Cape Hideous, Tower Wizard, Stardom Card Party | Noclip Crewcast

🎵 🎵 Thank you. Hello, friends.

Welcome to episode 236 of the Noclip Podcast. It's a crewcast. The whole crew is here.

Jesse Groscha, how are you feeling?

I know it's such a long time until the next Canada Day.

Are you dealing with it OK?

No, it's tough up here.

You know, we only have so much to look forward to.

It's Canada Day and Christmas, and that's about it.

Christmas. Famous Canadian.

Yes. Jesus Christ. Our Lord and Savior.

Jeremy, now that Jesus Christ has been taken by Canada, who is your second favorite uh Nazarethian carpenter uh me because my birthday is Christmas and I was a carpenter in high school and you guys don't you haven't seen my birth certificate you don't know where I'm from you don't know me there's probably a place in Massachusetts called Nazareth I'm gonna look that up while you ask Frank do it his day is going do it that's the me and Jesse were just talking about like silly named places in America one of my favorite ones is you know when it's like damascus utah you know what i mean you're just

like what the like paris rhode island i almost went to lebanon new hampshire last week some of them seem more palatable than others like new york york's not that big a place in england it's fine you know you can take that one there is a nazareth academy in massachusetts but it is an independent all girls catholic high school so um it's like carpentry school should should be no yeah unless i become a teacher i don't think i should be going there a catholic high school that's only girls is the like default where i'm from um you know and obviously boys as well and frank what's the stupidest name

place in california uh rancho santa margarita i gripe about it just because like the when it comes to internet stuff like i think the max character limit for a lot of things is like 22 characters and our city is like 30 so it never fills out out the form so oh no so how do you how do you do it you just type in rsm or rancho santa marguerite and then it cuts off there but it does it does sound like like margaritaville or something as well you know jimmy buffett was from there yeah waste it away again in rancho santa margaritaville i think we can do better what jeremy do you have any other california stupid

name places i mean there's a lot rough and ready california oh yeah rough and ready i mean that's a that's a great i don't mean to say that's a shitty name that's one of the best town names in the world um is Is that out there in the desert somewhere?

Rough and Ready is— I think it's in the Sierra Foothills, Rough and Ready, California.

We did already talk about Placerville, or Placerville, which was previously known as— Hangtown.

Hangtown. Still is, depending on who you ask.

Rough and Ready is by Grass Valley.

They got rid of the noose off of the— That's, you know, listen, I'm not one of these anti -woke guys, but that is— I'll go to bat for that.

I'll be one of those guys for— I'll be like, like come on we can't have nothing now can't even have the man hanging news that we hey look not to be like i was as much of a fucking contrarian as i was last week i'm not going to be out here saying hey they should have kept the noose and the hang town thing but they did hang it was a french guy it was just like a it was just like a white french guy so like i think that's something we can all get behind we love the french no we do please don't click off we should have been a guillotine really could you imagine that's true guillotine guillotine town

doesn't it actually it kind of rolls off the tongue uh rough and ready is by grass valley and then copperopolis is another good oh yeah i love holy shit that's awesome that's uh that's francis ford coppola's next project that's all he can afford after the last one that's amazing i never put those two together wow i bet francis ford coppola's been to copperopolis it's like not he lives up in you can't francis work hopefully go to copperopolis sounds like a bit from bojack horseman yeah it does it's too many syllables yeah tongue twister or something you say before you go live on camera you know

what i mean seashells seashells by the seashell red leather yellow coppola coppola was denied a bank loan exactly uh myself and jeremy have been to the beautiful baghdad nevada i think it was wasn't it i think it's southern california it's by you're right it's by trona yes it's but it's it's bad it's past bat country right it's south of the mojave past uh barstow um out there it has the world's is that the one with the world's most depressing subway i forget i think it might be yeah the bagdad subway if you tell people your favorite subway is in bagdad even if you don't elaborate at all they give

you looks um needles california is another good one in that same area yeah terrifying name forgot about needles um and And then the other good part about that part of town is that you're just in Fallout New Vegas land.

Because all of those towns are...

What's the name of that one town?

The one you start off with in Fallout New Vegas?

Oh, Good Springs? Is it Good Springs?

No, that's the first city you get to.

Isn't that it? No? I'm thinking of Clearwater, but that's something else.

And it's Novak? Novak is not, because that was No Vacation.

That was No Vacancy.

Sorry, that was a hotel.

hotel i think it is springs i want to say him is it pims oh uh i feel like him is i feel like i have it reversed him him is the first city oh yes good springs is the first town yes sorry pims is a is a is a alcoholic beverage i believe in the uk people drink pims yeah pim pim is a town that has like two like i think they're either if not closed down two of the most depressing casinos ever oh is it prim pri thank you prim that's a problem baby yee -haw welcome to prim exactly i love that robot i think the town of prim in real life is about as big as the town of prim in the video game it's not it's

just on the road to vegas it's just you've been through prim frank shirley yeah it's i feel like every it's like two hotels they're both look shut down uh yeah i think they have a massive water park that's closed as well it's just it looks like like it looks very like post -apocalyptic the town of of which is again very have a you know what i mean it's full of full of ghost towns and all that madness uh can i do one more california place that has a good name is yolo county baby oh brutal it's just i i can't imagine the ordeal they went through with uh millennials stealing that sign about 10 years

ago i'm sure there was an armed guard at every now entering Yolo County sign.

Yeah. I remember the first time I was there.

Is Davis in Yolo County?

I think so. Yolo County is definitely on route from the bay to Davis if it does not contain Davis.

It is there, yeah. Yolo County is ridiculous.

I'd love to know the reason behind that.

It's probably another Native American anglicization or whatever.

We have a lot of those in Canada.

Like just names that were definitely Aboriginal language.

You know, it's a bunch of them overlapping and names getting crossed over.

The only funny one I can think of, though, funny name, is there's an area called Crotch Lake, which is great.

That is funny. And it's right next to Coxvale, which is.

Coxvale. Coxvale. It's fantastic.

I didn't know what they were doing.

These are Ballstown down the road.

I bet if you keep looking, there's McDonald's Corner down the street too and Poland.

It's a real fun area.

Oh my God. Poland. poland yeah just a place called poland yeah i love it they were just in the new world they were just making europe they were just like let's and and presumably in the middle east if nazareth and baghdad are also just stole a bunch of names exactly i don't know what ireland if we have any particularly it might sound yeah there's like a couple of silly ones like um there's a town in donegal called muff um nice and there was a big joke about there being a divers club up there because it is on the coast so i if there was a buff divers club t -shirt i would buy it if it was very clearly

not a joke like if it was real yeah there absolutely has to be like that would just be ridiculous kill is a very popular name and it just means like church and irish basically so the window entering name and all the towns they just named half of them killed because people were like the church is there they were like kill all right okay let's just kill i guess um there's a place called gory nice and there was actually a set of murders there a couple of years years back about 10 years ago which the newspaper headlines wrote themselves um i think there's a town called bastard town as well if i remember

correctly uh that's where i was that's yeah that's where you're from yeah yeah yeah that's my hometown a couple of goodies yeah yeah good stuff man naming stuff naming stuff's hard it is you know naming a town naming a youtube channel second youtube you know it's hard sometimes i wake up and i go oh fuck no we should call it something else maybe we should call our new channel yolo i was i thought you were gonna go with bastard bastard town bastard that's a good name yeah but it's okay if you have the equal and opposite bastard town bastard town would be a great podcast name if come down did not exist

it sounds a bit like the pg -13 version yeah yeah that's the thing that's crazy it does sound we're dialing it back but like if that didn't exist it would be just like a funny name which in fairness we would be we you know that's true in terms of our in terms of our you know political perspectives perhaps we might be what would be the pg -13 version of choppo then it would be like uh the young turks no jesus christ wow wow yeah who's a less intimidating i'm too deep on this i can't have opinions um you know yeah you know you know drug and choppo yeah it It would be like Bernie Sanders' apartment where he

sells weed. Yeah. Chapo Trap House.

Bernie Sanders' alleyway or something.

The guy you know who sells a little bit of drugs.

Are we saying the Chapo?

It's an Epstein Island.

No. I'm good. I'm dialing it up.

That'd be a good one.

What was that island actually called?

That probably had a different name, right?

Little St. James, isn't it?

Was that what it was called?

Wow, you knew that right off the head top, Jeremy.

you want to be too close to this this is the news story right now this is the fucking not the original name of the island well i don't know why it's a news you know nothing happened obviously so there was no list it was never real never got a little curious about doing fucking a little deep dive on all this bullshit i got enough information has one google review and it is one star oh wow who wrote that one donald trump hey david carrius a local guide two years ago no no text hmm not anymore they're deleting the records that's what it is yeah how many people live on little st james i don't know

it has a wikipedia shall we do a little show we shall this be the first episode of bastard town i believe we're calling this podcast episode a little it should just be called little st james little st james yeah it was owned by american financier and sex offender jeffrey epstein that's a great fucking whoa and sex offender title wow yeah wow i guess I think, honestly, I think you could probably swap those job titles around, okay.

Oh, come on. The notoriety around Juan is significantly greater.

Yeah, he had a lot of buildings he owned in New York, that is true.

Until his death in 2019.

During Epstein's ownership, the island acquired the nickname Epstein Island.

Okay. Yeah, I don't know.

It's not back to ever.

Yeah, no. It's just like Dave's house.

Yeah, yeah. It's just like a rich person's version of Jesse's apartment.

I don't know. Hey, whoa, whoa, hold on.

don't don't line me up after epstein island all right settle down hey look what is canada if not an island of uh all right let's get out of here all right um eject and pulling pulling the switch oh dear lord um hello everyone welcome to a podcast about video games we're going to talk about some video games today we're going to talk about tony hawk's pro skater three and four again uh we're weirdly going to talk about that's threatening one apparently frank's been playing it now so the sickness is spreading make sure you're watching your uh you're wearing your your mask for this one i'm going to

talk about the drifter i'm glad you got a chance to pay that jesse um tower wizard as well cape hideous bunch of great games and we got some emails as well but first of all a massive thanks to all of our patrons over patreon .com slash no clip thank you for supporting all of our madness we do have some no clip doc stuff coming out um very soon we had some early access fun over the weekend with our battlefield 3 uh single player campaign uh mini doc thing which um uh people have been enjoying uh jeremy and myself put that together so it's been uh it's been cool to get that out both of us big battlefield

fans so it was fun to sit down with david goldfarb and talk about that a little bit of a bonus one because we didn't we talk about it too much and i'll talk more housekeeping at the end but of course massive thanks to all of our battle pass holders truly they are the first person we would invite to noclip island to play video games and uh and that's maybe maybe do some like very light drugs but like you know none of the nothing you're gonna be addicted to by the time you get home uh so please come on board uh bring your own pillow love priest use duane the rock lobster anthony thomas nico passateri

it's a me ferrario senator armstrong reed dredge harry Fannigan, Jush, Arno, Matt Pearson, James Brown, Mark Rojas, Coburnicus, Tucker Morgan, David McGarry, Goddison, Sven Hooster, Pez, John Akers, You Ain't Nate, Tim Robinson, Forrest Pruitt, Raquel, Jonathan Kremen, Eric Hamilton Schneider, Christophe Vitui, Cameron Laird, Zachary Snader, Alex Goucher, j george sakotas jacob godserv entheogen james med to here till you have and of course ryzen thank you all so much for supporting us at battle past here you are heroes throughout time and you will be you will be buried on noclip island with the rest

of your families and whenever you perish but the rest of the families will be killed when you die so that we can get uh we have to close the pyramid so we need to make sure that everyone's in there before we uh before it's just a cost cutting measure I hope you understand it just doesn't make sense to leave all those loose ends hanging no absolutely not we need to you know the gods need the bones that's what that's why they want is that what it was for they wanted the bones in the pyramid are the gods dogs and they're just looking for something to play with is that what it is yeah they have their

simple simple gods or they operate on a sort of a a level bartering understand the bone part we get yeah bones are their money yeah i don't know why they use the bones they need the bones they don't care about the marrow i suck all the marrow out before we put the bones in and they don't seem to care about that so i don't know i don't want you to suck my marrow danny i want you i want my marrow to stay intact you should have you should have read the fucking small prison you're right yeah i'm just saying just saying whatever every indie recommendation video you make my bone marrow quash goes up

oh no so watch out watch out frank's been giving me marrow this whole time why yeah he just let me take it i was wondering what that little hose coming out of his arm it's good i don't know how bone marrow is taken i think it's way more intense than that isn't it like a big needle right near i think it's a big knee because you can whenever you do you give blood they always ask about it i'm always like tempted to do it yeah because i don't know i don't asthma yeah they they have done that yeah they give you money yeah bone marrow i think for a bone marrow transplant i think it's an inpatient procedure

i think they put you asleep for that one yeah that's something i'm so afraid of pain i the only way i would say yes to that voluntarily is if it was like an emergency and someone needed it to save their life or if they could like put me under like if i was like how long would i need to be under for there to be no pain they'd be like like four days and they just knock me out for four days i'll do it oh like nope like you don't want post -op like pain or anything you want the recovery pain i want them to put me down until i I wake up and I'm just like oh I feel normal okay how about this you live

in America right so how about you go through the pain of the of the of the surgery you don't go through that you don't know that and then when you get out you do have the recovery pain but they basically give you like heroin oh you know they give you oxys so that you don't have to think about it ever because it's America yeah but then I'm chasing that high for the rest of my life that's a good point chasing Chasing the high of giving bone marrow.

Chasing the high of giving back to my community.

It must be an inpatient.

Like, they're sucking something out of your bones.

Like, they're not gonna do that.

You know what I mean?

I don't want a needle in the bones.

That does sound like something a necromancer or a doctor would do, you know?

Who the fuck was the first person who tried that?

You know what I mean?

My cousin Scott. He was really bored one weekend and was like, let's try to get the marrow out of these bones.

Yeah, this was before the internet and stuff, so like, we were really bored i'm sure we were doing it with animals for a long time because that's like extra food in the bones and they were like whoa but then cracking the marrow yeah so they must have thought hey wait a second do we have that oh god but then they're like how do they figure out somebody was needed more bone marrow and then they were like we just pulled bone marrow of somebody else let's fucking try let's drill into this bone this is how i feel about all of medical technology yeah i feel like i feel like the answer is always just

that the grim reality is that there have been seen so many humans for so long that it's just like millions and billions of people were like oh yeah you get sick when there's like bad air and they're like yeah that sounds good enough and then one day a guy was like no it's like these little things and everyone was like you're a fucking idiot and then he died proving it and now we have germ theory it's the same thing with beer it's like some jackass picked up a bunch of molted barley in a in a field and was like oh this is is rotten i should drink this and that was the rest of humanity we had uh

that man was my hero jonathan budweiser his name live in it in infamy yeah it's like just think about how long they used leeches i mean i guess people still use leeches for some things but like they're using leeches for fucking everything man yeah like wow got a headache your wife left you leeches yeah your wife won't leave you leeches also no headache they they drill a hole in your skull it was not the whole oh is that what it was but they knew like the egyptians when they were sticking people in pyramid not to get back on pyramids oh no but they did pull the brain out through the nose so like

they knew that that was possible that's true that was like my favorite fun fact as a child is i would i would tell that too like i was a precocious child who liked to learn about things that were outside of school like just get a book on egypt and read it and then tell people about the uh the brain coming out through the nose like you know you're at the doctor and you're five years old and they're like how is how's school going and i'm like good did you know that the egyptians removed the brain through the nose with a big hook do you know how they did it though this is the gross part that i didn't

realize until i think recently enough is that like because in my head i was like oh they just like hooked it and pulled it out in one go no they just they stick a rod up there and like scramble that shit basically yeah i mean like brain jam and just scoop it out yeah and then it basically like falls out and they like drag it out like they're like Like, they're trying to get the last bit of, like, Nutella out of the jar.

This truly is the first episode of Bastard Town.

Yeah, honestly. This is a raunchy Noclip podcast. Noclip, Noclip Island.

Noclip is Jeffrey Epstein.

Which games should we talk about first?

Let's not talk about Tony Hawk's first, shall we?

Let's get it out of the way.

Frank, have you made a lot of Tony Hawk's Post Gator 3 and 4?

Yeah, I haven't. Took a lot of convincing.

I haven't, like, finished.

So when you beat Tony Hawk 3 and 4, after it unlocks like pro challenges.

I remember we did our quick look and I was like, there's no combo.

What the hell? There's like a third list of tiers and challenges to unlock.

So I'm about to get to that.

But even playing Tony Hawk 4, I'm like more and more like annoyed that they call it the 4 remake.

Because half the levels aren't Tony Hawk 4 levels.

They're the new levels.

The new levels are good though.

The pinball level is really fun.

There's the water park level.

But it's like, I don't know.

I feel like we were still, I know it's such a moot complaining point at this point but it's like i don't know i'm still annoyed that like um it's not the core thing but the fact that there's always extra challenges and stuff the thing that is impressive too is the achievement list for this game is way more like technical and like if you're like if you're a hardcore tony hawk fan there's like a lot of challenging achievements to do everything so it is it is like an impressive like task list but um my first like run through is like i'm getting through this pretty quick and then i realized like oh

i'm about to unlock the pro challenges so i'm excited to see see all that but i think that's why they did that because i think they realize people complete these games way faster and also last time around we talked about this i think in the quick look i'm pretty sure that the completion challenges for both games were locked to the players whereas i think now it's universal whereas i'm pretty sure if you went back you're like oh i'll pick up you know i'll be muska now or andrew reynolds and then it reset i'm pretty sure it reset the progress on the games so it was locked but that's not the case

anymore um so yeah i saw the pro challenges after we did the quick look and i was like oh that's why some of that stuff is there well the one thing i'm so i i i really like the pinball level i think that's really cool uh the water park level i i love as well i think that was that's got some super smart stuff where the secret tape wasn't that i thought was really cool um well where's this spongebob thing that i don't know i and i've saw i've seen people complain about like it's just two half pipes at the bottom of the ocean like it's a very like it's not a whole level it's just like a little portal

area you go to i think you jump off the jolly roger or something right i I don't know anything about Tony Hopper or Skater jump off the front of a ship I saw this and someone was streaming oh is it in the the Skater Island competition there must be there is something in front because that's where the Iron Galaxy logo is I think and that level is at the end of the mast there or the end of the ship so I wonder if it's there ok but it's only just a little portal level that's funny and apparently it's just in the deluxe edition so if you go down there there's no Spongebob branding what i don't know

you have to pay more money for the corporate tie -in um so wait the area is in the game wait yeah the normal one but the branding isn't that's what so if you go it's just not bikini bottom theme but it's still there yeah yeah that's what yes that's uh video games chronicle if players visit the spongebob themed area without the deluxe edition installed the spongebob references will be missing instead leaving a largely empty pirate ship what i don't that is is so bizarre i can't tell if i'm getting gypped by that or not like am i am i do i don't care about spongebob really so like why am i getting

you're getting the principle of the situation all right it's just such a bizarre like why even have it at all like it seems it's so bizarre to go through all that mileage to like include this extra like it's like if there was horse armor in oblivion but then the monster energy themed horse armor cost five dollars yeah very strange exactly hey man we love that monster energy drink it's the main drink that we have on noclip fc island um stop the uh yeah so yeah i played some multiplayer as well um i was surprised how bad everyone was i maybe it was like just the games i was playing or maybe they

put me in a lobby with a bunch of noobs or whatever but like there was like top combo scores and top whatever's and i was like doubling everyone easy um they're all getting like 60 000 and you know i was getting 150 000 and then early and then not caring and then just waiting until the match ended have you played much stuff online i haven't touched the online yet but my friend who played said like yeah it's also popular with a lot of like game pass users like people download like what's this and then just having never played a tony hawk game in their life that's their thing too is like i feel

like we take for granted our our tony hawk abilities where it was like there hasn't been a tony hawk game in like 20 years i mean they did like the one and two remake but i don't know i feel like it's like we were so used to every single year a new tony hawk game coming out so it was just our skills were sharpened and um yeah now that's a lost art although again genuinely props to iron galaxy for for and vicarious visions are keeping it going because it's like these remakes are really good yeah but um yeah it's it's uh people forgot i don't know people i've also turned the music off and i just

play whatever i want on spotify now damn i was that bad eh it's not it's just like there's not enough good stuff on there and the new stuff's not interesting to me so i do like when the doom soundtrack kicks in i have like all the mcgordan tracks i like it i like it i'm like out of place though right it's like i guess that's danny's so tonally different because it's like like all the songs that antoniox are like largely ones that are kind of wrap it up in two minutes and they're all like you know pretty for the most part like pretty high tempo and kind kind of like you know happy and yeah whatever

you know and then fucking yeah kicks in i love that music uh just does collared greens on there now the schoolboy q song with kendrick okay i'm looking at the track list right now they have kick push on there jeremy can you check uh jamie can you pull that up for me there's a jesus christ there's a lot of uh it's a long list i don't know all they do i just pulled it up myself yeah yeah lupe fiasco kick kick push there you go yes yeah yeah i'm my own jamie today yeah that's great now so i don't know it's like if there was a couple more songs that might tip me over but i ended up putting on i ended

up putting on a bunch of bands that i liked from uh from the uh the first game what was that band who released that song sedona that was a good one that was like a new song that was on the junk bunny you're all right they put a new album last month last last year it's good stuff yeah fair enough i think we've we've we've said our piece about tony oxford skater three four right really we both really like it it's great fun four definitely feels like an unfortunate half measure that is pragmatically i get it but it's yeah it's a little bit like unfortunate maybe um no pun intended uh yeah anything

else to say about it frank it was weird where it was like the zoo level is just i was just there for like two minutes and and that's it.

Like, you got all the stat points, you have the gold medals, and that's it.

And it's like, man, I feel like in Tony Hawk 4, you spent so much time at the, like, and same thing with the Kona Park, like, the competition levels, like, those, like, I don't know, but in the Tony Hawk 4, you would spend a whole day getting all the goals there and here.

It's just like, I mean, the map is there, but, yeah, the experience is so quick compared to what 4 meant to me.

So, I don't know. That's why I'm still eager to, like, finish all the goals and then do the Pro Challenges and see how it takes my time with it.

But it's also still better than not having it at all um and then it is also funny seeing taco bell branding every level so yeah i'm happy to exist um and i'll keep playing it i'm interested to see like the achievement list because it seems like like i'm almost done with it and i only have like maybe a hundred out of a thousand achievements so really yeah yeah i guess i hadn't considered at the kona level for instance because they had to they had to make a bunch of the regular levels the competition levels so they stripped so the kona level just had all that stuff stripped out like it's not even

like it just has the 10 regular objectives it actually has no objectives now yeah yeah it's just get get the gold but and like that you can do one for me it's like I do one combo and I beat the whole level it's like oh totally like yeah like what that like you just move that and it's like yeah like I don't know it's it's it's so bizarre that skip the third run yeah yeah yeah like get like 95 and competition and competition and then to win yeah yeah yeah I think it's just we need space space to mourn all the goals of Tony Hawk 4 like or you know you know yeah do they have the Taco Bell bell sound

effect if there's official Taco Bell branding in it oh dude can you play as the dog no I yeah oh man that'd be awesome no I think I don't know if it's every level but yeah there's just Taco Bell like a the like the storefronts which were always generic in the original but here now here's an actual Taco Bell and I think college level has one for sure there's a they they took out the the porn shop as well in that one didn't they yeah and los angeles la had a porn theater i feel like and you know with neversoft's humor every everything was like triple x whatever um but uh yeah there is a tony hawk

meal and i think if you get it at taco bell you get like a redeemable code you get like a taco bell hoodie in game which isn't bad i'm down to check it out um there's so much brand synergy in tony hawk's pro skater 3 and 4 it's awesome Well, even, like, the original had, like, Jeep and Nokia billboard ads in Canada.

So it's, like—and, like, that was a big part of Tony Hawk is getting the skaters, the licenses, the decks, all that stuff.

So spilling it out to—I don't know.

Taco Bell is cool. I don't know.

Taco Bell is a respected brand.

I don't mind that. Yeah, you can't dress the skaters in—you can't change the clothes on the skaters, though, I don't think, right?

Really? I can't get a—you can on your custom skaters, but I can't on— Like Dave Nera?

I don't know. Yeah, or Dave—wrong sport, but you're close.

but like if bamargera was a was a you know in a taco bell hoodie that'd be pretty cool but you can't do that i made a i made a real messed up custom skater who is may who's wearing all clothes made out of um like uh like what do you call like gummy what do you guys call them here like jelly babies like gummy bears what do you call them like yeah gummy bears gummy gummy bears yeah we have jelly babies in ireland which are kind of like those they're a little softer and they're they're also little little look like little people um but yeah there's like a gummy i have a gummy deck a gummy wheels gummy

trucks wearing gummy pants gummy shoes gummy hoodie um that's why it looked like a total freak it's good stuff yeah i called them uh gum lord nice so yeah pretty happy with that gum town yeah ah damn it i left it there i left it there you you picked it up you dunked it i picked up you used a gum let's uh oh jesus let's this is a really sad this is your first version of this podcast i'm so sorry i don't know what's happening to us what is gross about gum it's okay must be a full moon tonight or something we're acting like real dirt bags stick it under a table and leave it oh my lord i was still

has some flavor jeremy picks it up just talking about gum if i'm speaking of things that are disgusting uh let's move on to uh your your game jeremy cape hideous dear lord um i have looked this up on steam it came out uh just the tail end of last year uh this looks fantastically strange please explain the gameplay and visuals of uh cape hideous yeah so this is a game that uh has been on my radar since the end of last year i I heard a lot of people whose opinions on obscure and weird and sort of out there games that I respect.

We're all kind of praising this game.

And I didn't really know anything about it going into it, which is probably ideal.

So I won't describe too much other than sort of like what the game is and what it plays like.

It's a you kind of just walk around.

round it's it is it sort of does feel like a um like a a very long animation relative to the animation it's long relative to video games it is a very short game um the whole thing took me about 35 minutes to complete it's an incredibly short game um but you're just sort of it is this totally wordless uh world where you are like like a shamanic figure like a medicine woman on on like a pirate ship or like a expedition and you're kind of just walking around doing stuff on the expedition and going through this totally wordless narrative um and and that's kind of it it's like it's very small very

humble but the there's something about it this game is fucking there's i i don't want to oversell it because i feel like every time i love a game i talk about like anthology of the killer and then people hear me fucking screaming about it and then they play it and they're like i don't i don't understand what he's going on about so So, you know, take this with a grain of salt.

It really fucking worked for me.

It is this, like, bizarre -looking sort of MS Paint -looking...

It's, like, really good MS Paint, though.

You know what I mean?

It's, like, the best MS Paint animation you've ever seen.

It has sort of a Hata -Uma quality to it, where it's, like, if you saw a still of it, you'd be like...

I don't know. I feel like people's impulse is to be like, oh, it looks bad.

I actually think it looks fucking awesome.

awesome um so yeah but it definitely is like grainy and textured and kind of all over the place uh but in a way that's very sort of unrestrained or like unrefined it feels very raw and authentic um which is kind of like i don't know it's refreshing i feel i feel like it's a it's a good counterpoint to games that are so polished but kind of lack soul this is like so weird and wild but so imaginative and surreal um and yeah i don't know there's something about it that's It's kind of an intangible quality that I was trying to put words to last night.

It has this feeling of sometimes you encounter a piece of fiction and the world feels so alien and yet so considered by the creator of it that you're like, holy shit.

Like I'm just like immersed in this person's vision and I have no idea what the fuck this is.

I have no idea what's coming next.

But like I'm just I'm just I bought the ticket and I want to take this ride.

uh and that's kind of how i've used this phrase on the podcast before but there's a screenwriting book that refers to this as uh swimming in holy water when a writer like knows their world so well that like you could ask them any question about it and they'd be like you're like what's that and they're like oh yeah no that's the fucking that's the magic thing like i know exactly what that is that's how i feel playing this game is that this this creator knows exactly what this world is and isn't overly concerned with letting you know they're kind of just like letting you experience it i think this comes

up a lot in like these because i guess the just looking at the screenshots and the the short bits of video they have on their steam page is that it's not unlike an adventure game in some respect it looked just in terms of the perspective you know um i mean my brain immediately went monkey island when i saw the ship but like you know it's a lot of like character walking across the screen type stuff and this probably will come up when um jesse talks talks about the drifter as well but i think this is like if you want to explain to people why you know ai generated stuff feels soulless is remind them

of a game they played where clearly everything was hand -drawn and and what that feels like and how real that feels because like large open worlds have existed for a long time and a lot of them you know going all the way back to uh daggerfall right like daggerfall is a largely procedural world made up of textures models of houses that are that like there's a certain amount of authorship in games you know and then there's a certain amount of stuff that's generated out of the assets that are available but when you play a game like monkey island it's like every every frame is a painting right it's

like it's it's a it's a it's this you can feel the brushstroke like if you're looking at a painting you know know that the the artist's hand touched every single pixel in this game and that does make a difference because you realize then that everything's intentional and you see something in the background and it's not just you you know and in like Horizon Zero Dawn if I look through the window in a house I'm just seeing what's outside the building but if I'm in like a game like this or an adventure game and you walk past the window and you notice something you know that it was put put there for you

know and it just so totally changes your relationship with with the the piece of media i feel like when you have when you have that trust in the creator you know that everything is intentional and it's funny because like looking at the video this i've not played it obviously i i'm looking at it and going oh yeah like why is that why'd they put a basket of eggs up on top of that box like clearly to communicate something about you know something in the in on the ship you know and I think that does give you so much you know we don't have a word for it maybe the Germans do but you know what I mean I'm

you know maybe some art history major could could explain it but like I feel like that has there's such a tangent there's such a really important quality when you have that trust in the creator yeah yeah that's a good point that the because it's all hand -drawn and hand -animated that like everything it's part of that like swimming in holy water feeling it's not like everything is so curated that like there's no oh I'll build a 3d world and then you might have like an arbitrary angle of it everything is like so rigidly defined that you were having the experience that was hand drawn by this person um

and i feel like that's why i don't care that this game is short is because i i felt like i was 20 minutes into it and i was exhausted thinking about the amount of hand -drawn animation that went into this you know what i mean like it's just fucking it takes a long time to draw all this shit and to animate it and there's so many like people walking around with this boat like a dude will come up to you and he's just like smoke in a pipe and it'll cut to a close -up of his face and he doesn't say a word but you're like that this dude means fucking business and then he'll like smoke his pipe and walk

away and it doesn't say anything and you're just like i feel like that like communicated emotionally to me more than any dialogue ever could have there's something powerful about the the and again i'm just going back to monkey island and other adventure games but the you see somebody as a a character walking around in the world and they're only have a certain amount of definition on their face to the close -up of their face and it's like because there's ones in the one that i always remember is a man comb seep good and uh in who is a guy who takes the piss out of guy brush for his name and then

one of the responses you can say is because his name is guy brush three put and one of the responses you can say is well what's your name and he goes man comb seep good fucking let he with the you know people in glass houses or whatever but like his face like all those faces are just so like there's something so powerful about that transition that again we don't get any more in high resolution games because they're trying to crush the difference between the big detailed model and the one that's in the open world or whatever you know yeah this is that's one of my favorite things about sort of um

like early like ps1 era games and games that were contemporaneous on the pc is that when you play like final fantasy 7 there's the cloud strife that you see on the sort of like overworld there's the cloud strife you see in sort of like uh instance pre -rendered background locations there's the cloud strife you see that's like way more detailed on the battle screen and then there's the fully rendered cg cutscenes with like the crazy looking cloud strife and having those different levels of fidelity it really feels like or or like character portraits even in like melliger solid i was thinking of yeah

totally um yeah the detail that you saw in snake's face and then compare it to what he looked you know it's like five polygons for a head you know yeah it's so different you really do like project those when you see those more detailed portraits i at least the way my brain works is i see that sort of subconsciously when i see the less uh the lower fidelity version of those characters it fleshes out your imagination of them um and yeah i mean there's obviously like utility for uh resource management in games of that era but it does have a real sort of like artistic quality to it that it enhances

your experience i was listening to um an interview with gareth edwards um who's i really like him as a director i think some of his stuff the stories aren't um incredible i think the creator is is is weak in that respect but like he does scale so well like monsters is brilliant the godzilla movie he worked on i think does scale incredibly well and i was watching an interview with him where he was talking about how he did scale and it was a couple of different things that he said but the one that really struck me was and now i notice it in all of his work and i see it in everything is don't show

the edges so like everything like when you see godzilla for the first time in that movie like the frame never shows all of godzilla like it's always like feet like the camera padding up to see him for the first time and then compare that with like godzilla versus kong where the two of them are like fully in frame punching each other you know what i mean um and then in the creator there's this like large ship that they have floating in the sky um and even then he would like he never showed the edges of it right from 80 80 90 percent of the shots of it you look up and it's like the camera can't

fit bit the whole thing in the in the which is what it looks like looking at massive things right you're right in the desert you're looking at a vista like you take a photograph of your camera it doesn't look the same and you're like what the fuck it's because like things that are big are outside of that you know vision and they feel that scale but one of the other things he did was like whenever you it was far enough away that you could see all of it he was either using like heat haze so it like disappeared a bit in on the edges or in the background or like even clouds just to never show the edge

you know because once you show the it's like it's like the death star in star wars or or that opening shot in the first star wars where it comes over the top you know what i mean um so yeah it's a i don't know that that also sort of reminded me just talking about how the how that stuff is communicated so yeah so anyway cape hideous is a it's a very small game i got it for i think it was like a dollar fifty on sale so i don't know i i mean it's it's six dollars normal price it's like 30 40 minutes long I think you could probably play it a few times and see new stuff uh there are achievements I

didn't get somehow in this tiny game so I definitely will replay it but uh Frank's on board it's uh it's great I I've absolutely I played three games yesterday uh two of them new indie games and one of them Cape Hideous and like Cape Hideous is the only thing that I was laying it up at night thinking about so I think that's an an indication that it's a good game excellent kpd is available now on steam for 5 .99 as jeremy just said uh let's stick with the uh beautifully uh depicted beautifully drawn adventure games and head over to the drifter jesse which uh just drift on over this it came out yesterday

at time of uh publishing uh there was also a demo for this out um i think at the past next fest was it yeah it was uh yeah part of the last steam next fest it was a goodie uh yeah tell us about the drifter this game looks fantastic i like the look of it it looks very uh lucas -y and it's um maybe a bit more a little bit more cartoony perhaps than some of those adventure games but yeah it looks great what how does it play yeah the drifter is yeah it's a point and click adventure game in the style of those lucasarts adventure games in some respects um i would say I would say this is a lot more linear

and more like you're playing out a very specific fiction as opposed to doing a ton of puzzle solving.

There's like very light moments of puzzle solving, but for the most part, it's focused around interacting with characters, learning about the world, having the story play out in certain moments.

uh you play as oh god what's his name mark no mick mick kata so so you're uh you're playing as the drifter uh a character who is uh moving between jobs mick kata is his real name uh every everyone's australian i cannot do a good australian accent so i will try to not do that but like i thought it was a boston i know i realized i realized how bad it sounded as i was saying his name um so thank you for catching it but no yeah mick carter uh his his real name he's uh it's a very australian video game everyone has really good voice acting like danny mentioned the art style is fantastic i think it

looks really really good it's very detailed um and the animation is very like expressive in a lot of its character work uh it's developed by a team called power hoof uh led by dave lalloyd i love saying two l's for lloyd um pretty like interesting history and development like uh made crawl this other game uh but then also made a tool called power quest which is a unity based 2d point and click adventure game uh tool that you can use just and it seems very robust it has like a scripting language and everything and it was used by i don't know if it was in the final release but in the game jam version of another

game i played another point and click called uh loco motive it was the which i was like whoa my worlds are colliding um i mean sorry back to the drifter very good game you're playing as this drifter you wake up on a train you don't know what's going on um and quickly you're you're after you learn how to do the point and click adventure stuff which is you know interacting with things once you've interacted with it once you can interact again there's a new thing you use items on other items if you know what a point and click is it's gonna be pretty straightforward um but there are these like action vignette

moments i've only seen a couple of them so far i'm not quite done with the game i think i'm about a quarter of the way through it's supposed to be about eight hours long uh i think it's like nine chapters and uh whenever they happen it's still in the same framework as the puzzle game but like you just have to find the correct sequence of events and narratively you can die in these sequences but it resets and the character remembers that that happened okay so i don't know how that plays into things yet uh there was one moment that made me go is this i don't want to say anything but i goes this do

i think i know what's going on uh so far it's it's played against those those biases and everything this is is an early preview on it i haven't played the whole thing uh all the way through so i can't say anything too much but i think just what it's doing right away visually it looks great uh sounds great again the voice acting is just like every single character that's voiced is done in this way where it's like i can't believe this is an indie game made by such a small team of people because it's it sounds like movie quality voice acting at times it's really really good which is which is not common with this art

style so that's pretty cool i'm excited to see that and also the the action moments you said as well action stuff tends not to be in these games because they're not you know about quick movements or planning things or dying like in most adventure games you don't die like they they often play with death in interesting ways in these games but um not too common so when those moments happening are you still just pointing and clicking for that you're still just doing point and click interactions um but it'll be like a character comes up to you i'll to make up a fake one a character comes up to you

with a knife and is like give me all your money and and you have a couple of options like what are you going to do it doesn't explicitly say what they are you're still doing that sort of point and click deduction of figuring out maybe an item in your inventory will be useful in this situation maybe interacting with this thing and hiding behind it is time pause though in that situation progresses um but it seems like it only moves forward the consequences if you make a choice and it's the wrong one or the right one it doesn't say whether or not it's the wrong one or right one but in the first sort

of um desperate situation it starts being like man if i'll do this again i'm screwed aren't i and it's like okay well maybe let's not do that again um so it's it's fairly straightforward like the puzzle solving in the drifter is again not lucasart style this is not like you're putting a balloon on the end of a bottle to make it full so you can fly up or there's nothing like that it's all very straightforward forward on the electrical wire no you don't spray the foam into the lips the male shooter thing from uh two yeah yeah yeah like there's nothing like that island so governor governor fat sitting there

it's like i need to cut a pipe off of something i probably use the knife to cut the pipe off like it's very it's very straightforward um but it's still good like like i'm saying this is designed in a way that feels almost like you're just playing out a book and doing very very light puzzle solving.

And I think it nails that.

Like the feeling of it is very good.

The drama is good. It ramps really well so far.

Again, I need to see through it to the end before I can have a full opinion on the story.

But just from the early bits, it's like, this is, it's phenomenal.

I think it's very well put together.

Nice one. The drifter.

Do we have any idea how much it's going to cost?

It's not coming out for two days by the time of recording.

Oh, you know what? It doesn't say.

Doesn't say. All right.

Well, it's available for something.

Over on Steam. I do have a Golden Idol shaped hole in my in my world but also there is some new DLC that's been dropping yeah another one I think dropped today I think you're right I think just today the second one dropped the Age of Restraint um so there's two of them now I need to go back and play god damn those games are fun thanks for getting me on those Jesse big fan of the Golden Idol games now let's stay with you for Tower Wizard as well this this came out uh last month uh overwhelmingly positive on steam almost 4 000 reviews this looks interesting what a three dollar what is this thing

are you building this was the game i wanted to talk about more deeply i should have put that in the notes that okay the drifter was the preview one i put it first that was i was like oh this little rinky dink three dollar game all right let's see what's going on some stupid little thing this is the worst game i've ever played no it's like this is a painful video game because it's cookie clicker danny it's cookie clicker okay it's an incremental game but it's a it's it's weird it's an incremental game that's designed to be played like an actual video game so like you know when you play those games

and there are brief windows of time where you sort of have to just let it play like tower wizard long windows i'd call them true exactly overnight like sorry yeah exactly yeah so i can't go to work i have have to watch the cookies count up.

You know what I mean?

Um, tower wizard, you start off as a wizard who's trying to build a tower.

Great name. Uh, and you click on this or, but eventually you get enough energy so you can build the tower higher and the number gets, it's one of those games.

Um, but eventually you reach this point where it looks like the progress is impossible.

Like you can't move forward and there's a prestige system.

I think it was, it was just something in like cookie clicker.

Eventually once you reach the very, very end, it's like restart and do it it all over again but here doing it lets you pick a couple of different upgrades that you can use to make it the beginning of the game easier and i thought oh it'll be like a little tiny increment and it won't really matter but no like when you prestige if you have enough points it's like the beginning of the game if you spent an hour doing it it takes like five seconds it's crazy oh that's funny like it's it's very worth doing um most of the time i got i finished the game i got all of the achievements i think it took me

like 10 hours which is you know sounds almost like oh cool it's like an incremental game no it's still an incremental game like this isn't doing anything different when you were saying bars going up when you were saying 10 hours how much of that 10 hours were you playing exactly it's just i just sat there like i sometimes so when i'm editing podcasts or when i'm i'm reviewing them or whatever i'll have something open on the other screen so i can keep myself from scratching my eyeballs out of my head so i go do something else to to relieve my brain and you click in you spend five seconds you buy

some upgrades it's like like the context for it is a little bit different obviously than cookie clicker it's like instead of building a grandmother to make more cookies you make a forest that gets magical wood so you can make a sage totem so it gives you more things like it's you know whatever context it's a cool art style it's nice yeah yeah old ass like uh duo tone atari kind of looking thing with like nice cool dithered background themes to it too that you can change just an achievement just for changing it to one of the themes which is inverted which hurts your eyeballs it's yeah it's it's

just interesting to me because i'd never played one of these that felt like it was trying to explicitly be playable not like just a thing you have on because there's all these new little desktop widget idle games it's like a whole sub -genre now like there's cast and chill and um rusty's retirement that i was playing before playing before like there's a weird new explosion of these games that you just have open for the sake of it i guess for sickos like me that need that um but this one was like no you can sit down and play me play me like a video game right uh click the buy button every once in a while

but you still have to you know the the question about the 10 hours was an actual question like how much did you actually play this do you think yeah i mean not that much like i would have an hour two if i was thinking in terms of minutes spent interacting with it maybe two hours yeah that's probably right that's still more cookie clicker In that 10 hours, I played that game, no hours.

That is true. But most of what you're doing is just clicking.

And the thing about the two hours, the reason that it works is, like, as much as the upgrades that you get allow you to skip a lot of the earlier bits, you do still have to do some of it.

So, like, in the earlier sections, every tier that you're trying to reach increases the height of the tower, and then there's, like, a new thing you have to overcome.

comments either collect enough resources or build this new thing or eventually there's like a wall that you have to break at the top of the screen using different attack characters you can spawn but like that takes time and you might have to do two or three prestiges before you can get through it and then there's another layer and another layer so like a lot of the clicking i was doing was just stuff i had already clicked previously to get back to where i was but now it was a little bit faster uh which goes to my point at the beginning of this this might be the worst thing I've ever played because I

was like so entranced I felt so compulsed as though I needed to finish it and yet I did not have a second of fun like I never enjoyed are you recommending this or not are you record no I just wanted to talk about it as like as a weird oddity what it sounds like to me is that you're not recommending it to almost everyone but what you're every word that comes out of your ear I'm like yeah I'm gonna play this yeah that sounds I'm gonna have this completed by Friday no problem I would never recommend this to anyone but if for whatever reason you have the same disease I have then this might be perfect

for you yeah I might have that same disease also there's a genre of like compulsion games because I I played a little bit of maize mice which is the new game from the luck be a landlord developer right and it is a it's pac -man meets vampire survivors and I it's a very well made game it I haven't I'm not like I didn't put it in the pod dock because it didn't click with me because because i'm not a it's not a genre that close to me it's also i said the best term i think it was a japan calls vampire survivors likes uh instead of bullet heavens they call them like mowing lawn mowing games or something

that's good frank is nodding i think i heard jeff gershman say like yeah they call them mowers yeah yeah i saw someone refer you to that i fucking love between this and cert what was it search action i thought they were gonna call it search heaven or something thing yeah oh my god mowers that's so good um but uh but it similarly i could see when i was playing maze mice that even though it didn't grab me i was like i this is one of those games that if it did grab you you're just like fucking just going like vampire survivors kind of i've had a few hours where it was just like i'll just do another

it like compels you it's like a fucking a warlock puts a spell on you it's like i even even when i wasn't like enjoying vampire survivors towards at the end I was like oh just do another one that's like I why why am I smoking the cigarette still exactly that's that's totally what it was I think uh Jacob Geller uh skeeted about that about Uma Musume being like I can't believe they made a oh my god yes a horse racing gacha game that's if they made a cigarette themed slot machine it's like Tower Wizard all these games Luck be a Landlord I think Luck be a Landlord might be the the progenitor or at least

the modern one it's infinifactory or infiniminer rather to uh to ballatro isn't it didn't uh local funk talk about like honestly like i love talking about this because i think what it does is that like it rubs up against this really uncomfortable reality about kind of most game design is that it's like this is what it's what a lot of it's doing is like you know we're all getting the achievements you know i mean not all of us right i'm jeremy here i feel like plays more games that are you know i mean he's playing cape hideous it's not it's not about you know that min max or whatever but like so much

of game design is these little these little systems um and it's funny you mentioned the casino because like i have i have started to get fascinated by casino stuff so um um, I was in Vegas for my, um, uh, uh, for, uh, the end of our road trip.

Right. So we stayed in one of the hotels and like this casino stuff there.

And I don't usually bash and I bet a little bit of money.

I was willing to lose and I, I won it.

And that was, I won a bunch and that was, that was cool.

And we have a local casino here up in Roner park that, um, about four months ago, me and my wife were like bored on a Wednesday afternoon and we're like, let's go to that that fucking casino. Let's see what that's about.

Like who the fuck is there on a Wednesday afternoon?

They had a Starbucks stairs.

That was my wife's main reason to go.

And so we went and we were like, it was just fascinating watching people playing these games.

Cause we're like, we're going to go home now and we can like play actual games that have like stories and mechanics and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

But these people are like, does it make you happy?

Yeah. Like there's something going on.

So I've been like listening to podcasts and reading stuff and I'm watching youtube videos about like kind of everything from slot machines to uh card games and and the odds like and stuff like that like i've been watching a lot of blackjack videos about how odds are calculated and how people win and outside of card counting and i've been watching card counting videos too um but it's but it's really interesting because like i don't think there's much of a connection at all between video games and or between gambling and video games but a lot of what they talk about in terms of like the like variable

ratio schedules and all that that stuff i was complaining about years ago with destiny and all that sort of stuff like when it's really obvious it's obvious but actually i was realizing that like oh a lot of reward systems in games are actually this like way more than basically all of them like there's very few systems like that well it's not it's not it's i wouldn't necessarily say that myself it's it's more that like they are they're part of the of the experience of playing a game whereas like uh uh casinos are the almost the most refined version of it where it's only about the either the reward

or the wait for the reward and games are like it's like spinning plates where there are there is the reward but there's also the sort of what feels more okay which is like the reward of the story which is happening around the same time and then skill building is over here right so so it's It's less that like the games are based around the reward, but it's, but, but I, I'm, I'm noticed, I mean, like I'm playing games now and hearing the chit -chit -ching of a, of a casino place in a way that I wasn't before.

I'm being like, oh, how do I feel about that?

Balotro did that to me, man.

2 ,000 hours in, I was like, wait a second.

I went to the casino one time and I was like, I think we might be doing something wrong here.

I don't know what it is.

When, when Balotro was the hotness, I played maybe 15 hours of it and I uninstalled it and hid it from my steam library because it was just like it was just hanging out there on my recently played and i would just fire it up um and then i had to capture balatro for something for work and i remember playing it again and i was like oh just like i won't like get hooked in again i'll just play a little bit and then i captured like an hour of it that was all i needed for the project and then that night i was like i should just fire up balatro i was like no yeah i need this needs to stop because it's

like it's not that like we talked about this when balatro uh during game of the year stuff it's interesting because balatro is like it's not gambling it's not money it's not real money it is and you can just like walk away from it like it's i think it's very easy to be sort of reductive about this and say like it's it's you pay once you're done it doesn't take more money from you and it's like you know it's kind of like when people get cyber bullied and it's like why don't you just just walk away from the internet it's not real and it's like the nuance there is that um these these games are like

coming out of the slot machine you're not putting money in and money is coming out you're putting in time and attention and dopamine is coming out and i think that that's like it's a it's a more nuanced point because it seems less insidious but i do think that like there is something going on there i mean this is we should do a fucking noclip book club about uh natasha shul's addiction by design yeah yeah yeah um i i've only read excerpts and then there's um the fucking uh what's it called game study study buddies did a amazing episode about it um that would be hard to top so it's just go listen

to that if you want to read read this book without reading it but um but like yeah i don't know there is there is something about the dark patterns of games i notice it when i play roguelikes that i get very compulsive because it's so easy to um the the loop the the space between the loops is one loop completes and then it's one button press to start up another one or like chain queuing competitive i like can't play competitive shooters because i'll just like do when i play deadlock i just couldn't stop playing deadlock dude call of duty is so bad about that as soon as you finish a match they're

like next one's in six seconds dude you can't even go take a piss anymore it's yeah it's and it's like um i forget where i was reading this example uh someone was talking about the like dark patterns in games and they were talking about playing chess and how chess because you have to wipe the board and reset the pieces there's a built -in buffering period that's where you lose a game of chess and you're like fuck that like let's go again and you're like in the heat of the moment but then by the time you put the pieces back on the board you're like actually like i don't really want to play sucks

do you want to go do anything else tidy now you know yeah yeah yeah let's not ruin it with more competition um but anyway yeah no it is interesting i think that um that games do play into a lot of these sort of like compulsion driving uh behavioral engineering sort of things like dark patterns that um that maybe seem less insidious than like a dark pattern where it's like oh you can't like like, cancel Sports Illustrated unless you, like, you know, like, the button to cancel isn't on the website for Comcast or whatever.

But, uh, but yeah, I do think that there's, it is something that, like, as a medium, we should confront more readily because it should be, you know, maybe Obolotro has, like, a cool -down period where it's, like, go, go have a, a cliff bar or something for five minutes.

What, are you going to take away my freedom?

What, you think I can't, I can control myself.

That's the conversation I see pop up around it is, like, whenever that comes up or, like, wholesome games, you know, why, why do we have so many games that are about about optimization or production it ends up being well i'm having fun with it i'm like yeah like that's yeah perfectly fine if it makes you happy and you want to have fun with it it's not hurting you i assume i hope i mean if it is i hope you know how to get away from that but that's the personal thing i end up having is like i can feel the grim reaper on my shoulder when i'm playing these games and just waiting for the bar to hit

that's the thing it's like what i get like we don't nobody plays games for like any other i mean largely we play games for entertainment right and and and and also like any art there can be aspects that are not part of the entertainment it's feels like it's insightful or educational or knowledge building or experiential or or any of those things but yeah you're right it's so um person by person as well like it's even like the the tony hawk stuff i found really funny because like me and frank are probably similar right just burn through those levels and i'm just like all right next one next one

and one of the things i noticed was there's no load times between the levels anymore and in on the old tony hawk i remember being like really disincentivized to like get back to the menu screen and go and spin the wheel around and get to the next level and because it was like it took a little bit of time to do that and then i might yeah go to the bathroom or get a drink or whatever whereas like now you can just straight up go to the level select screen it has the levels and all of like the what you've not gotten yet including the like money and everything else and you click that and you're in it

in like less than five seconds like it's it's that's it it's it's so quick to get in there so they keep locked in uh uh melos the the felt what's it is it melos tanahani or melos thank you i always fucking forget the two consonants and swap them um the guy who made uh anodyne um and a bunch of other games talks about how i believe it was a bunch of posts he did on blue sky about this that that games can be many things, but one of the things that he sort of, like, resents that they have become in many ways is that they're, like, this sort of, this cocking that fills the gaps between work and sleep.

And it's, like, the more frictionless the game, the more effective the, like, cocking mechanism, the more it fills the gap.

And so it's, like, yeah, sometimes games that are, like, less compulsive but more, like, rewarding or artistic or challenging or beautiful or whatever the fuck they might be other than frictionless is like it it may be less of a like oh i'm so tired from work and i just want to like do this um but but there are things that like you'll think about or that like give you you know like cape hideous like i i wasn't playing cape hideous going like i gotta run this back like let's play it again i just like was laying in bed thinking about it i was like that was so fucking like evocative and weird um

and it's like yeah i think that that is something that uh you know obviously it's it gets weird with games because like you said games are sort of like like the the spectrum between entertainment and art is very blurry and some things are both and what some some games are toys and some games are cinema and whatever um but uh but he basically was expressing that like as a medium we should aspire to not just be like you know the thing that's like the cigarette that you smoke for five minutes between work breaks or whatever like it shouldn't be a soothing mechanism right yeah or not purely a soothing

mechanism it should yeah but it's not right there are tons of like you know you're mentioning cape hideous or weird stuff passage even like weird little games it's i'm not even disagreeing with you i completely agree but like i think it's not an unnew thing or not whatever but it's it's the exception i guess yeah maybe yeah for sure like most games even the most popular not most games but a lot of games like especially really popular ones when you find out something in the game space is supremely popular like ballatro escaped it reached escape velocity and like everybody plays that game like people

who don't know what video games are play that game on their phone um it's never you never ever hear like oh yeah citizen sleeper uh you know they're talking about that on nbc like that's never happening but they're going to talk about balatro like james gunn did an interview for superman he was like oh yeah i'm playing balatro on my phone all the time it's great like that happening isn't that's never gonna no one's gonna be like oh yeah yeah i started playing a thousand times resist and it's an interview with like you know some like dead evil noob is not gonna say that maybe you know what else

i'll say is like the one game i feel like and it didn't have what what you're saying about mainstream broad appeal but like the one game that when you were talking about that made me think you know what this game is not doing any of that stuff and it did break out into a much bigger audience than you would think is disco elysium that's what i was gonna say that is true that did go pretty broad yeah and it's not doing any like actually it's it's just good writing yeah like yeah and i if we're at the stage where we think the reward of good writing dice rolls actually are the reason that it popped

off because it's semi -gambling it's like playing craps you just gotta click through all the story and you get to board dice it popped off but disco elysium's not even like like minecraft even to an extent is still like that's a great yeah yeah that's that's a great example because that's just lego largely exactly I mean yeah yeah minecraft is a great example of like um on the like toy to art spectrum or something it It is like a incredibly thought -provoking toy.

This is something I think a lot about as someone who aspires to make and release games is that I think there's interesting space to explore making things that present when you look at them like a gamey game, like a game that normal people...

Like my brother would play, who only plays God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn.

There's nothing wrong with those games.

They're just games that have permeated to a more mainstream audience.

and you know like i don't i my brother probably has never played like an indie game on steam or anything um but i think it would be interesting to try to intentionally sort of like engineer a game that presents like something like balatra or vampire survivors but then trojan horses in something like cape hideous i guess that was a switch oh uh so uh never mind you say a prescription yeah spoilers for inscription sorry never mind i mean that's not spoilers it's a thoughtful game that's also incredibly addictive and weird hey man we've of how many of us have completed glitter mitten grove you know

what i mean that's true that's although that's a bait and switch of a weird game to a weirder game i think it's maybe yeah doesn't really work as much um any final thoughts on a tower wizard jesse we got a bit off range there but it was a good chat that was the conversation i wanted to have a play tower wizard okay well i'm gonna play tower wizard okay also i'm gonna play there's another game it's in a bundle with it which looks absolutely just deranged called the norp apolog yep have have you seen this have you played i have seen it i i think i think i played this a long time ago when it came

out that's not right 2023 this feels so old there's no way i don't know how to explain this it's not made by the same devs but it's it maybe it is it's in a bundle with them but i don't know how to explain this it looks like some sort of pikmin meets uh a physics simulator or something meets vvvv it looks completely insane i will i will play it and report back to you next week on okay please do and tower wizard don't play tower wizard we won't see you next week i will be playing tower wizard i appreciate the warning i'm gonna pick a game called cigarette wizard dude the worst thing is it would make

a billion dollars wizard we should make a game called can you have game called cigarette on yeah why not you can have muslim 3d what's stopping you from making cigarette i'm gonna avoid bastards yeah you should make a game called cigarette 3d and it's just like a like a cigarette how would you get around that if you're worried about cigarette call it like dart dart masters there you go masters but it's not it's about okay wait unfortunately the irish colloquialism for cigarette is definitely worse than saying yeah we're not calling it that one so we're not calling it that although that word 3d

would probably get not bundle of sticks 3d exactly there you go yeah yeah that's terrible but also the idea of a game called that is very funny um dart 3d is great because it could be a game that all of the branding and like all the aesthetic things are that you're like in a bar playing darts but it's not about playing darts at all yes it's just about smoking darts yes and drinking like it could be like an anti -alcoholism are there is there any like driving games mad yeah mother's against i was on radio with a lady from mad before oh yeah that's when you argue with them that video games aren't

bad right or something like that she gta4 she thought because you can knock people over in gta4 and you can get drunk and drive and you're like yeah well it's a video game so yeah i mean yeah i didn't i wasn't going to say it to her but i've been hit by cars twice but they weren't they weren't drinking but right I was like yeah if you want to hear more with that interview I respect the work of people who want drunk drivers to not be around I'm I'm all for that I don't get in the car if I've had one drink or have a drink or anything that said I love a drink probably too much uh and that's something

like I have a little bit and then drive it's it's what do you want me to do they wrote it in the book all right my version of drunk driving is uh drunk walking home which honestly for not for everyone else is safe but for me is is is it can be catastrophic i ended up in some person's bed too it was the first time i got out on the on the lash since like covid about two years ago in petaluma and i went out with some friends and went to the race course went to a bar afterwards with some music on and i was drinking ipas and i like i was drinking ipas like i drink a normal drink and just hadn't thought

of it and this is me in my like late 30s like i have zero excuse for this and i walked home that night in petaluma and it was lovely it was like warm out and nice and i was having a great laugh for myself walking home the two miles home or whatever it was and then i went to take a shortcut through the park that's where our old um our old house used to be um and uh i ended up in some lad's back garden by accident and he was having a party and i was like oh no this is when i get shot and he they looked i walked in and they all looked at me and i was like this isn't the right spot and he went nope

and he stood up and got me by the shoulders and walked me back out and i felt like an absolute pill like it was uh it was a good time said late 30s right oh he's like two years ago okay cool yeah if that was like a 21 year old story it'd be really funny yeah no i'm no it's not i have worse stories that are more recent than that but they're not about me being that drunk thankfully um uh ipas are my downfall apparently but i do think but like as somebody who often grapples with his own enjoyment of of a bevy um i i would be fascinated if there's any games that are like that are about that that are about like

over drinking or social drinking or you know you're right this disco is a great yeah disco is a great version of it i think especially for like middle -aged men as well um keep driving actually has a lot in it about going to rehab oh that's interesting yeah that game i i was a little mean to it when it came out it's included in my my upcoming summer games video cool that game fucking kicks ass it's such a good video game did you enjoy more having played once i accepted what it was and didn't try to make it what i wanted it to be it was so much better excellent yeah yeah i i don't know maybe that's

a topic that i'm more interested in than than you guys are but i i think it's something that affects a lot of people especially uh lads so like and you know a lot of games are made by lads so i'm just interested in why it it hasn't come up much before maybe it has and maybe I've not noticed I don't know I I wonder if it is the sort of like video games identity as you know I feel like it would be you would have to I feel like people would see it as such a serious game if you were like this game is about alcoholism right you would you would need to like I don't because like disco elysium gets away

with it because it is a game about like you know it's about like communism and it's about like being a cop and it's about like a murder mystery it's about so many things that the alcoholism thing is almost like it's so integral to the plot but it is like a subplot or something it's like a b story um but like a game about drinking too much it's just like it's such a serious topic that has impacted so many people it's like walking the line between like i it would if it was a comedy game you'd really have to be careful about joking about it and if it was a serious game you'd have to be really careful

about not being like the most dour video game ever made yeah yeah exactly um yeah i'm sure i'm trying to i guess the like drunk protagonist or the like you know the pain pill addicted protagonist like max pain three comes to mind with like some of that stuff but like yeah um a lot of games skate around it it'll be like oh you know it's like poppo and yo i think is a game about oh totally yeah actually yeah that is a fantastic call out yeah 100 because that's about basically a drunk parent like yeah the abuse that a kid goes through yeah yeah god so smart yeah the monster and the the teddy bear

you know and the difference yeah that's a great that's a great point it's it's from a different perspective obviously but yeah but like yeah you're playing your darts game and you're drinking your beers and your cigarettes and all your friends have gone home darts 3d pick it up on steam launching in november from the makers of cigarette 3d i googled games about addiction and one of the auto uh generated results is world of warcraft which is very funny that's that's incredibly meta yeah i mean we already talked about the games that have become you know compulsive games compulsive yeah yeah as much

as i love wow once once most of your um social circle isn't wow it's very difficult to stop playing wow and again look if you have a balanced lifestyle that's totally cool you know but the worry is obviously anytime i was playing wow and really into it i was not having a balanced lifestyle so yeah if the only place you're hanging out with your friends is in a bar then yes you're gonna drink once or twice yeah exactly yeah yeah then it says something uh frank you have a a a murderer's role of just the most bizarre games that you've put down on this list please sir dealer's choice just talk about as

many of them for as long as you want just just bring us on a journey because i am fascinated as to how you ended up with this list of games yeah no thank you um yeah i don't know i've been in a weird fugue state like i said i'm going to japan in a month i can't think of anything else so i'm just i'm like trying to clear my head and just trying to i'm trying to get addicted to a game there's nothing that's grabbing me i even started watching like pachinko documentaries so there's a bbc if you look this up uh look type in bbc uh pachinko there's a 1962 news report of a of a bbc interview like going

to a pachinko parlor and it is like the most fascinating thing ever wow and i feel like i need something like pachinko i need something so pure and it was lining up to our conversation earlier um the most frank this documentary opens like it's like it's the twilight zone the guy walks in the frame like we're here at the pachinko parlor the the uh the the the the language of it is so bad it's like there's an illness sweeping japan men are enslaved by these machines the pachinko like it's it is very much like that twilight zone tone but um yeah peeling back i'm just like clearing out my backlog

so like i finished stellar blade which i ended up really liking um i did if you collect all the cans there's these little collectibles if you collect all the cans the last costume is just like lingerie but even before that nikkei they did it so it's it's stellar blade is the same studio as shift up which is like nikkei that like the mobile slash pc shooter game so that's what got me back into the game and they had all these new outfits and like dlc boss battle things and then i was like all right let me beat stellar blade so i ended up finishing it i do really like it i think at these days you

probably get for like like 40 bucks it's on pc now so i liked stellar blade i beat it at the end it teases like eve will return so 2027 whenever the hell stellar blade 2 and then it'll make stellar blade free and it'll free stellar blade will be happy it could yeah i i mean like i really like stellar blade free nikkei it sounds cool but it's yeah it's nikkei sounds cool but it's not on steam it's not on consoles i don't i don't want to play anything that requires like a standalone alone dude just play infinity nikki just get off the get off oh yeah come on you want a gotcha experience that has the aesthetic

of of of of uh the horse game or slash uh stellar blade infinity nikki man that's where it's at there's like i played like an hour of it isn't like forget what the gameplay was just like platforming do you hack the gameplay is very confusing it feels like it's changing every five seconds it's like a 3d action game but there's lots of weird okay okay that's kind of like warframe okay i don't know that's good well you know a warframe i'm not really sure what i'm warframes about because like it's about like shooting things but it's really about collecting costumes like collecting different frames

like that's actually what warframe is about which is basically what stellar blade is about which is basically yeah um and then um speaking of collecting costumes so beavis and butthead had a battle battle pass in call of duty what yeah yeah yeah so be right it's just for the month of july the most random the most random collaboration is beavis and butt head is in call of duty it's like a ten dollar battle pass you get four characters so you get beavis you get butt head you get todd who was like the the the neighborhood bully and you also get coach buzzcut um what do they look like do they look

like oh my god they look like the drawings look like cell shaded like beat like They look, the animation quality is insane.

It's actually really good.

How tall are their legs?

It's like, oh, yeah.

Because in the cartoons, they did not have normal legs.

Yeah, they're super high torso.

I think it's like scale accuracy.

Mostly torso. How it looks.

But it is funny because when you die, it's like you'll see Beavis's head get blown off and like it's still Call of Duty graphic.

Do they talk? Yes. And what's also very funny, if there's two characters on the map, if there's Beavis and Butt -Head, they'll start doing their like laugh together and are like when you throw a grenade Beavis will yell fire fire fire and and like amazing it's it's pretty great it's pretty I really like it right now they have for the month of July they have a playlist that's like they call it cod tunes um but it's basically they turn all the maps and characters like kind of cell shaded so it's like because if you just play Beavis and butthead you you stand out on the map so you are so you're a bright

neon but uh it's generally funny and yeah it is as jesse said was with call of duty earlier like it's funny just diving back into call of duty because it hasn't changed it's so this is on black ops 6 which was a game pass game oh my god and it's wild like people are still playing college like it's just a giant machine that exists and at this point we're so far in the cycle there's all these new maps there's so many bizarre skins and cosmetics have been released in this wave jay and silent bob is in the game at this point uh anna day armis from john wicks ballerina is in the game uh yeah yeah no again It's

just Fortnite and Call of Duty duking it out for the Metaverse.

Yeah, for all the IP stuff.

The Jameson Bob thing is the weird...

And Seth Rogen. Seth Rogen?

They did a 420 collaboration.

Because Call of Duty is all about the weed skins.

Seth Rogen's in Call of Duty.

So it's been funny diving back into Call of Duty.

Oh my god, he is. And then now they have it.

Every weekend is Double XP weekend.

Wait, is it a character?

No, right? It's just Seth Rogen.

It's just Seth Rogen.

yeah Seth Rogen is Joe Rogan in it yes not yet that would I see whoever gets that first wins the fight they have taken over the culture war yeah that's why I feel like he's so short though right he would fuck up the that's true that's true Frank he's seven feet tall everywhere he walks there's little like dudes putting down apple boxes for him to walk on great yeah perfect I feel like I had a uh I hopefully this is not apocryphal this was a real story told to me by by someone at film school he was the guy who managed the gear department and he was a um he had done some sort of like mid -level position on a tom

cruise movie okay he said that they had to put down apple boxes for tom cruise to walk on so that he was the same height as his uh female co -star i believe it i see pictures of uh robert downey jr wearing his stilettos his like platform shoes so he can be the same height as chris evans in some of the scenes it's very funny oh that's great great apache was pretty tall too and they shared a lot of uh yeah true scenes scenes together yeah it's all that goop okay i let me step in for one second here i feel like there's a real weird like niche in fb i was thinking about this editing the battlefield

documentary and it's being evoked by this call of duty discussion i feel like there's a there's a real vacuum right now in shooters for like something that is because i i went back and i played like battlefield 2 a little bit for capture i was watching footage of like call of duty one's campaign i was watching like medal of honor ones campaign and stuff and i feel like shooters have like bifurcated where it's like the more arcadey shooters have gotten so bombastic and arcadey even like the even like the contemporary battlefield games are they don't have beavis and butthead but they're like a lot

about like levolution and spectacle and it's like so big and stuff i feel like there's but the games that are like more grounded and like like military are are like milsim like yeah and stuff i feel like there's a real niche right now where it's like the gameplay is leans arcadey but the tone is more sort of like uh grounded or something you know what i mean like like call dude it used to be i feel like someone could fucking clean up if they just like came in and made like a battlefield 2 era you know i don't know that's what that's what i would make bad company 3 you know honestly i i'm sure

when i i was editing that i was like i was thinking why the fuck there's money on the table for bad company three thanks thanks for getting my uh you smell very clean line in there as well yeah yeah actually i like line from bad company one you smell very clean can we spoil one just like random tidbit from the battlefield documentary yeah okay this is this is not even something that there's a ton of detail on but battlefield 3 started its life as an mmo yeah yeah which is that's like the craziest shit i've ever heard i don't think that's public either because i was and i was asking about him more

in the edit and like he didn't have all that much more to say about it because he was working on bc2 but yeah like for years it looks like it was project venice is what it was i knew venice was one of the codenames for three but i didn't know that was it was this other version of it yeah it was they were trying to make some type of massive interconnected battlefield thing yeah and i guess it never played out but the paris stuff like the urban map stuff was leftover assets from that so i was just i was watching footage of frank playing the paris missions and i was watching like multiplayer footage

of like the sen river map and i was picturing these as like right mmo like i was picturing like quest givers in this and i was like what the fuck that could have been like that's like a crazy alt universe that's just call of duty that's that's what the new ones are like they have random maps in the single player mode that are like big open world and you go and talk to characters and give you quests really really yeah and call it black ops 6 there's i think in 6 and maybe the previous one frank might know i i know you're not a big single player fan but i never played a campaign okay good and imagine

that with multiplayer yeah no exact i can't even imagine so he said the paris stuff was all built for that other version of battlefield 3 but then i asked him it's i don't think it's in the doc but i asked him if the new york one was because i was thinking then oh other locations that are like that and he said no because he he said the new york stuff once they figured out how to end the game he didn't know how to finish the game and then once they figured out how to do it it was like you want to build new york like we need to get this game out so they were like how do we how do we put the blinders

up on this so it was like it's in a subway train at the start it's in a subway and then it's on a like the street level is linear right you're just shooting out of a gun out of a out of a um out of a car so it was like that's how we got new york in in the game but yeah that wasn't that that was crazy i don't yeah i mean that was too early probably that was the era of you know like like huxley the great mmo fps that was just over the horizon and like it was this because mmos were so fucking hot in the late 90s and early 2000s that like and they were like how could we take every genre and make it

an mmo and then wow came out and no one knew that that was sort of like the high watermark and that the wow killer you know 21 years later was still not here uh so yeah it's interesting that battlefield was like we got to get in on this wow shit it's funny i think i think the eventual version of the first person mmo was borderlands because i think what it did was it created a place for you to play with your friends take quests on and the loop is largely about acquiring new gear like i think that to me that's it took the essence the most important stuff from well not the most important but the most

deliverable in a first person game without making a map the size of you know an mmo that's in first person which is just too much content i i think borderlands was the was that and then then we started getting all these these co -op shooters and then they turned into things like destiny and because you had games like massive action game remember mag and like all these big scale first person games that just weren't they were they were going for the scale but the gameplay was the same as every other fps whereas borderlands because they went loot like loot shooters became like because what's an mmo

they're just loot rpgs aren't they like it's all about loot that's all discovering new places and meeting quest givers and going on quests with your friends and getting loot like that's what an mmo basically is um whereas a lot of places got sort of the they they thought too much about the scale of the world i think and then and then kept the gameplay sort of similar to a lot of other fps games yeah then you just get planet side perfect exactly exactly you get planet side yeah and i bet that's what bf3 would probably the original and would have been but yeah i was really i love that video because we

don't often get to cover like the the battlefield 3 campaign was largely disliked by people um because it wasn't like bad company 2 or like battlefield 2 um i think the multi -parent bf3 was really popular but the single -player campaign was not that loved and i always liked it for these these sort of very weird reasons I guess um so it was very fun to go back because he's he's critical of it too like he like but it's it's that great moment of like this is why this is why the game is like this way this is why these levels worked this is why this stuff didn't this is what I would have changed I think

um yeah I think it's a it's a cool little feature so it'd be fun to get it out uh should be I think it should be up by the time this podcast goes up so go check out the channel Frank, you have not talked about one game that's in here, a mobile trading card game, which we don't often talk about.

Oh, my God. Do you want to tell us a little bit?

They did it. They made your favorite cap into a trading card game.

I can't believe this.

Okay, so my friends and I have been addicted to this.

This is called Stardom Card Party.

Again, it all goes back to like Pachinko, the horse gotcha.

I'm just like diving deeper and deeper and deeper.

This is insane. You're going to be smoking cigarettes on the next episode of the podcast. this this has again like this has existed since 2023 i didn't know about it i kind of knew about it i the problem the reason i never played this i mean a all the marketing and signage is all in japanese i thought you needed like a japanese apple account or a jap like i thought you needed like so many things of things i want to do in japan are not welcome for for gaijin or foreigners you need japanese address japanese credit card all this stuff i thought like oh i need a japanese apple account to play this no it's

a you sign up on your mobile browser you can't play on a desktop browser unless you change your chrome settings to like developer mode and put it as a mobile which i'm sure you're getting to i know my friends and i had done it my friend has actually found a way to scrape the website to like pull all the card data but don't tell anyone um stardom card party basically it's it's a trading card game where the gameplay is just trading cards there's no battling there's no like actual it's literally you're just collecting cards so how do you get new cards you just so so every day you can sign up in japanese

this sucks yeah oh no it's all yeah yeah so every day you log in it's it's just like the horse gotcha game in a gotcha game they give you like credits and so every every 12 hours and there's literally like a timer you can't see it i mean i could whatever there's a timer on the top left that shows the next time they spill out credits you get 300 credits every 12 hours and then in that you put you you get a card pack and there's like tiers of cards there's like one star two star three star four star five star you You get your cards, and then you just look for other people's profiles, and you trade

the cards. So there's a ranking page for every wrestler that is currently signed to Stardom.

Once the wrestler retires or goes to another company, that ranking leaderboard page disappears, and it's as if the girls never existed.

Oh, my God. But people still have their cards.

So what my friends and I have been doing is like all of a sudden all the Gaijin are on this game because no one else talks about this.

and now my friends and I have all jumped on here and now we're hunting down like all of our favorite wrestlers so like there's a wrestler I'm upset I mean I'm obsessed with all the wrestlers but there's a there's a one wrestler Tommy Hayashishida who's on a rival promotion but she's my favorite wrestler in the world and so I am like trying to get all the old cards but people don't want the old cards because everyone wants to be on the leaderboard for their favorite wrestler so like my friends and I just spend all day like going through everyone's page and like like making video diving for yeah

basically it's it's like that and like it's so funny because like it's like it's like it's like junior high where you can literally like decorate your like profile page with your favorite wrestler so people are put making they have there's a page called binders every user has a binder and they just decorate it like lisa frankstown with like hearts and stickers of their favorite wrestler and it's like and it's so fun and ridiculous but i feel bad because i've I've been missing out on two years of cards.

And if you go to any stardom show in the middle of the match or in the middle of the show, there'll be an intermission.

And they always have like a number on screen.

It's always in Japanese.

I never bothered to point my phone in Google Translate.

But what that is, is for the one day only, if you're at that house show, you can put in that code and get a limited edition trading card. And so I've literally gone to shows and I've completely missed out.

And now I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so angry.

and so um now my friends are on top of it i'm going to stardom shows next month i can't wait to get my limited edition trading card but like it's just it's like a hyper hyper fandom thing i can't imagine there's more than like a thousand people in the world who do i don't know the twitter account for this only has 4 000 followers okay it like and it's also funny because they'll turn anything to a trading trading card so like the wrestlers will post selfies of them like at disney or something and then the stardom will be like all right we'll make that a trading card and now we have a uh winter

selfie series trading card that you can pull and like it it's just such an absurd like mountain of lore and stuff that my friends are getting into that no one else world no one in the world knows about or even cares about but i am so obsessed with stardom card party and like for every wrestler you like rank up so i'm a bronze rank and star like kid i'm a bronze rank in like azumi and like you can put it on your on your profile badge and it's It's just like it's like an MMO that's just trading cards.

But like the fun of it is like seeing who's everyone favorite wrestler is.

You can also tell like I'll see profiles like someone has like 200 cards of one wrestler because they just will give away all their other cards.

And like, I don't know, I'm obsessed.

You can't convert the extra cards into like star bits or something.

No, no, you can only trade them away.

So like, like right now I'm like on my collection.

I'm like, I have 131 cards and you can see my bronze rankings for the different, like wrestlers and you can like highlight your favorite cards.

Like someone traded me a stardom bikini party card of Otomi.

All right. All right.

All right. I got a start of Valentine of Otomi.

I got a Zuby. Does this exist because like every brand in Japan has a trading card?

Like you have to have one.

Is that why this exists?

Everything has like, gotcha.

everything has yeah what I mean like horse girls is like the the the giant like satellite that everyone can see but it's like that exists through every element like they're every every promotion has its own trade like even if you go to like like Japanese grocery stores here in the states they'll be uh there's like snacks you can buy like if you buy a snack there's a one -piece trading card here's a pokemon trading card if you buy the snack people will buy the sacks just to get the trading card so it's like I don't know it's it's like it's like it's like here in the west we laugh half that you can get

the tony hawk taco bell thing whereas in japan people actually care about the oh yeah the the trading card on the go to their pop -ups i have friends too who like they'll buy like six copies of the same manga because each manga comes with a unique bookmark oh my god like like the the like i don't know the the and like we have elements of that here like i don't know there's like popcorn buckets if you see a star wars movie whatever but like it's just it's just degrees of fandom and that's what we'll always obsess with is like elements of fandom and like Like there was a whole, I was like consider

myself the biggest like western stardom fan in the world.

I've ignored a like giant part of this like, I don't know.

You've been slacking.

I know, I know. But now I'm in now.

And it's so funny because I even met two stardom wrestlers like a week ago.

And it's like I didn't show them the cards, but it's like part of me is like, oh, that's so nerdy.

I kind of have to. Yes, absolutely.

Especially when it's in Japanese only.

You know, I'll see you, Tommy, next week.

Do I say, hey, Tommy, will you sign my phone?

i have your bikini you signed my phone it's just right on the screen i don't care yeah yeah learn how to just translate the japanese phrase i have collected you oh god yeah yeah christ i have 300 of you i have 300 yeah i mean and that's like a band from japan no they want me they want i come in and it's i shower with yen it's like here i get you know i go to the startup merch booth and here's 10 000 yen i hear they're giving away a house for one dollar in some of the cities I heard it on Instagram, so it must be true.

There's so many times where, like, you need a Japanese address for stuff.

I've signed up for stuff, and I just use the hotel I stay at all the time.

I don't know. I think the Appa Hotel in Shizuoka.

Yeah, the Appa Hotel, one station down from Akiba.

I really like that hotel.

It's my favorite. It's my favorite.

There's so many Apple hotels in Tokyo that I went to the wrong one when I was checking in jet lagged in Japan.

and the correct one was visible from the exit there's like 200 yards down the road yeah i could see it um i think we should buy jesse is referring to the phenomenon of akio which are abandoned houses in japan that people do not want to inherit for like tax reasons or upkeep reasons and they're very cheap i think because you can legally spend up to three months without a work visa in japan i think the four of us should buy one each of us get a season oh i like it each Each of us have a quarter of a year.

Sakura season. Yes.

We redesign the house however we want.

We'll have to have a lottery system to allocate the weeks or something.

Can you buy one as a gaijin?

You can. How much are they?

One dollar. It varies greatly.

Some of them are normal house prices.

Some of them are a few thousand bucks.

What are they called?

Akiya. A -K -I -Y -A. Okay, and I am assuming that I am uh drastically underestimating how remote these places are some of them are zero dollars yeah i mean there are like if you go on but you have to live there right that's the whole thing i mean i assume so yeah yeah right uh yeah i i know you can buy them as a foreigner but um i mean i think i don't i don't think you could rent them out and i don't think you need to be a full -time resident but i don't think you could be like an absentee landlord of an akia and they don't even know i'm irish i will never be an absentee landlord they fucked up our

country rightly um wow these are uh some of these are like the cost of a car that's like you know yeah now i i'll use a car i won't use a house in japan but still man are you kidding me look at these just to have it though just to know you have it just to know that's what i think about though and i'm in the middle of like fuck fucking nowhere eastern oregon is like how what's how cheap can you buy a house here but then you or you see people moving to like places in the mojave that they don't have well water even you got to drive four hours to go to walmart to buy anything yeah they got every week

they have to like their trash they have to buy like 15 gallons of water fill up their water tank car and drive it home you know that's true i stayed with a family in eastern oregon when i was filming a documentary up there and um uh when one day i was there they took all their trash out back and started burning it and i was like that's that's so fucking atrocious this like thick black smoke going up and i was you know i was like a guest there so i didn't want to rock the boat too much but i had to ask like isn't that fucking bad for the environment and the dude was like yes but also like i have to

drive so far to take the trash in every time that it's like equivalent i don't know i don't know where he got that data but uh but But even the fact that it enters into the calculus that you have to drive like, you know, 10 hours to take the trash out or whatever.

It was like, wow. All right.

I'm not going to say you should burn your trash, though.

But it was funny that it was like, I guess there there is a discussion to be had about the environmental impact of it.

They won't even build a landfill out there.

I'll just burn it. That seems. Yeah.

So you're driving all the way out there and they're going to burn it anyway.

Probably. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a good point.

Someone's got to burn that trash.

so yeah someone's got to nuke those we got to nuke something um all right those are our video games this week frank we got some emails this week yeah we actually had a lot of emails this week i could have kept pulling them but i don't know if i should have limited it but we have at least three no four there's more so thank you guys if you want to send emails podcasts at noclip .video we had so many so i'll i'll we'll spare some for next week as well podcasts at noclip .video or in our discord the podcast chat channel um actually let me see oh yeah this let me oh my god there's so many sorry okay

uh the first one uh from from jack not the fight club jack i don't know okay hi no clip crew i am jack thanks to the steam release i'm happy to hear the crew introduced to this horse girl world and the culture shock experience i hope everyone picked gold ship because she drop kicks you when she wins umamusume is the rhesus pieces a multimedia that i would love to see no clip explore in a future video topic will mobile slash gotcha games be a possible no clip video subject oh man i don't know about that no i don't come on i where's the withering waves documentary come on i can see one on gotcha games

writ large we've basically never done we've done one mobile game it was that um the monster hunt the the witcher monster hunter whatever it was called the one they they put out um i think that's the only mobile game we've ever done and that's just that's like as triple a a mobile game as you you get basically really really it's on triple aip um i don't know gotcha games are so about milking people's time and money that i'd feel and i know all games are but like some of them what what'd you say some of them are good like some of them are like actually video games yeah not never say never but kind

of like anything like any game we decide to cover there's a lot of considerations you know there's lots of games we've not covered that are triple a games that i i just feel there's no point in covering their developments or you know for the gotcha stuff i would yeah depending on like what would you pitch as an as a as an artistically rich gotcha game i mean yeah the anime is actually pretty i have not watched it but i've seen clips of it and it's like way more hype than it should be um gotcha games i i mean none of them i would pitch nothing ever we should spend our time covering things that are perhaps

more um artistically driven and not designed to yank money out of people's wallets but i think you know like uh mahoyo's games are at least there's there's some interesting stuff going on there design wise that is basically just ripping off a bunch of other video games i think we could do a documentary that was critical of them i was just trying to think of what the perspective would be and the only thing i can come up with is find some players who were impacted find like a a whales documentary find like three people who who have spent at least $50 ,000 on some game and be like, man, like be sympathetic,

but be like, what are you, are you okay?

I'd like to, I don't know if I do that.

Cause then I think you're also then just like doing something on people who have like proclivities that like, it could have been any game that did that at that stage, or it could be any vice at that stage.

But I think like something that is analytical of the game design principles and like how close they are to casinos.

is like that that's kind of why i'm fascinated by all this casino stuff because i feel like like i'm not i'm not interested in like going to the casino but what i'm interested in is is like this is a whole new area of game development or game design that i've not considered before and i do wonder if there is like some interesting cross -pollination like um narrative that we could do between these things like you know i don't know what that is that's kind of i'm in the discovery phase as it were but gotcha games are definitely unfortunately i probably the closest to the experience of being in a casino for that way

you know yeah we should interview natasha dao shul about like about dark patterns and games and have it be like a like an aerosol scotcha game documentary as opposed to like yeah i don't know i i'm struggling to think of like a studio that makes scotcha games that if we were like we want to make a documentary about this and then you sat down and you were like so like do you think this is like harming society i feel like a producer in the room would be like all right shut it down but you could easily talk to a developer who used to work on them or or so you know stuff like that i thought that was actually

interesting in the vampire survivors doc when you asked luca right you asked him like if his experience working in the casino industry influenced his game design at all and he was like no not really and i was like you don't think at all didn't he say like i i try to not bring any of that into the game design well i might have cut that bit out because it wasn't relevant to the documentary further point no that's in there that's in there but like there's more that he says that i think it just wasn't necessary to the conversation i think maybe i'm wrong what i remember what i remember is him saying

that the or did i in the vo i'll have to go back and watch it was that the all of the um juice elements are definitely part of that yeah like all that like ding ding ding and all that stuff happening is is from that for sure um yeah gameplay wise it's yeah i mean it's it's not much of that but yeah that was probably not the answer jack wanted sorry jack yeah sorry one day maybe if they make one that's not like hurting people free pulls all day no money uh rentro rents owl on discord wrote what's the first game you remember that really hooked you i'm talking about the game that even when you shut

it off for the day you were thinking about all the things you want to do next time you played where it would just not get out of your imagination for the entire day until you sat down to play again for me it was quest for glory one slash heroes quest one the game took over my mind when i first played it it had an immersion few games at the time day night cycle three different character classes that changed how you played the whole game and solved certain puzzles i couldn't get the world of that game out of my head and i've been obsessed with that series ever since tower wizard yeah right yeah

well you go back in your heads what was the what was an early one path of exile for me was definitely the one we would talk about me and my buddies amir shout outs to the homie we go way back uh we talk about that game forever we'd be in class showing each other builds we'd be talking about what new items we wanted to get how what are we going to do for the next hardcore league what you know what are we going to do for this it was uh thousands and thousands of hours we spent just thinking about it jeremy it's earthbound when i played earthbound as a kid i've told the story of the podcast before

but we had a creative writing assignment uh in you know like i don't know first grade or something like so early where you would draw a picture and then write like three sentences under it and make like a picture book and i just wrote the first like act of earthbound as a story i just illustrated my memory of earthbound that because i was playing it at the time um but i was just obsessed with earthbound i don't know what one was like the one that i i mean there's plenty of games that i loved and completed and you know monkey island and all these games but i'm trying to think of one that like where i

was thinking about it all the time or wanted to play maybe unreal tournament might have been it or quake 3 i think the one that like really took over my imagination though was world of warcraft like at a certain point my world of warcraft life was far more interesting than my life in college like i college was so fucking boring to me and i just wanted to play wow all the time so i did and almost failed my first year but i didn't so it all worked out in the end uh the summer before Star Wars Galaxies came out, me and my friend Connor would just hang out at his house and we would just go for long

walks in the woods and we would just like talk about what we were gonna do in Star Wars Galaxies when it came out.

That's amazing. And I think that that experience of like dreaming about the possibility space that the game would enable was like a richer experience.

I mean, not to say that game wasn't great cause it was, you know, it's flawed, but like one of my favorite games of all time, despite that, but like just, you know, and I mean, a lot of the things we did, like we were like, oh, we should open a shop because he wanted to like build robots and i wanted to be like a creature tamer like we could open a companion shop where we sell robots and creatures uh and then we did so yeah but that whole summer we would just sit in like his parents above ground pool and be like what if we didn't like what if the business was like this like we would just fucking

dream about what we would do when this game came out that's awesome for me it was yeah for me it was street fighter 2 like uh i was also obsessed with like mortal kombat and super mario world but i feel like street fighter 2 like even like that's how i heard thailand like china it was like that was like my introduction i never heard of this before who was your man yeah no like and so like i feel like it changed the way i play with action figures like when i would watch like i used to like as a kid we had like cable with like encore actions you know just show us like jackie chan films and martial

art films i always saw and looked at through a perspective like street fighter and then like it was like it must have been like 95 96 like at that point it was street fighters every every minute coming out like whether playstation version or ex or whatever the hell would you play in street fighter 2 was your go -to can ryu i mean no like as as a kid and even still it's like guile and zhang is so weird and i was like yeah now it's zhangief zhangief but as zhangief zhangief zhangief um yeah no it was always guile and zhangief and then like every street fighter from then on would be different characters

i would like focus on but yeah street fighter 2 as a kid like also like running into arcades and just seeing the machine i would just like light up and like dash to it but yes street fighter 2 is like the game that and also like just hooked me on like the capcom art style the music every like that world of pixel art too sharply like i still super marvel is also equally incredible but like street fighter 2 was the thing that just that just that shot up in my brain the highest and then uh oh this is a really cute email uh i i tore uh a i t o r i tore wrote uh this is a a bit embarrassing but i just

have to tell you guys on a recent episode of the podcast isonzo was mentioned the world war one game and the rock throwing ascent game mode in it oh yeah i happen to have not only worked on isonzo but i've been the main programmer on the ascent game it was the first time a podcast i'm listening to has mentioned something i've worked on and it caught me completely off guard while buying groceries i struggled to hide my massive grin and probably made a weird noise of some kind it's a small and dumb thing but it felt like a i made I'm a real game developer moment it made me very happy so since I

can't thank the person who sent the email that mentioned the game I'll just thank you guys that's so cool yeah no I mean you're the fucking that's the realist a game developer could be is fucking make it a cool game like fuck us talking about it that's like a that's a cool game that you worked on it's awesome and also that's like the funniest coolest mode I've ever heard of it at FPS yeah it's completely mad um I have it wishlisted but I'm gonna drop it in my car right now and I'm gonna play it we're gonna drop drop it like a rock on exactly on a world war one soldier it's only 750 at the moment

it's uh 75 off of uh uh isonzo i s o n z o um or you can buy the deluxe edition for 40 bucks there is no sale on that one um but i will be buying the uh i'll buy the regular version that sounds like a good time congratulations and then uh raquel wrote in hey noclip crew i love the altar so much so it's It was a bit of a disappointment to hear that they used AI, even with the intent of it being placeholder assets.

My partner and I are both in the games industry, and we were discussing a few of the issues that studios' over -reliance on AI in the dev cycle could cause, and there's one that we don't hear mentioned often, growing junior devs. If studios use AI to knock out early pre -production work or low -level tasks typically meant for junior artists and designers, then that takes work away from junior developers.

We both got our start doing relatively simple and small tasks that could potentially be done by AI tooling today.

Without those opportunities, we wouldn't be in the industry at all how do you think ai displacing junior developers will affect the future of game development careers yeah i think i did mention that last week we were i said that the big issue you're running into with um with with sort of a lot of the work that especially in smaller more highly highly uh experienced teams especially is that instead of sort of outsourcing stuff for getting juniors in that they're they're they're building their production production around maybe using, um, AI to, to, to do some stuff.

Um, yeah, it's something that I've heard from several studios and also other folks.

And I think it's kind of emblematic of like, like a lot of industries.

Like, I feel like this happened in games coverage a little bit over the past few years as well, where you just have, uh, like a, that to me, that was more of a a saturation of people who wanted to get in um and then people who are sort of taking up spaces maybe um but yeah i this does seem like it's troublesome right so like where do these people go especially if there's all these new courses where there's all these developers getting pumped out of colleges now and the sort of obvious answer is like oh they'll you know just make an indie game just just make a perfect indie game make a billion dollars

just spend two years of your life minimum uh you know unpaid working on you know and then you just end up in a situation which which i've encountered a lot in the states over the years actually which is that like the arts are only really filled with middle class people with like people who who could stay at home with their parents or whose parents were able to you know trust fund them through it or something like i I remember we talked about this with Jay Tholin, actually, about how few, like, working class people seem to be in game debt, which is probably not a fair, it's probably a broad brush

to paint. But, like, just the over -reliance on third level education as well in the States in general, which is not necessarily the same in Europe, I feel.

And then also, yeah, the ability for some people to just coast, you know, while they're, you know, at the start of their professional careers or make mistakes and not have to worry about living paycheck to paycheck, that it sort of allows those people to succeed.

And then you're, there's this whole forget, forgotten bottom to that, that you don't, you don't ever notice.

And like AI is maybe taking now is sort of compounding on top of that, on top of everything else.

Take the word game industry out of that point you just made.

And it's just true everywhere.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, it's bad. I don't know necessarily what the numbers look like.

I know it's always been an issue with junior devs being able to get in, especially in the last decade.

even now with uh how many people have been laid off like why would you bother hiring a junior with no experience if you could hire someone with four years experience looking for work um it will continue to be a problem especially as more people get laid off i don't know if ai is the only problem but it is certainly not helping um and like jeremy earlier was talking about cape hideous and how that game is designed so explicitly by one person and you hear these stories of like ubisoft making um their own internal bark ai thing like a tool based on on their own writing that can generate barks for characters

something in that regard um and it's like you're just taking not just the the simple jobs that are sort of given to juniors to work their way up but also the texture away from your own games like you can't like that's what the why would you make a world where things in it you don't understand enough you know like you can't have a conversation about like it's so many opportunities to tell stories that are that are taken away not just from the higher ups but from you know developers who are trying to make their way up and trying to find their own voice it's like now they don't get to do that they

just get to press a couple buttons in a machine until it gives them uh you know the right set of words it's just it's a bummer all the way down yeah it's it's it it under it misunderstands like the because this idea that you can fill a world like we talked about the skyrim like ai companion mod where it's like yeah lydia will just be like you'll be like what what is this place and she'll be like this is a farming village farmers grow grain grain irrigation cereal crop domesticated by humans 2000 like i i think it misunderstands what the point somebody should make that game somebody should like

make youtubers playing it make the bad ai game uh oh like an intentionally what were you write the lines but they're like fake or you mean using an ai just use the i just i just show her shit this stuff i don't know i guess i guess yeah i've been doing it that way is a lot more funny but like i'll step up and take one for the team that's that's that's what cigarette 3d is all you're just talking to her in the bar yeah you're just talking to the bar yeah and it's just so where you from but he's like i'm from a town a town is a municipality of people living in the same area like just fucking wrote

did you vote for trump you know what i mean oh yeah uh but it yeah it's to jesse's point it's like in in cape hideous there is a moment that this is it happens so early in the game so i i'm fine to say it where you can look off the back of the boat and you just see the wake trailing behind the boat and in the distance there's like two pixels of like reddish on the horizon so small that I couldn't even tell if it was something intentional or not and those like two fucking pixels just sent me down like a journey of thought of like what are we leaving behind are we running from something is that land is that another

boat is like I don't fucking know and the game never tells you but i was like it's it's placed there by a person with intent and i like the the artistry of sort of things that juniors can handle like bark lines is like you can do a lot of heavy artistic lifting with those things if you run into a peasant in a village and they're they just say some like throwaway line but it triggers your imagination like that's fucking to the knee dude yeah yes like that's fucking the witcher too oldren here boy constantly when you're in that camp like i think about that kind of stuff it's it's it's necessary

like the haunting part of like what jeremy's saying with seeing the pixels like when i read uh tanahasi quotes new book the the message and he has this passage in it about wanting to haunt people like his goal is to create literature that makes people stay up at night that makes you think about it in in your worst moments and your best ones and like after i read um oh my god what's that book it's like the house house is all messed up house of leaves um when i read that it's fundamentally working the one where the house is all messed up they couldn't figure it out they finally got it in the end

um when i started reading stand uh the the stephen king book really really great book by the way um there's a little like misprint in the book there was a line on a piece of text and it made me think holy shit not again i'm not about to do this again right so like just the point being that like if you make art you don't you never know what's going to connect with people and if we just sacrifice the opportunity to haunt someone you sacrifice the opportunity to make that moment that jeremy experienced in cape hideous or or the chance to do something weird that that sticks with someone because it's

like it's quicker it takes five seconds i get the economic interest in doing that but the artistic angle i don't know how that is taken in any regard it's funny because there's definitely like there's like games have expanded a lot over the past i'm gonna i'm gonna be devil's advocate for one second and i'm not gonna come in with the this is the shot the chase is coming games teams have ballooned right and the scale of games has ballooned and that is a problem and it means that a lot of people folks i know who work at like triple a studios working on famous first person shooters or whatever a lot

of them don't like their jobs but they do it because they get get a bit of experience um and then you know they're they're working on their one little corner of the game that they're only meant to work on right which is a very common thing in large activision and ubisoft teams is that they work on their one thing because they're these massive projects and they're produced to all hell and they need to be right and all that sort of stuff and it's not necessarily the most fun work and uh in that respect it's like you were it's It's the argument against, you know, am I a Luddite now because I'm saying

that we are going to take away, we're going to automate things that people don't like doing, right?

I don't know enough about labor and socioeconomic conditions to make a call on that one.

I don't like that. And that's one side of it.

The other side of it is you have, like, there's shit that I don't want to do, that if I could get a computer to do it, I'd do it.

So it would free me up to do better work.

And I think what's happening is obviously that's not what's happening that if the, if, if games were a, you know, a co -op, if a studio was a co -op owned studio that had 3000 people, I wouldn't have a problem with them using AI and using those 3000 people to make something cooler.

You know what I mean?

Like, like getting rid of the, the drudge work at the bottom, the swill that nobody likes doing and leveling up everyone so that they can do stuff that's important.

But that's not the conversation we're having.

constantly we're having in the conversation that is how can we use this technology to get p so make it so we don't have to employ people and the the what the work ai can do uh is not aligned to how important is this artistically for a human to do it you know what i mean like they're they're it's it's it's aligned to what can the ai do the ai can kind of kind of a little bit right words so So, oh, we'll get rid of writers, right?

Or, oh, we can kind of a little bit make textures.

So we'll get rid of texture artists.

There's not, it's not, it's like the horses before the car or something.

You know what I mean?

It's not, it's not like we're looking at games and going, what's all the stuff that we don't want to do?

What's all the stuff that we could free up and make more creative work.

That's not where it's coming from.

That's not the motivator.

So like, I don't necessarily have a problem with it in this fantasy version of reality that i live in but in the actual reality um that's obviously not what's going on here's the chaser there's a really good article that's up on the telegraph i think it went up today or yesterday it was yesterday uh by andrew orlowski it is uh basically it's called the great ai delusion is falling apart and to me this is why i don't get too too angry about some of this stuff because i i think a lot of it we are going to get proven in the next couple of years is total dog shit and does not fucking work it never

worked it's not going to work the models the way that this sort of stuff will work in some respects it'll work in in areas but like in other areas it's just not going to work but it's being applied in these areas because people think that there is a way to monetize it quickly like like in the stupid chat gpt shit and all that sort of stuff and So just one or two lines out of this.

In a randomized controlled trial, the first of its kind, experienced computer programmers could use AI tools to help them write code.

What the trial revealed was a vast amount of self -deception.

The results really surprised us, research lab METR reported.

Developers thought they were 20 % faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19 % slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

In reality, using AI is making people less productive.

productive they were wasting more time than they had gained but what is so interesting is how they swore blind that the opposite was true so i think we are in like there's a lot of people who have obviously the vested interest in all this stuff when we saw this with blockchain we saw this with with crypto we saw this with whatever right and there's a little bit more meat on the bone on this one because you can ask chachi pt some stuff and it gets it 70 right and it makes you feel cool right it's the act of doing it looks interesting to people and looks like future tech but i think a lot of this stuff

is not going to fucking work and it's not going to make games better and those studios are going to lose money and because the games don't sell and then obviously people will suffer in the interim which is fucking awful but but i i don't know if i'm if i'm i think in like animation or places like that i can see it taking a lot more jobs but i think in the short term it's probably going to take jobs but i don't really trust that this this stuff is actually, I think there's going to be a big backlash to this in the next like five years.

I don't, I don't see it taking over.

I think it's going to prove to be too expensive, too unreliable.

And, and it's going to get a stink on it.

I think a lot of this stuff is going to stink in a couple of years in the same way that like crypto does and everything else.

It just has this like, like a lot of people now, when they think about things like blockchain and crypto, they think of scams and idiots.

And I think that's what's going to happen with this stuff too maybe i'm too optimistic about it but that's what i think no i i totally agree i mean it's like not that this is not a fucking this is not the politics soapbox hour but just to make a point about like this the structuring of like monetary incentive it's like these things are being invented to make a profit and so having them come in to do these low -level tasks it's like this is this is how you make money in like a capitalist economy as you like fence off a thing and are like this is mine now if you want to like come in the fence you

gotta pay me and then a lot of these especially like digital services what they do is they offer these services as sort of like a loss leader like the costco hot dog of silicon valley and then once people are like oh now chat gpt is like integrated into our workflow at some point there's a switchover made where it's like okay well now this is a premium service and like or you get like a reduced version of it is the free version um the the fence expands or contracts whatever fits the metaphor here um and yeah i i agree with you i mean it's it's also like we didn't even talk about like the ecological

fucking impacts or like the you know the ways that like some of these centers of of processing for uh ai services are just like pumping fucking uh pollution into local especially like lower income oh yeah there was there was a recent report wasn't it where there was one of the meta ai factories the locals water all turned brown or something yeah something like that like people like couldn't breathe and it was yeah i mean it's like there's a million reasons it sucks and like all of those are so valid that but i feel like for some reason the most substantial things like that are easy for people

to dismiss because there's something about like anything that sounds like climate change i feel like people are like yeah yeah i know i know i know like it's fucking the water's poison and the air is poison like but like i feel like that's why a lot of the discussion centers around um is it useful because i feel like people it's very easy for people to excuse like destruction of ecology if it's like yeah but like you know but it's convenient or because it does this thing or because it's like the the ends justify the means or something um but so it is interesting to me that a lot of the discussion is around

like can it do the thing and not around like you know 60 artists just like they need to like eat and live somewhere whereas like a fucking factory of processors is like spewing out poison air or something uh it's just funny that our conversation is like yeah but is it good it doesn't are the textures good yeah yeah i i the only reason i like bringing up the usability of it is because i think it sucks and i think that's funny that like all of this like that like you know people like that the the thing that it like the most obvious thing which is like does the thing do the thing the answer is no but it's

but we live in a world in which that doesn't matter anymore more there's an amazing um did you see the uh luke plunkett tweeted or on blue sky posted it earlier on that like someone from the xbox graphics team was hiring people and he put up a linkedin post and the linkedin post is an ai generated image of like a ghibli ass s xbox employee which is bad enough until you realize that the monitor that they're working on you are looking at the back of the monitor and the monitor has like the screen on the back of the model it's just like this is like parody of like brass i couldn't have gotten away

with it's so like it speaks to the mentality of the people who think that these technologies are are like better than they actually 100 because it is it is so much of it is self -deception and i've seen this like i chat gpt is a fucking like it it it helped me learn coding in some capacity right but so i feel like Like, a lot of people have that sort of, like, they dip their toes in the water and they're like, oh, wow, like, I didn't know that that function existed in Unity.

What else can this thing teach me?

And I think if you don't, if you are not vigilant against it, which I luckily was, like, already very skeptical, there comes a point where it's, like, you try to cross the Rubicon and you're like, can it just, like, write the code for me?

And the answer is, like, no, it fucking can't beyond, like, the most basic shit where it's literally just pulling the text from, like, Unity documentation anyway, so you might as as well, just check the documentation and learn that process for yourself.

Yeah. Because I have seen other people try to learn things through chat GPT and they just end up like in this miasma of thinking that they're that they're like, oh, yeah, now I can like automate this to do it for me.

But then they spend four days asking chat GPT to like refactor their code and it never ends up working.

Yeah. Or the email sender who's, you know, Raquel, who said that her and her partner work in game dev, like it's similar.

similar it reminds me of like stuff like blueprint which is like blueprint's a really great tool to allow you know non -programmers to write simple scripts and be able to do stuff inside of unreal engine but like every tech artist and programmer i've talked to goes oh i just have to rewrite all that shit you know what i mean like it's like we don't the i i we had the conversation last week about ai being used for like sort of some version of gray boxing right but like people have like that's the thing is that no one ever talks about this this uh this technology as like a sort of uh productivity

tool to make you get faster at doing the thing or it's like it's it it's it can do like 40 maybe of where you're going but like the last 20 is the hardest so like it has to do another 40 and then do the hardest part so it's like of course like when people say like it's going to to take over like editing and camera like no it's not like like i think it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how things are made like i totally i i the editing thing i think is such a good example because it is something that i have like expertise in and i feel like that this is what everyone says about ai things

is you don't realize how shitty it is until it's it or like journalism people use this that they think journalists are like competent until journalists talk about something that they're an expert in yes and they're like oh shit like this article this doesn't reflect the reality of my expertise at all and i think ai is similar where like picture you're editing a video and you hand it like a documentary edit you have six interviews hand it off the ai cobbles together an hour and a half documentary on its face that's an amazing feat holy shit that could have taken me like two weeks of work and now

it's done but then you watch it and you realize there are issues with it and now what happens is the the first 40 percent like like you said, of like the assembly is done competently, maybe, but then the rest of it is bullshit.

But now in having to undo the fucked up ladder 60%, you do not have familiarity with the materials that the documentary is built out of.

So even if the first 40 % is done for you, the process of doing the first 40 % is how you are able to do the ladder 60 % of the job.

So fast, so much faster.

Right. So if AI can do the drudgery work for you, it doesn't even really help with the latter 60 because the familiarity with the first 40 is what enables you to do the finishing work so like what the fuck is the point of this anyway and i bet it would if you added up both versions it probably takes 20 longer a hundred percent yeah jesse sorry you were you were saying something earlier um when i was on my little ramble uh yeah i um i was saying that uh it's like ai's goal goal is to take away like 3d modeling jeremy could probably speak to this uh uv unwrapping is the worst thing ever that you

ever have to do ever when making a 3d model it's like ai they skipped the part where we figured out a really really good competent uv unwrapping system and we just went straight to here's the 3d model with textures on it and it looks like shit it's not performant and it doesn't work but if you if we just invested the resources on solving this one one problem it would allow me to continue to be an artist and do interesting things and instead it's just no here's the you can only make the art we're not going to do the cool fun interesting thing that allows you to more expediently perform your art

it's just don't worry about it just throw in the bad head model that's 19 million polygons when it could be like 400 if it was properly done like the topology is garbage like that that's how i feel about most of this creative ai stuff or like like the xbox thing you guys mentioned it's like we're we're going out of our way to uh to bring people on who want to do creative work but only if they're willing to do a bad bastardized version of it where sometimes they have to ask bing to figure it out for them i i that it like you've made a better version of the point i was trying to make earlier which is that like

it in trying to make ai a saleable marketable product it has to be the like sexy all -in -one one solution that if you actually examine what it's doing does it poorly as opposed to like a non -profit incentive version of these tools would be like okay let's invent something that just does the drudgery work and like it does it efficiently and well and competently but that's like a less sexy product or something this is all about like it's all about the spectacle and i think that that is the problem is that like people putting up the fucking ai generated graphic hiring graphics programmers or whatever

is like if you if you believe in this technology you deceive yourself into thinking that it has competency and to the extent that someone putting up a public facing image advertising jobs for one of the largest corporations in the world has the fucking monitor drawn fucking backwards like that you could fix that in photoshop in half of a second but if you are not being if you are not actively vigilant against the failings of these technologies if If you are an AI evangelist, it is so easy to self -deceive into thinking that the job is being done competently.

And that's, funnily enough, that's one of the things that came up in the post in the Telegraph, was they said that because people are so predisposed to this stuff working, that it needs to work for them to be doing it, that they don't see the failings.

They're not looking out for them.

And that's the biggest thing you need to do when you're using this technology.

I don't use this stuff for much of anything.

I have flirted in the past with using ChatGPT to ask it questions about stuff that I know about, like really specific things about like, you know, Formula One, you know, how cars operate on track and things like that, like things that aren't like history that it can quickly Google.

Or like if you ask it about Noclip, the answers it comes up with are hilarious because it's like, oh, it's just like the tagline from Wikipedia.

and like, you know, Danny did this and no clip was this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then it like attributes a bunch of Jeff Keighley's work to us, like completely confidently.

It's like, oh, of course the final hours of portal too was a great no clip, you know?

And you're like the fuck, like, that's not even that hard to like, where in the world does it say that we did that nowhere?

Like, so, so it's like, yeah, I think that's the, it's like a, it's like confirmation bias but it's some type of bias that people have usability bias that that also creates this bifurcation where some people are these mad evangelists and other people are rolling their eyes um at it and like yeah who knows there's probably a use for this stuff that is will benefit humanity and you know like jesse said tools to stop the boring thing like yes please ai rotoscoping you know what i mean like what's the what's the most boring thing you've had to do in Photoshop or Premiere or whatever that takes forever,

you know, like, uh, yeah.

And, and, and take it, you know, but alas, that's not what's going on.

Um, Raquel, you probably know more than we do.

You work in development, but hopefully not.

Hopefully there's other avenues for this stuff.

Hopefully it's a bubble to some degree or, or it finds its footing in stuff that actually makes sense, like medicine or robotics or something that's like not artistic.

You know what I mean?

um but yeah i guess we'll have to wait this one out dr pax max uh more dr pax more in our discord wrote question for jeremy for the q a segment do you play any tabletop rpgs or board games and if you do do you draw any inspiration from them directly in your game design choices uh no i've always wanted to and i could never find because like i i'm i despite the fact that i'm a loud mouth opinionated person on this podcast it is because I'm amongst friends who I'm comfortable with I'm a very like shy introverted person and so like I want to play tabletop games but only people with people that I already

know and amongst the group of people that I know and love none of them will play tabletop games with me um so the closest I've ever come is when I used to go on road trips with friends in California I would dm a tabletop role -playing campaign which was essentially just doing a dice roll app on my iPhone and just inventing scenarios and it was basically just like an improv game like there were no like I wasn't operating on fucking you know D &D 5th edition or whatever I was just like there's a guy and he says this what do you do and then I would roll a die but uh but now the answer is no and I've

always wanted to you you know what we we launched a new thing maybe that's like a like one month that's the patron exclusive thing or something like that you know we could i would get a little game going play some play some madness um great questions thanks frank for all those uh emails thanks to email senders podcast at no clip video no clip that video no clop that video is our horse girl subsidy which frank is running at the moment um uh god i want to do that for that would have been a great like april fool's joke or something no no club.

Um, uh, we'll be back next week.

We do have some other stuff though, hidden the, the channels, the various channels on no clip crow for now.

Um, we've got some quick looks coming up.

Did you guys record on yesterday?

You record one today.

We're recording one today.

You are recording one today.

What is it? Can you say Jesse?

Oh, uh, Kaizen, a factory story.

Yes. This is the auto builder.

Is it not an auto builder?

It's like, uh, if you know Zachtronics games, it's like Opus Magnum.

Uh, it's from, some some of the team originally that reformed to start this new studio uh it's their first game awesome um your indie game recommendation video is also coming up as well yes on the final version of her one of them anyway yes yes you're playing death stranding i see yeah it's a really good indie game it's published by koji pro you guys know that right yeah there's a bunch of other stuff in the in that channel we've also got that battlefield 3 video that'll be going up soon and And also for patrons, the early access for the next Torby video, the next Everbloom one in that series.

The first one was about sound design.

This one's about trees.

Just a whole video about trees.

I'm loving this series.

It's good stuff, man.

Are you going to talk about SpeedTree?

Are you going to bring up how cool that was?

We literally talk about SpeedTree, my friends.

Yes, let's go, baby.

I love trees in video games.

I can't wait for that.

SpeedTree is expensive.

That's what I'm... Yeah.

My favorite topic, honestly, is trees in video games.

So interesting. Well, we got the video for you.

I can't wait. Our bonus podcast will be up as well, by the time this goes up for patrons, all about Minecraft. Yeah!

The Minecraft movie, that is, not anything else.

And yeah, plenty of other docs getting made in the background.

I'm knee deep in Disco Elysium again.

So I'm hoping to get that out pretty soon or in the next month or so.

And then we have a couple of other things.

We'll have updates on other stuff, events coming up in the next couple of months.

PAX West and QuakeCon, we'll have some folks on the ground there.

so we'll have updates on all that stuff too all right that's a podcast the games again we talked about today tony ox post creator 3 cape hideous the drifter tower wizard um beaver some butthead and call of duty and uh and the stardom card party game jump in there trade some uh packs with frank he wants all those all those og stardoms uh thanks for listening to podcast and we'll see you next week bye Thank you.

[Noclip Podcast Episode 236: From 'Bastard Town' to the Dark Patterns of Game Design]-[Cape Hideous, Tower Wizard, Stardom Card Party]

📋 Summary

Noclip Podcast Episode 236: Exploring Weird Places, Game Compulsion, and the State of the Industry

The Geography of 'Bastard Town'

Indie Game Highlights: From Skating to Shamanism

The Dark Patterns of Game Design

Closing Thoughts

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Noclip Podcast Episode 236: From 'Bastard Town' to the Dark Patterns of Game Design]-[Cape Hideous, Tower Wizard, Stardom Card Party]

📋 Summary

Noclip Podcast Episode 236: Exploring Weird Places, Game Compulsion, and the State of the Industry

The Geography of 'Bastard Town'

Indie Game Highlights: From Skating to Shamanism

The Dark Patterns of Game Design

Closing Thoughts

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📖 Transcript

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