distracting to people who are so good at video games, they don't need it anymore.

I think that's why I the reaction to the yellow paint thing I think says more about the egos of gamers than it does about game design.

I think it's.

It's like, hey, guess what, everyone?

Everything is yellow paint.

Games are designed to tell you where to fucking go.

Go into a train station, man.

The real world has yellow paint.

You just don't notice it.

Wait, hold on.

There's an important nuance point here which I think is that yellow paint in.

If you're playing the like final fantasy seven remake and you're in the middle of fucking nowhere and they like if you're the bottom of a cave that no one's ever been to and there's yellow paint all over the ledges, it's fucking stupid.

And it's not because it's signposted and it's like what is this a baby game?

It's because it is not a creative solution to telegraphing.

I think that my gripe with the yellow paint is is not telegraphing and it's not the communication of information, because that is part of the language of game design.

I think that there you can use.

You can use lighting, you can use color, you can use intensity of color, you can use hue and saturation, you can use contrast, use chiaroscuro, clairobscure in French.

I believe I just learned over the game of the year stuff.

Uh, you can, there are a million ways to solve this thing that are not yellow paint.

And I think that, like when when you're playing God of War and it's like we're in an ancient Nordic cave no one's ever been here.

And then it's like there's a guy painting fucking, you know, like safety strips on, like it's the fucking Metro.

It doesn't make any sense.

And that is what pisses me off.

It is frustrating.

Certainly.

I completely agree.

I think the best, funniest games of the last couple of years.

That are not necessarily the games, but funniest moments i've noticed in these games is like sometimes there will be a comedy bit like, i think, lab rat uh, a puzzle game that i featured in my game of the year video on noclip 2.

Um does a joke about that, about the yellow paint, and sort of tries to in universe tongue-in-cheek, like i have.

You know i'm doing this, but it's okay because i put the yellow paint on the ground.

Over here you can find the paint can with the yellow paint brush on.

There's some other game i can't remember the name of, but Um yeah, it's.

It's a funny bit, but I totally agree.

It's, it's a very frustratingly simple solution.

It's like when movies uh, you hear about the Netflix thing of a bunch of writers and directors have been like, Netflix tells us that we have to repeat the plot of the movie three or four times.

Otherwise audiences aren't going to pay attention.

It's like, you're solving the wrong problem here.

Like make the movies more interesting.

You won't have to, you know, I won't look at my phone while I'm watching it.

The gray man was boring.

Not because they didn't tell me who the gray man was nine times.

It was because it sucks shit.

I'm sorry.

It's totally.

It's like there are tv shows you have your phone up for, like i was.

I started watching pluribus last night right, you can't take your eyes off it, right?

Or like one battle after another is like not, you know.

It's like yeah, i totally agree.

Yeah, i think.

I think that distinction is important.

I think people seeing it as a lazy way to solve a legitimate design uh, challenge is fine yeah, but it's what i hated was that the conversation turned into.

People are, you know, putting up the Look, I'm playing Fortnite right now.

Do you know where the loot is in Fortnite?

Like, you play PUBG, you play Arcade, you're like fucking searching all over the place.

In Fortnite, they have big fucking golden chests that make noise when you're near them, and the ui tells you when you hear things.

So if there's someone walking around you, the ui and fortnight shows you the footsteps.

If there's someone shooting far away, the ui shows you where the shooting is coming from, and if you're near a chest, it does the same fucking thing.

It's like the most frictionless like experience of like looting or searching for people to kill, or trying to stay away from people who are trying to kill you, so you know.

What's interesting about that though, is that that's like that's sort of the other extreme, where it's like if you're doing it in a very immersed way, i think that that's cool, and if you're doing it in a way where it's like there's a blue chiron that surrounds the treasure chest and it's glowing, i think that's more respectable.

But yeah, the yellow paint, to me, is like.

It's like when someone says like i don't want to be racist, but it's like no, just if you're just like, either say something racist or don't say something right, like the they're like I don't want to, I don't mean to be rude, but and it's like no, you're whatever you're about to say, just be rude to me or don't say what you're going to say.

Like fucking give me the giant blue glow or figure out a way that's clever.

Don't just fucking be like, I don't know.

Yellow painter, like, like the centrist racists of video games.

Yeah.

You fucking yellow paint fence sitters.

It's easy to sit on it when it's painted yellow.

I know where to go.

To me, it's actually a more of a more of a uh, liberal solution to a problem where they're like, they acknowledge that there's a problem and then the solution to it is so milquetoast that it absolutely like, creates four other problems.

Homeless, this is a problem.

What if we gave them one bowl of soup a day?

No, no.

What if we made it so that they can't sleep outside?

Well yes, i don't want them to sleep on the bench, so i also won't sit on the bench.

What if there was yellow paint all over the benches?

Yeah um Yeah, I think that's a.

That was a good chat about that.

I don't know about other gripes though.

Other gripes in games.

I feel like we're a very forgiving crowd when it comes to game designs.

There's usually a reason, even if it's a bad implementation.

So I don't know if I have a, I think, oh, you know what?

I'll add in almost any live service games menu.

Like Fortnite is a disaster.

I know everything's going back to Fortnite right now.

Your gripe is them being bad?

Just... Okay, just because the question is gamer gripes that we don't understand.

It's cool.

We can just list gripes.

That's fine.

I just want to make sure.

I was just checking.

That's all.

Oh, sorry.

You're right.

I was just dropping a gripe.

We can just gripe.

Let's gripe it up.

No, you're fine.

That is a better question for us.

Sorry.

I misinterpreted the question.

I was too hung up on that.

No, you know what?

The menus do suck.

I hate that everything's a cursor now.

I want to just go through stuff with my control stick and flick through the settings.

I get why it's there.

It fucking sucks.

Oh, yeah.

Do you guys have any other gamer gripes that people have that you don't like?

It makes me want to take up arms and take to the streets when I see people who, especially people who only play AAA games, especially will hop into indie game discourse and be like lazy fucking PS1 aesthetic.

They do retro aesthetics because they can't do photorealistic Death Stranding 2 level shit, and it's like do you think that fucking Van Gogh painted like that because cameras weren't in his possession?

Do you think that Picasso painted like that because he was dumb?

He didn't know how to do circles.

Yeah.

That was his problem.

That shit drives me fucking nuts, because it's like it's the it is, it is a.

It is a culturally ignorant perspective on aesthetic.

And it is also a technically ignorant perspective on the ways that small games get made, especially by like, solo developers and small teams.

It's like committing to a low poly or low fidelity.

Aesthetic is not only an artistic choice, but also a production pipeline choice.

Sort of on a similar thing.

I think some of the reactions to difficulty and accessibility get real political for some reason very, very quickly.

I understand that there's a conversation to be had between making games accessible and not making them too easy, but if you have the option to do the hard one, I think it touches upon my my personal, long running gripe that gamers think that games are trying to not let them beat them, when they are in fact doing the opposite.

They are doing is not all games but, like the vast majority of games, are attempting to drag you through this process so that you see as much of them as possible, and i think there are a lot of people who think of games like Like arcade games were maybe you know where, like they actually are trying to kill you so that you put more money in, or like you know a sport, or like a physical achievement that you're trying to drive towards something that is like difficult to achieve.

And I think that's where a lot of that stuff comes from is people being like, don't make games easy.

Then all the noobs can beat them.

This is my one skill.

It's yeah, it's so, it's just so macho and you know just bullshit.

Sort of idiotic toxic masculinity, shit.

And it's kind of usually comes from younger kids, i think, younger men.

I do have another yellow point nuance take on this which is that i think that difficulty can be.

I think that it is good that certain games are made for veteran gamers and high skill gamers like i think that that is a specific type of game experience to overcome a very difficult game and i think that from soft have a very clever way of solving this, which is that i think if dark souls had an easy setting, it would.

It would change the experience.

I think having a fundamental canonical soul, one type of the game experience that you can have, is an important part of the experience, because then you feel like you overcame it.

However, I think that the summoning the option to summon and use the Ashes of War in Elden Ring and in Dark Souls, you can summon the NPCs or real people.

I think that that's the perfect solution because there there will always be like shit lords who are like oh well, you've only really beat the game if you didn't summon.

You summon for for bells, what are you?

Those people are fucking stupid yeah, but like ding-a-ling, every fucking time i can get that mimic tear out baby.

I think that the summoning is the perfect solution because I think it allows people who don't want to commit themselves to like a masochistic experience to still beat the same game and still say they beat the same game.

And I think that is part of the joy of Dark Souls is like climbing the mountain.

You know what I mean?

Like if you drive up Mount Washington and get the sticker that says this car climb Mount Washington.

It's like you didn't climb Mount Washington.

You drove up the back of it.

Right.

But it's like if, if Mount Washington has handrails on the climbing part, you know, and there's people oh, did you use the handrails when you climbed it?

It's like those people suck.

You climbed the fucking mountain, whether or not you use the handrail, you know?

Yeah.

Also quote unquote casual games in the way they sort of like I hate that phrasing, but you know farming games really.

For, if we're totally being honest,

Games that the target audience isn't men exclusively.

Those games, the way they get derided and they're like forced into a corner like oh, you played that.

That's not a real video game.

That always drove me crazy.

It's gotten.

I haven't seen it too much in the last, maybe a couple like three or four years, but especially with Animal Crossing becoming a lot more commonly enjoyed.

But weirdly, like cozy games, has somewhat sort of like you know, appropriated that back in a more powerful way.

You know, 100 percent.

Yeah.

I just want to make a distinction.

When I was saying accessibility, I should have done this at the start.

When I was just saying accessibility with difficulty, I was speaking about accessibility for people who require it, rather than easy modes.

But i but i think that is part of the conversation, you know what i mean?

Yeah, because there's also pushback from people about like having assisted gameplay stuff within.

Oh, i think if you're saying that just yeah, fuck off yeah people, but yeah they, i think they try and they try and appropriate that a argument into a conversation about get good, which i think is just, like you know, stupid.

Yeah, that's ridiculous.

I'm fucking colorblind.

They're like, why don't you just fucking get some more cones and rods and shit, bro?

What does Forza have, like, ASL in it?

That's so stupid.

Like, shut up, dude.

What are we talking about?

Do you think they chose yellow because that's not one of the colorblind colors, right?

Is there any colorblindness where yellow is?

I'm sure if you're fully colorblind, for sure.

But I mean, yellow is a yellow has other like it's made up of other colors like it has green in it.

So like I'm deuteranopic.

So my inability to perceive green correctly might change the way in which I change, in which I perceive yellow.

But I'm not sure, actually.

Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, I do have a strange urge to climb Jesse's beanie, though.

Yeah, it's looking real good.

Can you know the difference between a fresh and a ripe banana?

Yes, actually, I can.

I think you're good.

That's the test they gave you.

How many fingers?

How many fingers do I have?

Does it look weird when I do this?

Yeah.

I hate that.

How many fingers?

That's it, dude.

Special bonus for the you look weird when i do it.

Doesn't look weird when i do this.

Oh man yeah, it does look fucking weird.

You're optometrist.

You've read out like all the lines on the board and they're like okay, now can you see what i'm doing here?

Your optometrist is like how many fingers am i holding up?

He flips you off.

Yeah, we're making emotes today, baby.

And the listeners?

There's going to be more listeners who have crossed over to watch the rest of this on the YouTube now than ever before.

That's a podcast, folks.

Not the longest this week, but we did record several hours, which came out over the weekend.

So you know, I got some angry comments, blue sky messages from people saying please don't release this much podcast.

I'm gonna feel like i'm left behind.

Tough shit.

That's the accessibility that we were like.

No, get good at listening to the podcast.

Put it on 4x speed, go for a long drive.

Yeah, 4x.

Wow, that's upsetting.

Um, yes and uh, send your new emails and podcast at noclipvideo, as frank said earlier.

Thank you all so much for hanging out today.

Our Game of the Year videos are all up.

Myself Jeremy Jesse Frank, no caps all produced little videos.

You can watch that talk about some of our favorite games of 2025.

Of course, we have all of those Game of the Year podcasts as well for you to listen to.

On the Noclip side, Disco Elysium Episode 3 has gone up.

Episode 4 will be out, I think, by the time this goes up.

It's about art, alexander rostov talking about art and the way he paints his circles and triangles.

Um, we are also going to have episode five then up for uh, early access patrons as well, so keep an eye out for that.

The patron show for this month as well is going up soon, and so there'll be plenty for you to check in on.

Uh, what are you guys doing for the rest of the week?

Frank, you're hitting up round one a few more times.

I actually actually am on thursday.

Yeah uh, Yeah.

My thing has been like I'll edit a little bit of the documentary and then everyone in the thing is talking about DDR and it makes me want to go play.

And then my rule is I can't go play again until I've edited a little bit more.

Nice.

So, yeah.

So, yeah, I don't know.

I really like it.

I also do want to finish beating Ace Combat 7 and then come back next week and talk about it.

Hell yeah.

Yeah, man.

Good stuff.

Looking forward to hearing about that.

Jesse, what are you up to?

Yeah, it's a big house building day.

Not literally building a house, but building stuff inside of the house.

It's, you know, we're getting ready for a child.

So getting get in the rooms.

Already doing a lot of building, built a bunch of furniture for our bedroom this weekend, which was a lot of fun and also exhausting.

I'm very tired.

Have you built the crib?

Have you done, have you done the thing?

Have you taken the picture?

Not yet.

I don't even know if we're going to, you know, I don't, uh, I don't decide any of that.

The wife does.

I mean, I would love to you know I I pick and choose things, but for that stuff she's like, why would we get a crib?

It's just going to sleep in the same bed as us for like six months.

Don't worry about it.

And I'm like, bassinet that shit.

Yeah, exactly.

We could just do it that way.

So I'm not stressing on that.

But we're also going to a really nice new restaurant.

And I think we're going to go watch the new Ralph Fiennes movie at our local art house theater.

Not 28 years later, the Bone Temple.

No, no, no.

I forget what it's called.

It's one about Him and a bunch of students at the, I think around World War II.

I can't remember what it's called for the life of me, but.

It sounds like a Ralph Fiennes movie.

Yeah, right.

He loves doing that stuff.

I can't, I'm trying to load the website here, but it's Ralph Fiennes.

He went to school in my hometown for one year.

I don't know why.

He went to the boarding school in Newtown.

He heard about you and he was like, I got to check out this Daniel Dwyer guy.

The Choral is the name of the movie.

It's a choir of young men that he works with.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Have you seen... What was the Pope one again?

Yeah, Conclave.

You didn't have to say anything else.

Just have you seen.

I knew the Pope one.

Yeah, Conclave.

Conclave was great.

I really enjoyed that.

You watch any good movies recently, Jeremy?

What have I watched recently?

No, not really.

I've been kind of in the holiday game dev marathon and then straight into godi stuff.

I do want to renew my criterion channel subscription though.

Um yeah, there's some some, especially some of uh kurosawa's older stuff i want to get into.

I like kurosawa's stuff that like isn't about isn't a jidaigeki, like isn't a samurai, and stuff like um, high and low and uh, drunken angel are some of my favorites.

What was the one you watched?

It was about like the old man on his last day of work or something harakiri.

I don't think that's that.

I forget.

Uh, ikiru is fucking my kurosawa.

I have a.

That's my shame.

Um, black hole.

I need to stop playing less fortnite and watch you should.

You should get a huge bottle of any any liquor of your choice yeah, sake would be great and just watch uh seven samurai.

If you've never seen it okay, give it.

Yeah, i've seen scenes and that's it.

Uh yeah, i gotta check that out.

I gotta check it out.

It's a big black spot, blind spot.

I have a couple of movies I watched.

I watched 2000 Meters to Andreevka.

Do you know about this?

This is the sequel to the – is it 12 Days in Mariupol?

I forget.

Oh, goodness.

20 Days in Mariupol, which is the most harrowing war documentary I have ever watched.

Absolutely wept for –

Most of it.

20 Days of Mariupol.

I think that's what it's called.

Is it 20?

I forget.

Yeah, it's 20.

It's absolutely incredible.

It's a really honest look at the work of photojournalists and also that question of is it worth it?

Like is it actually worth it spending?

You know spending all this time in these dangerous places sending footage back.

Or is the world numb to this now?

A very honest look at that, I think, which is pretty important, I think.

And 2000 meters to Andreevka is basically a sequel to that.

It is about this insane.

Like if you had shown me this in a video game, I'd be like, there's no fucking way this happened.

But basically it was a 2000 meter stretch of woodland, which is only maybe a hundred yards wide.

And on either side were just flat fields. with mines in them.

So the only way they could get to this town was through this strip of wood that was like a mile long and only a hundred yards wide.

And so it's just like bat, like trench to trench warfare between Ukrainians and Russians on this, like strip of forest in in this, like otherwise you know, agriculturalized area of Eastern Ukraine.

Um And yeah, it was pretty it was.

It was not as upsetting as 20 days of Mariposa, but still very just mournful and fucked up.

And it just shows you like, you know, you close your eyes and you go, that's happening right now.

Like that is there are people right now in Ukraine who are going through that still.

And you know it's because you're watching it going like this feels like something from World War One.

This is like, how are people still doing this?

This is insane.

We need to be invaded by aliens and they need to take over the planet and they need to be like stop fucking fighting or we'll blow up earth, and then i feel like that's the only thing, and they'll also decide that all shoe sizes are universal across the planet.

Thank goodness, finally something useful you need.

I need to talk to you.

I don't want to spoil anything anywhere, so i'm going to talk to you about something, a tv show you should watch.

Okay, once we turn off.

Okay, just because I know exactly what it is, I think.

Yeah, I feel like you've already given it away.

If you put the pieces of this episode together, you can figure it out.

Exactly, yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay.

Good, good, good, good, good.

All right.

That's the show.

I don't know what I'm doing for the rest.

I'm moving more shit into the barn, trying to get out there so I can film more stuff.

And yeah, editing Disco Elysium.

It's been the story of my life for the past three months.

Almost done.

This episode's the hardest, I think, but we're almost done.

All right, that's a pod, folks.

Thanks so much for hanging out, and we'll see you next time on the Noclip Podcast.

Peace.

[Noclip Podcast Episode 264: Indie Gems, Retro Racing, and the 'Brain Rot' of Gaming Culture]-[Big Hops, Auto Modellista, Eternity Egg]

📋 Summary

Navigating the Indie Landscape: Big Hops and TR-49

The Rediscovery of Retro Racing and Arcade Culture

Gamer Gripes: Yellow Paint, Accessibility, and Aesthetic Snobbery

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Noclip Podcast Episode 264: Indie Gems, Retro Racing, and the 'Brain Rot' of Gaming Culture]-[Big Hops, Auto Modellista, Eternity Egg]

📋 Summary

Navigating the Indie Landscape: Big Hops and TR-49

The Rediscovery of Retro Racing and Arcade Culture

Gamer Gripes: Yellow Paint, Accessibility, and Aesthetic Snobbery

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

ListenLeap Brings You Into Real Context Learning