Dune Awakening, Death Stranding 2, Umamusume: Pretty Derby | Noclip Crewcast

Thank you for watching!

Hello friends, welcome to episode 234 of this podcast. It's a partial crew cast. The J -Dogs are down a member.

Jeremy Jane, you're flying solo this week.

What are you going to do without your buddy, Jesse?

We're hurting. The J -Boys are in a rough state.

We're at 50 % capacity.

But, you know, we come out here every night and the boys give it their all.

and you know i feel like this is phil jackson the love like the coach of the lakers right now love it head down to j crew if you want to get your official uh j jeremy jane jesse grasha uh licks uh we're also joined by royalty the king of gamer scores frank howley he just posted on social media but three or four minutes ago he did it he's done it folks he's broken through Through the glass ceiling has shattered.

Frank Howley, you are no longer a sub 100 ,000 gamerscore Luddite like myself and Jeremy.

You have ascended. You will soon be getting your very own planet.

Congratulations. Frank Howley, what is your gamerscore right now?

It is 100 ,003. Wow.

So you know, I hit the world record. I was like, let me just set the bar a little higher just in case anyone else tries it even near me.

First man with 100 ,000 gamerscore.

it's incredible I hope to hear from xbox I tagged them in it I don't know I feel it'd be a major I feel it'd be a major flub if they don't acknowledge me it's like yes you know I don't know but I it's I couldn't have done without everyone's help here uh even a recent game we were capturing I think attributed towards my gamer score so beautiful it's incredible so thank you was it a game we can't talk about to be I don't I have no idea I have there's so many shades I talk about a lot with my friends where it's like we have stuff that's like in our patron we talked talked about stuff that's just

between the three of us stuff that we talked about the podcast and i'm posting social media so i don't know but yeah can i guess sure was it battlefield 3 no uh no that i think i got ea gamer score which i'm so sorry uh we do have a fun little battlefield 3 video coming out soon uh jeremy just sent me the the the the almost finished edit uh just about two minutes ago as well so it's all it's all kicking off here on july 1st welcome folks it's the second half of 2025 would you believe it and we would not be here without our incredible battle pass holders love breach ute dwayne the rock lobster

anthony thomas nico pass a dairy it's a me farrario peppy lappy senator armstrong i swear to god i'm never going to be able to pronounce this one properly redredge i think it is harry flanagan joosh arno matt pearson james brown mark ross coburnicus tucker morgan david mcgarry goddessin sven hooster pez john acres ewan nate tim robinson forrest pruitt jonathan cremin eric hamilton schneider christopher tooey cameron laird zachary snader alex goucher george soccotis jacob god serve entheogen jen james med tohir tilliev and ricin thank you to all of those folks and all of you folks over patreon .com

slash noclip who support us each and every month we're working on a whole crunch a bunch of stuff now i'm fascinated as to what frank goes uh was it a was it one of the sweden games games yes okay okay okay was it a was it a nazi game yeah okay okay we got it we got it we got it good stuff good stuff we have a lot of games we have a lot of docs coming out i am i am in edit world folks i am i'm gonna be like the fucking architect at the end of the third matrix movie with the amount of screens that are going to be surrounding me for the next month i have spent Went far too long dilly -dallying, spending

time with my parents when they came over here.

Ugh, how dare I? The people who made me.

What a waste of fucking time that was.

What a beautiful waste of time.

And then I just came back from two weeks on the road.

I drove 3 ,500 miles through some fucking goddamn America, let me tell you.

The entire continent is like 3 ,000 miles, right?

right? Like if you drive San Francisco to Boston, it's like 3000 -ish.

I think it's less. I think it's like two and a half or something.

You could have driven across and started back.

Maybe on there in Hawaii, we just kind of wedge them to the West Coast. Maybe then it is or something.

Yeah. But it feels like I spent pretty much the entire time in Mountain Time, which was cool.

I feel like I'm never in Mountain Time.

No one ever cares about Mountain Time.

Have you ever been in Mountain Time, Jeremy?

I think so. Where does Mountain Time begin?

begin i weirdly i think it began in eastern oregon which is weird because like vegas is not in mountain time and i think that might be further east oh yeah oh yeah arizona's mountain time i've been to arizona utah new mexico i've you know i spent a surprising amount of mountain time he's dabbled frank what about you uh i've been to denver i think that's the only mountain time zone i've been in it must be the most mountain time surely those are the mountains for which mountain and time is named after uh slightly further east than i was um but yeah i went to uh went to some beautiful parts of of america i

basically played no video games i brought my steam deck didn't didn't touch it good yeah i guess i love video games don't get me wrong yeah like some all all the sweeter is the return to video games from your departure uh went to yellowstone national park any you guys been there before no i always wanted to go it's uh it's cool unsurprisingly you see like an insane amount of animals all the time we saw uh bison are everywhere we had the quintessential you are stuck in traffic because bison are walking in the other lane so i had like just bison like two feet from my car just like um and we saw

uh saw some some grizzly bears out there so black black bear yeah yeah holy shit grizzly and two cubs they are big let me tell you that's the one i've i have been tent camping hundreds of times and the only thing that ever scares me is just laying in my tent and imagining getting ripped apart by a grizzly bear yeah it's we're lucky in california that there are no grizzlies left yeah we're lucky they've been hunted to extinction which which makes the fact that the california flag has that it like now extinct version of the the grizzly bear on us it's like the california grizzly or something it's

because we conquered them you know exactly we captured their soul and trapped it in a flag so they could never escape and then uh fallout new vegas stuck an extra head on it which i always uh appreciate it for the new california republic and the coolest thing i think i saw is we saw a black wolf um yeah wolves apparently are like really hard to see there i saw some um bald eagles too but the wolves are hard to spot because they tend to be nocturnal right so they you see them super early in the morning or late at night and we were driving along the way to see stuff at Yellowstone is you just look

at everyone else if you see a bunch of people stopped somewhere looking and the guy in front of me literally pulled over and I I was like all right I think they know what they're doing and I pulled in ahead of him and they got out and looked over and we looked over and I was like what is that is that a bear and I was like it looks like we were we were dying to to see a moose where i went i went moose hunting in yellowstone i went moose hunting in the grand tetons uh we even went moose hunting outside salt lake city there's there's one lake where they tend to be but in the summertime they just

don't you know they're just hard to find you never saw a moose but i was like is that a moose that thing is huge and then i was like my wife was like i think it's a wolf like a dog it was mass it was miles it was like maybe a quarter mile from where we were but the thing was fucking huge it went past the tree and i was like oh no like that's the largest dog i've ever seen that is terrifying um so that was pretty cool i think that was my favorite weird animal to see on the way that's awesome was it uh crowded there i i know yellowstone is a really popular park but i expected it to be more so i

don't know if we were early in the season or or if there's fewer tourists because of all of this you know fascism i don't know if that that contributed but it didn't or maybe my expectations was that i was going to be so crazy but it really wasn't that crazy at all it was it was less than yosemite i i did the cardinal sin of i drove back through the eastern sierras on sunday and uh i went to drive up the tiago pass and through yosemite and do you remember you've done this before even in the summer you used to be able to get a pass to go through you could like but they'd say like oh you need to

you need to get through the valley or you need to get through because you're actually going to the valley or whatever but you need to pass through here within two hours like you need to show the gate at the other side they aren't doing that anymore i had to go back i had to like drive up towards tahoe basically up towards reno and across oh damn um yeah they sent me back so i guess i should have got a pass did you cross up by like uh like lake mono up there yeah exactly yeah on that side so as you know i had to turn around and go back it's pretty good pretty good stretch of road to do twice you

know you're gonna have to do a stretch of road twice especially after nevada um that was grim i drove past the area 51 store though so that was that was good fun what can you tell us a little bit about area 51 it was just like it it was just what area 51 jeremy is a place where aliens landed in the 1950s of course right this is a popular television show based on it it's a video game an arcade game thousands of t -shirts with uh little green men smoking joints um i know those guys uh yeah they just i so you're just driving it was like the grimest drive you know 3 ,500 miles eastern oregon was was desolate

there was nothing like for like Like it was one of those like next gas station and 150 miles situations.

It was just like absolutely nothing in Southeast Oregon.

Eastern Oregon is the most desolate place I've ever been in my life.

I spent like a month there, like right before Noglet started filming a documentary about a town that was split into two because of their church. So half of them were like, yeah, we're like fine with gay people.

And half of them were like dancing is illegal.

And Eastern Oregon is fucked, man.

it's the only place i've ever been in a bar and heard just like people openly saying racial slurs it was oh yeah insane i got drunk in a bar in salmon idaho um which was a great town and there was some there was some some words said there uh that that weren't cool um i will say that that a lot of the people there were the types of folks you would expect vote red pretty easily and they were super pissed at trump at the moment so that was like that was very interesting it was a i i feel like i got like a real i tapped into some real american shit on this trip because i was like you know i went to

a protest in boise the next day as well i was just in town and the protest was on and and uh some uh i had to pull a skateboarder off a homeless guy he was beating up because the homeless guy attacked him yeah it was pretty it was pretty gnarly we should we should just do like we should just pivot to doing like adam curtis or not adam curtis like a louis theroux style just like you go around and you're like so like i heard you say something racist what did you mean by that yeah what did you yeah put the bike in their face as the homeless guy was like clearly like tweaked out or something and he

uh he he made the cardinal sin of swinging at a skateboarder but then grabbing his deck and running away with it and the minute he did that i ran ran over because i was like oh no skateboarder justice is coming and he like jumped on him as our punch him in the face and i pulled him off and i then i got the deck off the guy and it was outside the protest so it was like the last thing the protest needed was this violent act happening which had nothing to do with the protest um so i was like told the skaters get out of there and i was half expecting to see it on social media somewhere because the guy's

face was pretty beat up but jesus you were the fucking irish peacekeeper of the boise some guy because i was standing across the road from it because i was like sort of enjoying the protest and being part of it but also like kind of keeping sketch like because there was a bunch of guys like you know what do they call it when they they smoke up their engines what do they you know they're rolling coal rolling coal yeah yeah there's a bunch of guys fucking rolling coal past the so like basically just like revving up there over uh over gassed engine it ruins the engines um uh to to make a bunch of smoke

hit the protesters but he kept doing it they kept driving down the street the wrong way so he was only smoking me up i was the only person on the other side of the street and um so i was just keeping sketch in case some weird shit went down because there was a bunch of like weirdo right wingy people kind of hanging around and doing stuff um but then i think some of the protesters thought that i was sketchy because then one of them came over to me and was like chatting to me about stuff and i felt like he was like checking in it's just like temperature check or 100 that's really funny because it

was mostly latino people as well as at the adash because of the the it was about the ice raids and all that sort of stuff so i was just chatting to him after a couple of minutes like he knew i was i was i was all right um uh yeah so but it was fun yeah it was fun it was it was a wild two weeks i enjoyed listening to the podcast a lot so thanks for for holding it down thanks that's nice to hear for doing it yeah i already told you guys a story of listening in the casino in vegas and getting interrupted by a sex worker on stage uh excuse me ma 'am i'm listening to my gaming podcast right now we are talking

about Stephen King right now if you don't mind please please don't please don't interrupt me have a good night I'm married and I'm playing this game of Thrones but more importantly the gaming podcast and the game of Thrones oh also I'm married as a side note exactly I went in I don't but I don't bet our patrons money you know except like when I go to Vegas except when I win except when I win and I put like 50 bucks down and I walked away with over 700 so I'm feeling pretty good about my my time in Vegas i guess paid for the hotel um but we're gonna hear to talk about road trips i don't think or maybe

we are actually one of these games we'll have to we'll have to find out we're gonna talk about some video games uh we're gonna talk about uh ruffy and the riverside which just came out jeremy's played that in the past as well i think that was in one of our games of the was it a summer game fest video or something we did a next fest video oh yeah yeah yeah it'll i'll it'll there's some interesting contrast between the demo and the game so we'll get into it excellent frank's played rematch uh as well as uh umam usume pretty derby and i'm gonna talk about a popular walking simulator starting with d

which you've probably heard a little bit about but we'll we'll get to that one how's the past couple of weeks been aside from playing video games how's the summer been what What's you guys been up to?

Does it feel summery where you are, Frank?

Yeah, actually, because now the schools are out, so I can ride my bike uninterrupted because, like, traffic flow in my area gets so messed up with, like, cars and kids and people, you know.

So now the street, I don't know.

So, yeah, it's been, like, hot between around the AC.

I've, like, now recovered from, like, the Summer Games Fest Jet Set Radio, like, now Anime Expo is next week, or this week, actually.

Nice. But, yeah, everything's, I don't know.

No, yeah, it's so weird, like, I'm such a, I guess, hermit, like, I don't go to the beach or any actual, like, barbecue, I don't do any of that, so it's like, oh, I see people are doing that, but I don't know, but, um, yeah, everything's fine.

You've been busy summer, though, right?

You got, like, a lot of you're going to Japan again, you're going to go, you're heading up to you're going to do some PAX stuff as well?

Yeah, so, I mean, see as things get confirmed, but yeah, I feel like PAX, we always plan for it.

I feel like last year was the anomaly because we were in another country.

Oh, I forgot about that.

Where were we? could we say yeah i think i mean we were we were in we were i went to japan and we went to korea for a project oh yes yeah um uh because if pax wasn't happening this year i was gonna go with a friend to every year end of summer it's the tokyo death match carnival uh and if it's the same weekend as pax and for a second i was like i wonder if i could still do that and then fly over but it's okay instead i'm shifting it going a week earlier um but um but yeah pax is always even jesse kind of comments it like pax prime is the real pax like paxease pax i mean pax south south was decimated

but um yeah shots fired jeremy hey i said it yesterday during the meeting i i we like our underdog packs over here oh yeah no paxease is chill but pax prime i feel like still has a little bit of the juice and like it's definitely wavered up and down but it's always a good time i just like seattle i mean we've spent so much time in seattle we've spent so i like seattle though i do like jesus between dwarf fortress all those half -life documentaries i've turned down bungee like 15 times probably just because we've been to fucking it's not the only reason there's been a lot of documentaries i'm glad

we didn't start because we probably couldn't have been able to finish them um but uh yeah we've spent a lot of time up there i do miss that san antonio back south that was a weird one that was the one that felt out most like just like a regional con you know but like uh i've never been to um what's the one in baltimore again every year and that oh mag fest mag fest yeah that's supposed to be a fun one yeah i lived like down the road from it for years and never went because i had a stupid kid so you know no she never hears this yeah no she won't know you didn't raise her to listen to gaming podcasts

she wants to come on the uh if we got a panel of packs she wants to come on stage so So we'll have to see about that.

The big reveal, you know, of my fake family that I made up.

So, you know, it's going to be awkward. It's less sad how much time you spend editing if there's like a loving family when you step away from the computer.

I just concentrate all my family time into two weeks of road trips and then I never see them for the rest of the year.

You just hug them for two weeks and then you're like, all right, daddy's going to go make more documentaries for the next 50 weeks.

Looks like we made some memories, family.

You know, I can. I've got the photos to prove it.

exactly 100 you just put them all over the walls nobody can you know your honor you know i i don't think i should have to play child support look at all these pictures i was a good dad and he's like why it's weird that they're all in mountain time though like it's it's almost as if they were concentrated into some sort of 3 000 mile odyssey yeah why why do you why are they all taking place in front of this one jeep wrangler just different angles of one mesa from different angles over and over again um yeah uh yeah i i i feel i feel vindicated by that anyway how's your summer going jeremy uh good

i've been it's very getting used to the humidity again is bizarre but i kind of like it um i it was the one thing i thought i would hate about moving back out to the east coast but it's kind of like stepping outside at four in the morning and it's 85 degrees and to 90 humidity it's kind of it's kind of magical there's something about it yeah i don't know um you got a you got you got um cicadas going on there i don't remember god they they come out infrequently it's not like a every summer thing i don't know actually if there's a kid is up here i feel like they there were cicadas when i was a kid

but aren't don't they come out like every few years or something if they're every summer but they do their brood every 14 years okay just after i left any uh lightning bugs yes i saw a fire when i went out at four in the morning the other day i saw one firefly sitting on the ground and i was like this is this is magical this is childhood but um sticking in a jar man yeah no i had to let it be free range although the next day i looked outside in the same spot and it was dead and ants were eating it so jesus christ i wasn't that magic the magic dried up as soon as the sun rose but yeah no it's been

it's been nice uh being here um i haven't done anything to summery since i went kayaking a few weeks ago but uh nice just been doing a bunch of game dev and it's i'm getting i've been doing research about like where the swim spots are out here because after 12 years in california i knew where like you go to this hiking trail and then after a mile you like go left into the woods and walk for a mile you end up at like a river nobody knows about and uh i i kind of don't have that here because i was like when i was 17 18 i moved to boston and then i just lived in the city until i moved to california so you

know from the time i got my license at like 15 16 whatever until i moved was only like a short period of time in high school so is the ocean warmer up there i feel like it's freezing is the same as same as california it's brutal yeah yeah just that's so unfair i'm getting out of california i was like move to california man you get you know frank's laughing because he lives down in socal and it's it's nice and you know temperate down there you get that that gulf mexican heat as well it comes up but up here man jump in the middle of july freeze your nuts off does not care yeah yeah you gotta gonna wait

for the hottest day of the year and it's also just like the waves on the west coast are just always intense it's there's like a couple of beaches you go to where it's chill but like a lot of places you stop it's just like i'll get sucked out in like two seconds there i'm not going anywhere near that it's also the um the what is it called it's not the emerald triangle that's where they grow pot up north what's the it's the oh it's the red triangle it's like the highest incidence of shark attacks or shark sightings or something is like the from like I think it's from maybe just Monterey area up

till somewhere in the North Coast is like the highest incidence of sharks maybe in North America.

Oh, boy. The Red Triangle.

Sounds like a bunch of communists up here.

Communist submarines we don't know about.

I did just Google Red Triangle.

The first thing that came up was something about the Arab Revolt.

Oh, okay. Yeah. It sounds like the name of a Tom Clancy simulator game or something.

Oh, here it is. Around 38 % of recorded great great white shark attacks on humans in the u .s have occurred within the red triangle um great white as well like that's the bad one yeah it's big sir up to like santa rosa ish like the northern tip of marina really yeah oh my god that's grim oh don't like that at all none of those in yellow stone let me tell you or utah or any of that stuff saw a lot of mormon temples though it's a good time i don't know anything about did you pop in and say what's up or they don't let you inside you gotta wear the magic pants i think to go inside i don't know mormon uh

let me say salt lake city a lot of kids activities because everyone seems to have like four of them it's like a lot of a lot of uh getting the numbers up in uh in salt lake city i felt like like bounce houses or like what are we talking yeah all of the above escape rooms bounce houses um you know tag places so we tag places i didn't know they had commercialized okay laser tag laser tag all right yeah cinemas just kind of anything that's that's mildly hey i've got four kids and i need somewhere to put them for four hours um with their 16 cousins that was kind of the vibe of uh of salt lake city

it was uh yeah it seemed it seemed pleasant and also just like incredibly boring so you know hey each to their own do your thing um you got any plans for the rest of summer how's your kayaking going you going river you going you going sea uh it's sort of in between there is a there's a river that links up to the atlantic ocean so it's sort of like a um i've heard of that ocean it's it's one of the oceans it's uh so it's a salt marsh um and so it's the benefit of no sharks destroying your kayak and eating you uh but also there is some sea life so i i took my buddy out for his birthday a few weeks

ago and we saw um just like a fucking live horseshoe crab two horseshoe crabs oh nice yeah i've never seen a live one i've only ever seen their their dead husk on the beach washed up somewhere um so yeah it's cool it's just like this sort of like brackish very quiet marsh that you just sort of like silently float through but um but it's tidal so it like flows in and out uh it has a bunch of cool life in it but But yeah, it's awesome.

I highly recommend kayaking, even if you...

I feel like every time I mention to someone, they're like, oh, that's scary.

What if you flip over and die?

And it's like, no, it's not like whitewater rafting.

It's just like canoeing, but smaller.

Right. Yeah, it's just having a boat.

Yeah, it's just a little personal boat.

It's awesome. A personal boat.

I love it. Let's talk about some video games, folks.

I'm going to start with Frank Howley because he is as we all know a massive fan of the sport of soccer football if you will the beautiful game um and uh some some people over in France who make games about old Asian dancer fighter men I've never played Sifu you guys but people who get old when they fight there was a good episode of that amazon show about it i watched that um they made rematch this uh this what are you going to call it soccer it's it's rocket league soccer league is that what we're calling it it's foot league foot league it's uh it's an arcadey online you know you control one player

5v5 football game um no official licenses or anything like that sort of has a bit of a rocket league vibe in terms of its uh presentation let's say i played a bunch of the it wasn't a demo it was a beta that was on a couple months ago i think i talked about it on the pod i really enjoyed it but didn't play more than a couple hours frank how are you enjoying rematch i am i am so surprised because like i've never cared about football like are just like i'm not trying to be like one of those anti -sports whatever but it's just like oh it's just it's just such a giant world for me to to get into i

don't know i i don't know i'm in los angeles i'm on europe whatever i know there's global teams everywhere whatever i'm not la galaxy right la galaxy i'm trying to get into la sparks i started playing at w i started playing nba 2k25 there's a w nba league and so you play it's like and tickets are so cheap but for uh for rematch uh yeah i had a friend suggested to me it was it's on game pass if this wasn't on game pass i probably would have tried it i think it's is it 30 or 40 it's 30 bucks on uh on on steam and consoles okay i think you can buy a 40 or 50 dollar edition of us and but it's 30 it's

30 bucks the all games have a gratuity fee now if you want to pay the extra we never found out what came in the um uh mind's eye deluxe edition either um same thing on this page it doesn't say what's in the pro or elite edition but if you just really like soccer you can pay 20 bucks more for it um but i will say having played rematch it is worth it so i am blown away by rematch i think every match is like seven minutes long if if the if a team gets four points above a mercy rules enacted in the round the game is immediately over yeah you're just playing as one person uh there's like three modes

there's like 3v3 4v4 for 5v5 i found my sweet spot in the 4v4 3v3 is like too much pressure so it's like when the round starts one player is randomly assigned the goalkeeper and then the other guys on the field you can completely ignore the goal as you'll be if you're teamed up with a random player like I play this game and I get so frustrated and angry but when you're good it's the best feeling in the world the thing that makes this game unique is it's very much like Rocket League where the walls become such an important factor in the play you can bounce the ball off the walls and people are constantly

doing a thing where they'll like kick the ball above the goal it bounces back and a different teammate will kick it in and so you can also like I'm sure this isn't regular football too too but like the physics is a big part of it as you're rushing past like defenders you can like kick up the ball and i don't know dribble it or do crazy it's almost like nba jam or an nba street like playing this game feels like the very much like ea sports ea big games like ssx nba street all those where it's very arcadey fast and fun there is a turbo button and you can like double tap it to do like an extra like

boost and sprint and so a big part of the game is like managing Managing your your turbo ability, being like this is me describing soccer, being mindful of all the players on the field so you can pass the ball.

But again, what's fascinating is you're just one player and you're just teamed up with randoms or if you're playing with friends.

And I discovered that joy just even recently playing the NBA games were in the career mode.

You're just one player.

So you have to you can't just tap a switch to the person closest to the ball.

So it really forces you to, like, be mindful of the entire field, shifting from defense and offense.

fence and like it's as someone who's like kind of really ignored sports their whole life this is so exhilarating and fun to play and an extra sweet spot with it is the soundtrack is like this intense like grand theft auto heist music it is so intense and like every time the points shift it's like the music like starts ticking like a clock like like like like michael man's heat or something or it's like it is so intense but when you get points it's so satisfying my brain was starting to have like I played so much yesterday and playing this game crossed me into 100 ,000 gamer score.

I just couldn't stop playing it.

Oh, nice. When I was in bed resting, my brain had the Tetris effect where I was imagining rematch. And I was like, oh, I screwed up that goal.

How could I do this better?

And, yeah, it's such an incredible game.

But, again, I remember feeling this juice a decade ago when all my friends got into Rocket League.

So, yeah, rematch is phenomenal.

Don't say a decade ago.

You're right. It was a bit 10 years ago.

Jesus. And, yeah. Yeah, so the only negative thing I will say for now is there's no crossplay.

I think they said that's in their roadmap.

They just couldn't get in time for launch because I have so many friends who want to play this.

I have friends who have it on PlayStation or whatever.

I've had friends who got it on PC Game Pass just to play with me.

But now it's like, oh, I want to be able to play on PlayStation.

I don't want to have to rebuy the game three times.

Right, especially for $30.

Yeah, so it's like, and I'm surprised there's not a free -to -play edition.

But yeah, $30, I will say it's worth it.

I wish there I don't know if there is a demo because like I was someone I wouldn't have played it if it wasn't for Xbox game pass but I am shocked how fun this game is so I really like it so is there much single -player stuff in here at all or is it just online it's like there is like a single -player tutorial stuff I think they're called workshops and it's just like very like all right I don't know I basically didn't try the workshop stuff and I just kept there's no like story or league or anything you can't there's no CPU players AI it is straight up like always always online do this the workshops

are more so like oh it's your queuing for a game basically and you can free play on the field to just practice your dribbling and kicking and juggling and stuff like that but yeah it's not that's like kind of negative because like if there was a single -player career mode i would love that because that's what nba 2k has but um yeah i think they just want you to play online but yeah so but playing online even with randoms is very fun it's interesting i wonder how much this game is going to benefit from the sort of like fifa a backlash over the past few years the like content sort of over saturation that's

in that game and and how difficult it is to to do anything new with it because the fifa street games have existed in the past right and they're they're similar to this but but obviously in this you are it's way more online focused you're controlling one player and all that sort of stuff and what i like here and you talk about frank is basically the stuff that you do when you are playing football ball is like, it's like finding space, you know, like running onto a ball when someone else has it getting into a decent part of the field where if they cross it to you, you have a shot on goal, you're

away from a defender.

Um, I've seen, uh, when I was playing the, the beta people were pretty new at it, but around the end of the beta, you could start to see people using the like, uh, dribbling skills and being able to like, you know, one -on -one people and flick the ball over them or deke them or whatever um so i suspect there's a pretty high degree of people doing that now you know the net that they've gotten good at it um which seems pretty cool am i right in remembering that the goalkeeper is last man back right is that that's the that's the term we used to call when we were playing oh yeah when we were kids so like

the person who's at the back basically is the goalkeeper is that how it works in this i think closest to the goal so like if someone else leaves and whoever is i guess yeah last man back you immediately get the controls and multiple people can just like run up and do it but whoever is assigned goalkeepers the only one could actually grab the ball um and dive as well because the controls do change you get gloves and right yeah so i think i think i think it's like b is to dive and triangles to jump up for it um but yeah it's uh it's and again i i've expressed this anxiety because we'll start i'll

start playing online and like if someone's new at the game they don't know that they're assigned the goalie and they'll just leave the goalpost and you can't like stream the only thing you can do and i think rocket league is you can do sarcastics thank you thank you thank you when people screw up there's like good job thank you thank you everyone's being so sardonic and like thanks thanks like i'll just spam it like but it's like i don't know it's that's the game it's like that's part of it i guess is getting angry but uh yeah awesome uh we have to play some for a quick look uh this week i'll

i'll get some some time in in the next few days and give it a go my favorite everything about this on steam it is in the category football parentheses soccer so even steam can't quite uh get away from that particular piece of uh vocabulary uh political vocabulary um anything else to say about uh rematch yeah i guess the other thing too is like i haven't played a proper fifa game but there's no penalties no flags or anything like that so you can you're constantly like slide tackling to like push the ball and the enemy will trip i don't know if you you use the term enemy other like enemy i love

that whatever so like it's just it's just chaotic because like even playing the recently playing the nba 2k games i always try to steal the ball account i get fouled out and it's like what the hell this is that's not nba jam rules um so i like i like also going to this not knowing the proper rules of football um but i i it's again i equate to like nba jam rig it's so fun and then yeah as soon as i played with like two friends on discord we were crushing the enemy team so like we're not doing ranked i'm sure if we did ranked we'll get in the stacks and stuff but doing quick play casual stuff um

there's xpu unlock more cosmetics i think there's a battle pass but it's all cosmetics there's no skill trees there's no armor there's none there's no like none of that crap to push the skill gap it really is like learn the controls and then start doing the crazy tech but communication with teams and passing the ball which doesn't happen if you're playing with randoms usually so which which i also think is something that doesn't happen very much in rocket league like rocket league is a is a game about it's what sport is it like it's it's almost like uh when you're kicking the ball forward in rugby or something

where you're you're putting the ball into an area and then hoping that the next player can get it into the next area that's closer to the goal it's way less specific whereas in this when you're you know you're passing directly to people you know where you're shooting the ball which in rocket league you're mostly just trying to hit the ball towards the goal it's less specific prolific and so in many ways it's also different to rocket league you know the the accuracy changes the the moment -to -moment gameplay quite a bit um that's rematch it's available on a bunch of stuff made by slow clap congrats

to those folks um you can buy it for 30 bucks get it for free on game pass if you're paying for that or spend 50 bucks for the elite edition which like frank said i do not know what's in the pack oh wait here we go for the elite for the pro edition which is uh only ten dollars more than the msrp you get it's got seven reviews so that shows you how many people have bought it the game by the way on steam has 17 000 reviews holy shit um so it's doing quite well um you get captain pass upgrade ticket which elevates your game and your rewards step by step that might be the most that doesn't tell you

anything piece of copy i've ever read that is shocking elevate your game you get the blaze on player background and title showcase your identity with an epic design that makes a statement as unique as you are uh the blaze on buckler tank top the blaze i'm saying blaze on it's one word so it might just be blazon blazon pattern and the blazon jewel set so you get a bunch of shit and then for the the elite edition which costs 10 more than that you get the you get two of those captain pass upgrade tickets double the rewards double the swag you get glitched trainers trainers is football boots for those

of you who weren't born in trainer land you get the blazon augmented reality cage brings each match to life with a vibrant blazon display that celebrates every goal so presumably movie when you score a goal does that crazy animation thing you can get the blizzon augmented reality cage you get the blizzon cap blizzon player background blizzon buckler tank top pattern and of course the blizzon jewel set so that sounds like a bunch of wank to me i i have heard the word emblazon a million times i just googled blazon and to emblazon is to like like put an insignia on something to like describe it with a design

the blazon is the is either the verb to display prominently or vividly or it is like the to describe or depict uh armorial bearings in a correct heraldic manner that's a great set of words but like that's the fucking uh that's like the crest i've never heard blazon before other than when my friends ask if i want to smoke of blood blazing i i managed to pronounce it two different ways that were wrong i mean the game was made in france you know blazon that's probably how they said it did you get the blazon augmented reality guys i did see one guy with like the glitch trainers on i was like what the hell

is that now i know now he paid twenty dollars more than me so wow so he's probably a saudi prince or something that's pretty cool okay i'm gonna talk about my video game if you don't mind jeremy yeah yeah we've all been waiting for some coverage of this one of course i was away i was playing this before we uh before i went on my vacation so uh it's probably about time i talked about this game have either of you guys played it no i still gotta play the first one so i gotta play the first the first one frank have you played it i played i so i reboot i want to finish death stranding one before getting

to death stranding two oh oh i'm not talking about about that stranding my friends i'm talking about dune awakening oh uh no also have not played that that's the after we covered ds2 last week and it was dark souls 2 i feel like truly we're fucking with everyone right now yeah i'm not i played some death stranding too i will talk about that some other time i don't really care it's so tiring i feel like it's so exhausting talking about that game i want to talk about dune awakening because i I played this game before I went away and I was super bummed that I, cause I played it right after we recorded

last time and I played, I played a bunch of it that night and then I could not stop playing it.

I paid like 12 hours that week until I left to, to, to on my road trip, like Friday morning.

So in like two and a half days or something, um, Dune Awakening is from Funcom.

It is a, I guess we're calling these things MMOs.

I don't really know.

It's somewhere between Valheim it's like a Valheim -ish crafty game but it's all online you are PVP and there is PVE in this and essentially it is a game that is set in an alternative reality version of Arrakis where you are you sort of crash land as it were on the planet and you have to survive and build bases and make stuff and i fucking love it it's absolutely it has so much unique weird stuff in here um that that has kept me in i am soloing it i am not playing in a group you totally can much like other ones of these sort of survival open world crafting uh things it's got such a great style

to it and uh yeah it it i don't know it it vibes off of the dune lore in in like very cool ways that like show show show its teeth i guess in the gameplay as well which is pretty cool what is this so is this like i feel like this is like rust and star wars galaxies is that accurate oh man maybe i i don't i don't know if i would say the quests and stories have the weight of of a star wars galaxy or even like you know a world of warcraft a lot of this is self -propelled more like rust where you are sort of unlocking the next tech tree of stuff which makes things easier or better or things like that um

so pretty much right away they basically go yo dog you need to make yourself a place to live because i don't know if you know anything about out this planet but it's super fucking hot during the day and you're not going to want to be in the in the hot in the heat too much so the like i i just i just i love how i just think this is so cool there's so many parts of this game that feel totally different to any other game because of dune stuff so right from the off when you're playing this game at the start you just cannot be in the sun like you need to hug the shade and like i don't know a 3d character

action game where i have had to worry about the shade before you know it's like a really interesting and the sun is moving right because it's a sun and you're on a planet so the shade is changing and you are trying to like basically stay on the right side of that um you also have to worry about uh water there is like certain plants that you can get a certain amount of water from but if you really want to get water what you need to do is kill some people and you need to steal their water you need to suck the blood out of them with like a tool you can ingest that blood and get some water from it

which is super gross it's like a last last sort of um option uh but what you mostly do is bring all that blood back to your base and use like a fucking blood water converter to turn that blood into water which then you you suck on which is awesome uh you get to upgrade your still suit to various levels of like you know uh heat damage and things like that and then the thing you have to worry about especially at the start is crossing the sand because as uh you know fat boy slim said uh walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm and i don't think there is a way to like sand walk in this maybe

there is but basically when you're running across the sand there is like a little earthquake monitor thing which tells you if the the the worm is getting annoyed by you and like the more you do it the more it goes up and then you hear like epic music happen and then you see like the you know shy hallowed coming at you from like the other side of the map and it's like ah and then if you don't get off the sand um you're dead zone and so that's a really good way of basically like making it so at a certain point you need to get like vehicles you need to get like a little sand uh there's like and the next

the biome the next area of desert you need to get to you can't run across without the worm catching you i mean you could try but like it's basically impossible so you need to get yourself a little buggy for that uh you can build yourself an ornithopter so eventually people are flying around in this thing um uh yeah and it's just like even down to the cutting of stone in this game is so smart like if you're craft if you're looking to like uh you know get materials materials you can't just crack into any big mountain or anything like that but there are certain like you know rocks that are there

that like oh clearly I can mine this and the tool that you use to mine you right click first and it scans the rock and then it displays on the rock where you should cut for the whole basically like here's the weak point cut here and then you use the left trigger on your mouse to basically draw the cut on the rock where it is oh that's really cool it's so nice and it like every time it's different and every time it's like and it feels like accurate to the materials like sometimes you'll find like you know man -made metal things that you want to cut up and you you just there's like a seam on it that you

can cut and it'll all fall apart um sometimes when you're exploring like the dungeons in this game are basically like like crashed ships and you know caves networks and stuff like that that you go into some of those have um doors that you cut with that same tool and it all just feels very in world and novel and like it makes sense it doesn't feel gimmicky like the blood for water doesn't feel gimmicky the sandworm doesn't the sun doesn't it feels like like these are things that make sense within the you know rule set of the world even the combat because the combat like yes you have you know the whole

thing about doing is there's no like people don't use guns right so like that's hard it's a hard video game to to you know i guess the whole thing about doing is that people don't use thinking machines that's actually the thing about doing is that they you know banned thinking machines and ai and all that stuff um uh and don't use technology that does that but the other thing is that everyone has those shields on so there's no point using bullets right because bullets can bounce off the shield of course if you just are like some low level person on on the planet then you all don't have shields

probably so you are shooting a lot of people you're using guns and stuff but then every once in a while some weirdo will start running at you and you shoot at them and they've like shield on you're like uh -oh and they're coming at you with a knife and then you have to swap to your knife and then it is straight up like your dark souls is powering the knife like you are it turns from oh i was doing a shooty rkd kind of game to i have to right click when they go for me and then i need to like hit them or and then do the whole like you hold down the button to attack them and they do the slow through

the shield thing like they do in the in the new uh denny veneuve movie and then you stab them and if they're really good you have to do it a couple of times or if they're a low level enemy you just have to do it once but it It just means there's all these really interesting mechanical elements to one of these survival crafty building games that feel completely earned within the universe, which I really I think it's I think this is about as good a adaptation of an existing media or world that I've seen in a video game.

Full stop. It's it's so all of those all of those decisions, those those design decisions add to the world in a really cool way.

that's awesome yeah i would like to check this out i feel like no game has really filled the uh the valheim shaped hole in my life right um and i've i have tried a lot of them in shrouded game pretty close but it kind of like didn't quite have the staying power and kind of had like uh you know it tried to be a little bit of like a quest -driven rpg and then wasn't it seems like this one is kind of just embracing the sandbox more so yeah i think you're right i think it tried it sort of of had had a one and a half feet in that world and didn't feel as strong in that way as some other games did and this game

very much is the you know go to a trader get an easy job go do it deliver the stuff do the thing you know that's and that's what you do to get like credits and money and notoriety and stuff like that and then your story is sort of like the main it's almost like the golden path of this game is the tech tree and for the opening and maybe for the whole game but definitely for the opening like six hours it is you have one person who is basically guiding you through it all telling you what to do they're they're sort of like a mentor in the world and they're saying like you need to do this now and this is your

thing and then you have like a you know there are there are elements of the spice in here and you know having dreams and you know there's there's other stuff going on as well which is which is pretty cool um i'm also like you get to pick your character to start and i my backstory was i was like trained by a benedict who was sort of shouldn't have been training me so i have the voice so i'm able to like in combat like shout at somebody and they'll walk towards me and then i can just like stab them pretty good and then their buddy's like what are you doing and all that stuff so that's a good time

and just like fun emergent things happen in this like your your buggy breaks like i had a buggy breakdown just just in the worst possible place i was just like uh in between sandworms basically my buggy like the battery went on it i'd been fixing up all the other parts of it and didn't realize that the engine could break or something on its own and i was like oh shit and then i had like this prolonged you know survival experience to try and get back or like when i moved base because you can only have one home base um i had to like go back and forth to my i didn't have to but I didn't want to leave

all my stuff at my old base so I did like spend like three hours just doing runs back and forth collecting all my stuff and then like you know staying out a little bit too long during the day and getting into trouble and it's all those emergent moments that are like the beauty of sandbox games I've had a lot of that stuff happen um and maybe that's a good point to transition to Death Stranding because I think that's ultimately what I've been thinking a lot about with death stranding is like death stranding is a game that like wants to be systemic it has all these like systems in it but like none

of them interact with each other it's like it's like a broken immersive sim where like nothing was you know the reason that's rounding one is compelling i don't know if these games are good i think they're interesting uh the first one i found interesting the story is complete nonsense but it's like it's like shot well and acted well i've really i think kojima might be neil breen with a budget and and also like with like cinematic skills you know what i mean but like no storytelling skills at all like i don't these these games do not have i had to google if he had children because i was like like

no way this guy has kids if he's writing all this stories are like incomprehensible it's just like how people relate to children that's running too is like a very very weird like what like people nobody talks or thinks like in a sci -fi metal gear solid world it didn't matter that like none of these none of these characters motivations were believable at all you know man man made of bees or whatever like it was pulpy and almost manga like like it was like whatever you know whereas in this it feels very odd some of it i don't know it's funny and weird and interesting and it looks great and the world

design is brilliant and all that sort of stuff from a gameplay perspective these games have like it's like oh your boots break okay make new boots do it in a menu this game the death stranding 2 is another game plagued by menus which is sort of of like a kojima problem i think especially post like anything basically past metal gear solid 2 like metal gear solid 3 had massive problems with like oh i gotta put on this camo now i gotta do this i gotta there's so much like work and then they kind of fix someone up for four and but i don't know i yeah to me i was just like oh here are all the things that could be

happening in this game if like you know i get what they're yeah it's just so i don't know it doesn't it It feels like a game, a systemic game where nothing is connected to anything else.

So it doesn't matter.

So all you're doing is spinning plates.

There's no domino effect that happens in Death Stranding.

Yeah. So I don't know.

I don't know. I will play more Death Stranding too.

It looks very good.

I want to see what weird things happen in the game, but that's about it.

It's kind of like a freak show.

you know what i mean because of doll man doll man doesn't help tar man doesn't help um i hear there's a vtuber in there somebody said i saw it somewhere there's some you know hey look conan o 'brien was in the last one so why not but i i kind of think that's what that that stranding is like the more i because it's not the story it's not the mechanics of the game like it's sort of pure entertainment like whenever you're doing anything whenever you have a long way to go the game puts on a song for you and makes the camera zoom out almost like they're like yeah this is fucking boring isn't it we gotta we

gotta do something here we can't just have them walk we need to like what's the name of the the band the music that's always in all those ones there was like one band that was like every song at the best running one whatever you know let's let's play some music and have the cinematic camera take over and it looks great so you're like yeah this looks good look at sam porter bridges running across this dirt in mexico and it's just it tricks you into like not getting bored but i think like i think i think the reason people play these games is the same reason people used to go to freak shows because it's

just weird weird like it's weird and it's well presented it's a good show it's dinner and a show and then and then then it's over and then you talk to your friend about that weird thing you saw you know nobody's talking about this game in any of the emotional terms that I'm sure the creators wish they were same as the first game nobody was like yeah man that was really about how we connected as as people but we like it because it's weird and had a baby in a jar baby in a jar you know where you'd see a baby in a jar at a freak show at a freak show Jeremy yeah that's true yeah it's interesting it's

like I don't know I I think it's indicative I again I haven't played either of the Death Stranding games I'm just sort of like tangentially familiar with them um but uh it does feel like maybe it's indicative that people are just like starving for weirdness in games yeah because I I feel like they're I'm struggling to think of a specific like other triple -a quad -a whatever example of another like weirdo game where people were like you know it's like rough around the edges it's boring sometimes but like fuck i just i love that weird um so yeah i don't know maybe that's just maybe it's it's getting

a bit more of a pass because it's in sort of like it's an oasis of weirdness in a landscape of pretty ordinary games that feel inspired by other ordinary games yeah i think i think that's fair and i think that's why you know melga solid those games had a lot of that weird but also you know they were largely like the good mechanics and and boss fights were interesting and novel and thoughtful and all those things um i don't know i feel like when i saw all of the i don't know how did it review super well i saw like somebody posted a a and like i did not like the first one i did a review on my youtube

channel um and my my sort of synopsis at that time was that it was like a lars von treer movie i don't know if this was good or bad but it was the it was clearly the vision of the director and i feel like i went on a journey with them and it was interesting and that's how i feel about a lot of you know there's some ones i I like more than others I think melancholy is one that like I connected with on some level um but that's what I feel like about this except I would probably retract the emotional I don't think anyone has any emotional connections to these games at all I don't I have never heard

anyone say that they were moved by Death Stranding 1 um so I take that one away but like but I do feel like I'm just gonna look at the Metacritic because I haven't even had a choice yeah it's it's got 90 is it 90 i'm guessing i'm guessing the day the reviews went up it had a higher one i bet i bet there was a lot of a lot of that but i i do think there is a a decent amount of i don't want to necessarily call it emperor's new clothes i think we don't quite know why this game is good or bad i think there's like a weird i think it it's sort of it is so different and And maybe that's enough for it

to be good. Maybe different is enough, but it's so.

It's it doesn't fall into categorization in a way that I think makes it hard for people to critique it as well.

I don't know which I don't know.

And to its credit is sort of like that is an interesting thing to pull off is to to buck off a genre and and be something that is hard to categorize.

like to me that that is something that is praiseworthy uh even if the thing itself is you know boring or frictional or weird just having a game and being like i don't know what kind of like if i saw a movie and someone was like so it's like horror is like action is comedy and i didn't know how to answer that question i feel like that'd be like a that's a that movie did something cool i'm glad it exists i think i think what i'm fighting back against maybe is that there is a the resources used and talents to used to make this game there's probably a better game to be making here like i think that's

what i feel about it it's less it's less sort of like the world is a more colorful place because death stranding one and two exist like i'm not i'm not gonna say that but and i think it's awesome that they do um but like yeah there's only so many games you can make and i don't know it just feels there's something weird about it i don't know what it is uh i i yeah i have mixed feelings about uh kojima being so obsessed with like actors and celebrities and stuff and it's weird because we talked about this last week with um did you see the kojima domino's pizza thing i heard you guys talking about it

i did not see it yeah so okay then you have context at least i i feel like it's this weird thing where for me most people couldn't get away with doing that but for some reason kojima is very sincere in the way he engages with things that otherwise seem like sellouty or shitty or like glomming on to pop culture in a way that i find kind of tasteless uh so like i i am tempted to give kojima the pass on doing something that i don't like which is like collecting pop culture icons and putting them in a game as sort of like a tangential signifier of importance of cultural importance because like i don't

i don't fucking i don't buy that like if you have timothy chalamet in your video game it doesn't mean that i'm like wow this must be a good video game must be good art um and you know likewise i don't feel that way if you put like gearable to toro in a game or if you have like conan o 'brien pop up and do a weird cameo um it actively kind of like turns me off so yeah i don't know there that is the one thing having not played these games that makes me feel a little weird about it is it feels like i mean kojima's talked to a million times about how he wants to make like he wish he was making movies

and stuff instead of games sometimes and it does feel like this is a weird in -between where it's It's like it's collecting like movie clout, but it's not leveraging those people into performances that are maybe that the thing you would assume that would go along with having people of that caliber.

Yeah, I think in a way I'm, you know, Metal Gear Solid 5 exists and I think that makes this all a little bit easier for me because I think Metal Gear Solid 5 is the most systemic and most. it's the per it's it's it's kojima's open world game like it is it is the metal gear solid open world game you know kiefer sutherland's notwithstanding um they don't do too much of the you know uh celebrity celebrity thing and it's immensely systemic like super cool some of that stuff's buried pretty deep i think that maybe is has a there's a problem in its design in that that regard but it's so like you watch

videos of the shit people do in that game you know and it's just completely insane um and there's crazy shit in there too right like sending the guys up in balloons and they turn up at your at your base and things like that but but it feels it still feel it felt real and that there were real stakes and you know i don't know it felt somewhat what connected to something that mattered but the the world in death stranding is so i don't know unbelievable if that matters and it's and that's and that's clearly downstream of them making some design decisions uh to not you know to have all of society just

be people on terminals that you interact with you know what i mean stuff like that which has a cost to it so So I don't know.

I don't know. I hope he doesn't make another.

I think we're done with them.

Like that's kind of, I still haven't completed this one but I would like to see him.

I think they've already talked about some other project that they're going to work on as well.

But yeah, I would like to see less of this and more.

I don't know. I'd like to see more.

I'm sitting here saying game design ground broken.

This is like on a design perspective, super novel as well.

I don't know what it is.

I have a thorn in my foot about this one that I I didn't really on the first one because the first one was like the first one and I was just grateful that people were making weird things but I definitely do think some of the author worship on these on these things is is overblown um and yeah I don't know do you think this is pure speculation this would be asking not proposing like an interpretation because again I have not played these games is I wonder if part of it is that like i have known you know having gone to film school you meet some insufferable pieces of shit and sometimes you'll like

watch a truly just like a terrible art film just like a real bad movie not even like a oh that was like challenging just like that was bad and someone will sort of like make the argument that it's good in a weird sort of almost contrarian way because it it like it feels it feels like good in some way to be like i'm the only one who understands this like weird obtuse thing yeah i wonder if in some sense death stranding a bit of its like cultural capital is that it is like an accessible like i like the weird frictional thing bit i don't know i i'm again totally speculating because i've not played

these games i think i i think that has carried some weight yeah i think which is also like not a bad thing if we're making things that are mainstreamy and weird that's why it's so hard to like critique it because i'm like i'm not i'm also not somebody who overly critiques games i'm happy for them to be what they are but i don't know i think there's some there's something about these that i feel like in 10 years time will probably have a bit of a you know what it reminds me of a little bit and i actually i don't think this will happen probably and i think this in a way saves death stranding some

face and makes me you know makes my point a little bit silly but it reminds me a little bit of like the way we now look at early walking simulators where we go oh they were so naive you know what i mean they were trying to tell these these uh these sweet stories and they're are just kind of cringy now you know because like because we didn't have good stories yet or we didn't know how to tell stories in this way and i kind of feel like that way a bit about this um where games just aren't really good at doing things cinematically with actors this way and because not many of them do and i think this is also true

of games like the last of us part two i mean i think games that have the money behind them to make stuff that is like very well polished and well shot and has all of the sort of artifice of cinema in particular i think makes stuff look cinematic i mean to a similar extent i feel like no clip has gone away with all we did was use a nice camera and light it was a nice camera and light it was exactly 100 hundred percent and have thoughtful editing and you can make things look like they are more important and cost more yeah it's it's the youtube comment that says like wow the production value on this is crazy

and it's like what did you did you what did you learn any there was what about the content of the thing you know what i mean totally yeah and i and i think because they have you know these games have are so cinematic and have such great production design like that like it's it's It's the world that's built and the clothes they wear and where they live and the enemies and all that sort of stuff.

And certain amount of that has to do with narrative, of course.

But like some Porter Bridges could look like a fucking doofus so easily.

But they made this delivery boy look like a mech. You know what I mean?

Like he looks like badass.

ass and i think a lot of that stuff hides or protects or camouflages something that's a lot less interesting under under the surface yeah yeah it's interesting tech as well you know uh also to to be clear like if you are listening to this and you sincerely love death stranding too yeah that is fucking awesome because like the last thing i want to do is i i i really like Yasujiro Ozu's movies and I fucking hate when people are like you know you'll see like a reddit thread or like a tiktok video that's like can we all stop pretending that like we love these boring fucking black and white movies

and it's like nothing pisses me off more than just being like you don't actually like that thing you just want to be seen as liking a thing that is like obtuse or you know old or like you know oh you love Citizen Kane or you're just saying that because you want to like like a movie that's supposed to be good uh so if you love this this fucking game please don't feel like we're invalidating your genuine love of this game yeah and i have to play more and maybe it'll it'll turn itself you know it'll i'll and i enjoyed what i played i enjoyed playing and you know what it is i i yeah i kind of want

to speak to this a bit because like i think this happens a lot with critique for some reason there are some games or movies whatever it is there's some things that like myself included they rub you up the wrong way a little bit.

And I'm not sure if it's because, um, I want to vocalize something that I feel like is out of step with the mainstream appreciation of something.

And it can sound like you're being a bit of a contrarian or in my case, it can sound like I I've spent 20 minutes criticizing a game that is actually on the, you know, the face of a good game.

You know what I mean?

Like, but I'm here, I am making this big point and critiquing it.

I had a similar experience experience with uh i i watched warfare the alex garland movie which i kind of didn't want to watch because i knew about what it was it is uh it is a a movie based on the memories of a bunch of uh iraq war vets who had a real bad day at the office let's say and it's told from their perspective and only their perspective it's basically what happened that day there's a very ill -conceived intro and outro i'll say that pretty happily um uh but it is essentially an apolitical war movie about the iraq war which is psychotic as far as i'm concerned i feel like that's alex garland in a nutshell

100 i don't know what happened one of his gym bros is is a trump fan or or his His liberal cousin pisses him off.

I don't know why. But for whatever reason, between this and Civil War, he is sitting on the fence and as such saying nothing.

But making art about things that are, I don't know, maybe a better writer or a better director could make the apolitical Civil War.

or the civil war movie that doesn't pick sides that has a coherent idea in it or the war movie about the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation by a colonial super state a war machine that that says nothing about anything to do with that but it is like it is crazy and when i watch that movie like it's really well shot you know the acting and it's is good like the the cast are great they they do a great job and a lot of the scenes in it are compelling it's exciting it's visceral it's all of these positive things but because of the central sin of this movie i could not enjoy it it just like annoyed

me and i think there's a similar thing happening sometimes with with death stranding with people who really didn't like the first one and i did um even though i qualified it a million times and this one here and maybe someone who would like studied english or is a better critic than i am would be able to voice these things in a way um and maybe it's just a intellectual failing on my part but it's a similar thing and it's it is interesting it's an interesting thing that happens like i remember when do you remember tom mcshay did the bioshock 4 .0 uh review for uh for game spot we um the guys launched

a a new version of the the website that would allow the staff to do multiple reviews so to launch this tom went back and reviewed bioshock which he hated no it was a bioshock infinite it was bioshock infinite sorry and he gave it a 4 .0 and i remember thinking and like a lot of us in this staff were thinking did we just invent this thing so people can like dog on shit they don't like like is that what we're is that what we're doing is that what criticism is maybe it is i don't know but um but yeah it's uh it's it's obviously a big part of critiquing and talking about games and stuff and we tend

to let games be what they are and sort of meet them on their own terms i think but for whatever reason i find that really hard with death's running too i find it hard to just meet it on its own terms um i don't know it could just be a could be a cilantro situation situation you could just be a super taster for the the soapy taste of kojima exactly yeah i gotta put more hideo in my mouth and see how i feel about it i'm going to do that i'm going to endeavor to play more death stranding too and see now that i've gotten that off my chest because that sometimes help helps i'm not going to forgive

alex garland for making the apolitical iraq war movie that's that's something you should not you know how scarlet is like it's a shame because he he's written some fucking great movies annihilations terrific i know but then he did take that it's an adaptation of a book so i feel like he gets away with a lot of that i think he wrote men which i haven't i have not seen but i've seen enough of to be like but like ex machina is like a that's a good movie but the you can get away with sort of like ambiguous sort of like aesop's fable parables about humanity when they're about sort of like like, these

mostly fictional, like, speculative sci -fi, it's like, oh, like, this machine lady's, like, locked in a room.

Are we the real monsters?

Or it's like, what if the monster gets out?

And it's like, yeah, that's cool, because that's not, like, real.

If it was a real historical event of a robot lady that was locked in a room, then I feel like I'd feel a little differently about him being like, is it bad?

I don't know. Is it bad?

And it's like, you're fucking writing the story.

Tell me, like, you don't have to, good art leaves room for interpretation.

That is, like, Like that's a very, you know, uncontroversial statement, but like when your real art is about a real historical event, I feel like it's just an abdication of your duty as an artist to not do the research required and process those events within yourself and at least come out of it with some sort of like, even if you're gonna sort of play both sides a little bit and be like, oh, well, you know, like here's, you know, they're just soldiers.

They're just like trapped in this situation.

It's like they're just doing what they had to do.

at least like make a larger point through the ambiguity about like like explore different philosophical lenses on the situation rather than just totally abdicating your duty as a human being with a brain yeah i feel like it's like cowardice to be like oh exactly well you fill in you know we're not it's not like it's not like a painting where like you know you are bringing your experience as a person and filling in half of the canvas with your mind like like Like Herzog makes more fictional documentaries that speak to larger truths than any Alex Garland's like technical exercise in preserving memory

and reality. Like we interview people for a living.

People are terrible at telling their own stories.

They are telling a version of their story.

I guess it says memories, so they get away with it.

But like, what are you getting?

getting, if you interview 20 people about this thing that happened, yeah, you have like this technical breakdown of what happened, but like you're getting the sort of the, the, the like, the median of the experience, or you're, you're, you're the, the, the part of the Venn diagram in the middle, that's all connected.

And, and like, how, how can you make, I don't know, it seems completely insane to me that you would make a document, you would make a movie about this incident and not talk about how it affected any of these people it's just the thing and like is the point war is bad because it's not 1949 like we know war is bad is it like poor americans shouldn't have to sign up to the military and watch their friends die i don't think that was the point or necessarily what was happening to these sealed team people maybe they seem more happy to go to war yeah i don't know now i'm picturing the uh the grizzly

man scene where her saga is like you must never listen to this except he's he's holding a copy of alex garland's warfare he's saying you must never watch this my favorite that's oh that's her thumbnail um uh my favorite idea because hurts you know we've talked in the past in this podcast about how much hercsog lies right and there's documentaries and puts up quotes that nobody ever said all this shit right it's brilliant my favorite reality of the end of grizzly man is that the tape was damaged and he couldn't hear anything oh i've never heard that interpretation that's great yeah i don't know

i that's that's my own like little brain worm about that that like and i i doubt that's the case but i i think if that was the case he's a genius yes that makes that scene so much funnier because he sits there listening intently to it and he's like oh oh he's like like grimacing now i'm just imagining it's just static and he's just like all right well this scene's gonna suck if i actually just say oh it's broken he makes the story because that's what he does right like that's so much of his movies are him making the story to speak to a wider truth and it affects people and you feel something you

feel something thing so then it's true if if somebody it's like you guys are talking about the Stephen King book right it's like that thing right he talks about time travel right where it's like you know Ira I wrote something and then 30 years later you were hearing it and we're both in the same room looking at the whatever it is bunny rabbit or whatever uh that's telepathy right that's art that's that's and yeah so that it works like it's a lie and it's it's it's awful it's it's lying lying it's like the biggest sin a child can do right but it's like in service of this more beautiful thing i'm

like yeah i think that's why maybe it's just different strokes for different folks maybe other people would be repulsed by that the idea that they are being manipulated by somebody who says this is true you know what i mean maybe that's the thing that they'd get on a podcast and scream about for 30 minutes uh don't watch warfare it's i mean do it's it's entertaining movie if i'm not gonna yeah it's yeah you know what i watched it like i watch like police body cam videos on youtube that's true i did watch sicario with like a similar mentality that was a cool movie that all this happens in one building

basically so it's got lower budget than sicario doesn't have that awesome shootout scene on the border oh man all right uh jeremy let's uh let's try and um does ruffy in the riverside have anything to do with the iraq war the invasion of iraq let's see um you know in the sense that my well okay in the sense that the american government's expectations were higher and then the reality was somewhat sorely uh mismatched and disaligned yes because i played the demo for roughing the riverside i believe it's steam next fest and uh you enjoyed it a lot i quite liked it i it has it has uh interesting aesthetic

it has charm it has wonderful music and it has really interesting novel mechanics which i will describe in a moment i feel like the game kind of disappointed me a little bit okay and i would kind of like to talk about like the mismatch of why going deeper kind of uh kind of revealed what i didn't really like about it um so roughing the riverside this is a 3d uh puzzle platformer um it's clearly nostalgic for the era of banjo kazooie and these like n64 and ps1 platformers very like cartoonish and over the top and bombastic and colorful um it has this gorgeous mixture of sort of like hand painted

textures on 3d objects uh almost like world of warcraft like it has this very like painterly texture feel to the world uh and then the characters are these like paper mario sort of like scribbly scratchy paper cut out characters that are like amazingly animated they sort of do that um that like undulation thing there's a term for it it's not boiling but it's something like that where like hand drawn characters that have multiple passes of them will sort of like undulate a little bit uh just this beautiful like hand -drawn feel to everything um and it looks so good it sounds so good the sound effects

are amazing the music is like fucking beautiful there's an there's an intro story beat that's just like having to say goodbye to sort of a father figure in the first few minutes and then this this like ghibli ass piano comes over and i was like i maybe it's because i was exhausted from 10 hours of editing the battlefield video yesterday and finishing it but i was not in i did not have the emotional fortitude to be prepared for that it actually hit me uh in a way that i was not expecting from this like twee little you know light -hearted platformer um and so all that is amazing and the the core

mechanic of it is what really drew me to this game because we've talked about this before that if you're going to do a game that's capitalizing on the nostalgia that people have for something like banjo kazooie or whatever um you can't just do nostalgia you can't just be like remember remember Banjo -Kazooie?

What if like there were more levels for it and different characters like that?

I mean, you can do that, but like that's not what interests me as a person who plays games.

You should do something new with the idea.

If you're if you're utilizing nostalgia, it should be a Trojan horse to get me interested in this thing because you have new ideas to do within that world.

And Ruffy in the Riverside does have a really interesting new idea.

So it has a texture swapping mechanic.

So throughout the world, there are objects you can scan with write bumper and when you scan them you capture the texture of them which you can then project with write trigger onto other objects so for example if there are stone big stone blocks that are like too heavy to move or break and then you see a tree you can scan the wood of the tree and project it onto the stone block and suddenly now the stone block is breakable um so in theory this is this is you know this is amazing this is like immersive sim levels of interaction within a 3d platformer um when i played the demo there were a handful

of really interesting interactions that emerged through this there was like stuff like i mentioned where there will be a bunch of stone blocks lined up and you have to create like lined up too high for you to jump on to get up onto a platform so you're like what do i do with this you scan the tree you turn some of the blocks to wood you break certain ones of them and you make like a staircase out of the remaining blocks i remember there was one we were like freezing the water and things like that right exactly so i those two were were sort of the big primary examples in the demo.

And that was enough for me.

I was like, wow, if the rest of the uses of this ability are as clever as these, this game is a 10 out of 10.

I feel like those two interactions are the two coolest interactions I have seen with the texture swapping mechanic.

It feels a little bit like, yeah, I mean, it's the struggle you run into if you design a truly novel mechanic is that it's sort of unexplored territory.

And it's like, all right, shit, well, we have the cool idea.

Now we have to figure out, you know, eight hours of game to do with this enough interactions and it feels to me like um the puzzles in roughy are so like binary they're like they're very locking key it feels like there is one specific way to solve everything um and that to me kind of it takes the wind out of my sails on the whole appeal of this game which is that like there should be a there should be an insane breadth of options for how to interact with puzzles but there should be a you know at least a couple ways ways to solve a puzzle you know what i mean yeah i hear what you're saying it's

like instead instead of it being a sort of a the the immersive sandbox it felt like where you can use you have all these tools and you know perhaps a few of them will work in interesting different ways it's more the lock and key sort of uh problem solving of an adventure game almost where like you need to find the specific solution for this specific puzzle yeah so there was kind of like an expectation mismatch there and probably also like uh it's just not as novel as as the alternative yeah exactly it feels like it is a it's a novel mechanic on its surface but the in in actual practice it's more

like um you know like a classic point and click adventure where there's like one specific key item that will unlock the puzzle door um so the the result of this is that in playing you know like two plus hour probably like the i checked a walkthrough just to see how long it was and how far i was through it i'm more than a quarter through the game according to this so i've played a good chunk of it um it feels like every puzzle i've interacted with thus far uh despite like the presentation being beautiful and every time i'm like oh this is like maybe this is going to be the one because this is cool

and charming looking it feels like i'll approach a puzzle and it's either uh a sort of like non -puzzle like i will immediately look at it and intuitively know how to solve it like there's no sort of like inference or thinking or sort of interacting cognitively with the puzzles or the other end of the spectrum is that it is like security through obscurity and that it's like i have i don't even know how to like begin to solve this because i just have to go around like scanning everything um and seeing which one of the things so i'll give one example uh there was like there there are these walls

where you can turn 2d it's like a little sort of like mario platformer kind of thing um and there are these monsters in one of them that are like chomping and stuff so i was like all right well i can't jump over them i can't jump them past them they just if you walk near them they kill you so i was like all right i need to like kill them i need to turn them into something there's like lava maybe i can use the lava to kill them maybe i can melt them maybe i can like turn them into stone so they stop moving maybe i can turn them into wood so they break none of these things work it doesn't even let

you apply the texture to the things that it doesn't want you to apply the texture to because it would be an alternative solution to it and so i was like all right well maybe i talked to a little bird who gives you a hint nearby and he's like oh well if you could put them to sleep then they wouldn't be be biting you so it's like all right well i can see the sun there's clearly going to be like an interaction with the sun character over there maybe i can turn the sun into the moon and it'll be night and they'll get sleepy and all i tried a million things all of which i thought were like you know

would have been interesting if they were valid solutions reasonable solutions maybe yeah like if if here's the thing is like a good puzzle shouldn't be like hard through obscurity it should reward the player thinking laterally about it and so even if there are a hundred solutions to this puzzle and that really trivializes the puzzle it doesn't matter because it makes the player feel smart that they found that their solution worked um you know what i'm gonna say about this is that you know this this is like an era -specific problem almost like this is how a lot of these ps2 early xbox games kind

of worked yeah um but it just it doesn't in the same way banjo kazooie ended up doing nuts and bolts because they just went full sandbox because i don't know it was a reaction or whatever um you it's yeah in the current epoch of gaming you you kind of i'm what the what this was presenting i totally get where you're coming from where you're like oh this is not um what i was this is not the way to do this in 2025 maybe or it's you can't give this much choice and then not allow people to utilize it all you know yeah i the i think the sort of dissonance between that and something like banjo kazooie

is that this is if that game is like 90 percent platforming and 10 puzzle this game is like 95 puzzle and five percent platforming i i haven't had a in like you know two and a half hours i haven't really had like maybe like a single like platforming kind of challenge at all uh it's all been texture swapping and in the texture swapping it's all either been like exceedingly obvious or just like kind of tediously obscure what the solution was so that a lot of what you've said doesn't necessarily make me think this but do you think playing the demo might have also because you've only played the first

two and a half three hours do you think replaying some of that stuff in the demo has sort of also colored that or i you would think so but the the demo was also structured differently um the demo had the um had sort of like a i'm gonna invoke diddy kong racing for the 700th time on this podcast in diddy kong racing there were like doors you could access you had to collect a certain amount of i think they were like balloons basically like mario 64 stars open doors there's a hub world you access the doors the doors are different levels that's how the roughy demo was and i thought that was cool yeah

because it has these sort of like siloed off instanced levels that feel like here's a world where you can like transform everything you can tear it apart you can turn everything into fucking lava and that is what i imagine this game would be because when you when you limit the level you enhance the amount of possibility because you can you know you don't destroy the overworld by doing all these transformations or whatever um the actual game roughing the riverside is much more like an overworld that you're going to different sections of are of so i recognized bits of the demo in this open world but the context

in which you encountered them was totally different um so there were familiar elements there there were a few bits that I recognized, but, um, but mostly it was, uh, it was in a different order, different bits, different approaches.

And, um, I would say it was like 80 % new stuff that I hadn't experienced before.

Uh, it just sort of like, yeah, I feel like it's a, I mean, it's again, it's very hard to design a new type of puzzle mechanic.

And then, you know, the only way you figure out if it's a good puzzle mechanic is design a shit ton of puzzles for it.

And by that time you've made the whole game and it's like, yeah, I don't know.

So, um, I, that all all that being said i think you know this it's it is an interesting game that tries some new stuff and i i think the presentation is fantastic i'm gonna keep playing it because i i'm hoping that it like leans a little more on platforming stuff and i'm hoping the puzzles get a little in trying to get more difficult past like the second half maybe it will intrigue me a little bit more sometimes i just need to be like sometimes i need to encounter the full friction of a game to appreciate it um like i've said unsighted it was a game that i liked until the last boss and then in the last

boss beat my ass so hard that i loved the game so uh yeah we'll see it's um but it's not quite what i expected i guess is what i'm trying to say cool roughy in the riverside uh there is still a demo available on steam or you can pick it up for 17 .99 over there it's got 57 reviews very positive uh currently and when did it come out last week yeah the 26th okay 26th focus um from zocrates laboratories ug there you go folks um all right you'll report back on that and i'll report back on death's drowning too we're having our little little catch -ups on some of these games uh frank do you want to talk

a little bit about i think i'm not sure maybe we're gonna do something on this we'll see um tell me about this um um how do i oh god it's it's let's call I'm just gonna read out the steam description oh um how do you say umamasume um yeah umamusume umamusume pretty derby is ready to race scout featured trainees and supporters as you navigate the immersive sports life simulation through the game's in -depth training system and top -of -the -line 3d graphics that has told me nothing nothing at all about this what are we calling this anime horse racing game it's got 5 000 reviews on steam almost overwhelmingly

positive it came out last week what the fuck is this frank so uma means horse and musami means young women's combine them it's horse girls guys the game oh phew horse girl's pretty derby so the so this is a giant media franchise in japan i've like seen like in the quarter of my eyes but never understood it so in real life these are all real horses like they're they're all into tokyo horse rays are all around the world um and there is an anime component where they have taken real horses and made like cute anime girl versions of them there's an anime there's like trading cards um this game it's

it's a gotcha game so it's a phone game they finally ported to steam and translated in english i think this originally came out in 2021 so four years later now now uh the western certain audience can play it or english speaking um or if you know you could play it with google translate previously but if the desktop version is on steam this is very much operates like the chow garden in sonic adventure so umesume uh you you you pick your horse girls uh when you start the game you know like any gacha game they give you like a bunch of free currency pull your horse girls and you get a bunch of uh umesume

uh and then you start your career mode and the premise of the career mode it's honestly not too different from like needy streamer overload or any of these games like you have like an x amount of days to win these races and if you do not place first in these races your career is over it's kind of like a roguelike so you train your horse and you say you have 10 days to the race you have 10 days you can train power speed stamina you click the button it does like a little percentage thing you get your stats up you can take rest you can take your horse girl out so some of them have different interests

every horse girl has her own story there's a horse girl that is a uh has the soul of a wrestler her dad gave her a luchador mask so this racehorse has a wrestler's mask on and she likes going to wrestling games uh wrestling matches there is a horse girl that is an american horse and she has a gun so she likes going to rodeos and eating steaks um yeah they're every every horse girl and you can buy figures of the horse girls and things like that when you say horse girls yes these aren't like yeah they're like it's not like it's not a horse it's like it's a mare no it's straight up like a girl but she

has horse uh ears and that's it i think a horse tail that's it they're just straight up like anime girl now they're just running this was the fundamental misunderstanding i had about this game is that i had seen screenshots and i was like oh certainly these are the these are the the young ladies who ride the horses exactly uh but no they are the horses i i have been trying in this all this gameplay to see when they get on the horse they are the horses screenshots there's a lot of horses with this horse game well they're running around a lot and i'm like why are they running so much oh yeah then

he dropped they're the horse their horse and but they also have to go to the horse academy and they also have to do homework and take tests and things like that so it's like the life of a horse girl is non -stop busy but uh yeah when it's the a horse when it's the horse race it's straight up like it's a derby so it's like it's just like the chow garden racing is there'll be like 12 horse girls and you see your horse girl and where they're at and like how you train them they unlock special abilities so like the american horse girl will throw or shoot her gun in the air and get an extra sprint ability

uh um and so you know i don't know it's all it's all rng whether or not your thing goes i think it's like stat checks i feel feel like people should like really just to paint a visual imagine like a like a half the people at anime expo just imagine like a crowd of young women who are at anime expo running on like like not not even like a different looking horse just a regular horse track like a regular like circle with the like bar that goes around the outside and they're just running and also are running incredibly fast like breakneck horse speeds but they're running in two legs while wearing

clothes that are absolutely not helping with like aero dynamics or you know what i mean like imagine imagine watching a bunch of athletes wearing like large dresses while doing the 600 meters like that's the that's the look here is there does this game explore the uh the sort of of, like, ontological nature of the Horse Girls.

Are they human? I don't know.

They don't really, like...

They don't get that introspective.

I think just... They're all...

No, so there are actually Horse Girls, and then there's, like, humans.

Like, the teachers at the academy are straight -up humans.

They are not horses.

They are not Umasume.

Is there a caste system here?

Is there, like... You know, do they talk down to the Horse Girls?

That's a good question.

I can't tell. I don't know.

No, I feel like the tone is very inclusive and happy.

Like there's no, there's no like snobby.

Like I feel like everyone wants to win.

So there's a little bit of that competitive spirit, but it's not like, it's not like you for it.

They're not like bullying the other girls.

It's like, everyone wants to be friends and everyone wants to do their best, but there can only be, but you do get caught.

You do get like progression if you're in the top five.

And if you lose a race, you have three in your single career, you have three lives and you can retry.

You can retry a race at the end of your career.

you retire your horse and when you oh no no yeah when you start when you start a new horse you pick like you pick two legacy horses so like rogue legacy you use all the stats of your old horse to start the life of your new horse how does this life of a new horse it doesn't like it it just it just you restart it's like your day one at the horse academy but yeah it's just like okay okay okay okay there's no glue factory no no no i was thinking more of a sort of brood mare situation oh jesus although there doesn't seem to be any stallions in this world so thank god for that yeah there's no horse

boys no i guess unless like the people said it was inclusive yeah uh so and the other fun thing too is like they always say like what track it is so it is i think it's all real like world racetracks in japan so it's like tokyo speedway or whatever and like the sendai what and it's like oh these are all real locations they signed off on us they were like yep go for it man it's genuinely super funny to like because i've been playing as like el condor pasa so it's she is a luchador horse but if you type in el condor pasa horse it shows you the picture of like the real horse and so like it's so funny

if you go on like the wikipedia it's like if you go to images you'll see like el condor pasa you'll see like the actual horse and then the anime girl and if you go to the anime girls wikipedia the top will be like the anime girl and the bottom will be like the real horse she's based on so it's so funny like people are getting obsessed with like the horse girls but there's also the real horse variants and there's figures of the horse girls there's also figures of the horses so this is just a giant weird world that i'm like dying to get into and learn more of because like this stuff is everywhere in japan and even

like at anime expo i'll see people cosplaying as the horse girls i had no idea what this was but it is blowing up on steam and i've ignored like genshin impact there's like little nicky or whatever that dress collecting game is called uh all these gotcha games have never got me but the horse little nicky is the adam sandler movie what's the really dresses fuck yeah i'm so sorry to interrupt you i just was picturing anime adam sandler doing i mean there is a game boy color game so it is there's pixel art of little nicky yeah there's a game but yeah but like i haven't spent any money on the thing

it does the same thing you log in every day you get points you can't play this on mobile but i don't know frank gets addicted to japanese horse racing and that's the thing that's the thing japanese horse racing is operated by the yakuza so this is like a long tail end of like getting otaku to actually like i think this is intentional they want you to fall in love with the horse girl then they want you to go to the real horse betting and bet on the real horses so you're not only sinking money into your favorite fictional idol Horse Girl, you're also betting money on the real -world horses.

Well, El Condor Pasa died in 2002 of horse colic, so they're not.

Oh, my God. But she's my favorite Horse Girl.

She died before this Horse Girl was born.

Oh, my God. Now we're honoring the legacy.

I'm looking at the Steam page.

One of the Horse Girls appears to be called Vodka.

Is that a Russian one?

I think so. There's Vodka.

There's someone else that's named like uh hennessey or something like like bourbon bourbon is another all the racehorses they're all based on real world racehorses so it's uh yeah the horse the horses are wild and there's two seasons of an anime there's horses are not wild they're stable frank and then the other thing if you get first place in the after every horse race there's an idol concert so it's like a three minute music video of them all dancing and it's like it's like whoever's first place is the leading singer uh and so it's just crazy it's just they never get a rest no it's running a race

then having to do a fucking dance off and and if you you make so when you're training them they have a stamina meter and like that if you try to train when you're low stamina you have higher risk for injury which will set you back set points so you are supposed to rest the horse girls you can also take them out to increase their moods you go to amusement parks you go to wrestling shows it's uh yeah it's it's it's got it all i now this has got to be curious this has got to be curious about other other because like here's the thing if this game did not have the cute waifus it would be it probably

probably still be a interesting game mechanically but now i'm wondering like what other what other situations can we transpose the waifus onto and create you know what i mean i don't think we need to go down well no like what about like gangsters to the classic pc game what if all of the gangsters were cute anime girls that's good that's good you know i hear what you're saying what we need to do is get get the get the waifu otaku crowds to play some like some good ass games yeah or just like like any like what other situations can we explore that by putting a cute girl into it is like suddenly

has a new uh a new lease on life i feel like that was um platforming with um lara croft and then they made a really good game that's true i had a lady in it she wasn't a horse lady though so that's that's the big thing is you're getting both the equine gamer and the uh girl gamer or girl appreciator gamer um like this game like um um musume pretty derby there we go can they break their legs and get sent to the horse for the glue factory frank or so i'm sure like you'll get injured but then you do get time to recover but if you miss out on those stat points you won't get first place and you can you'll

have to retire your career at some point okay hey look man we all I'll throw our last baseball one day.

We don't know what day that is.

But it comes. Oh, my moose.

I'm a pretty derby.

Pick it up now on Steam for free to play.

The way you said that was like it sounded like you were like an Italian grandmother.

Like that was like something like you just served a nice meal for your family.

And you're like, oh, my moose.

Oh, my moose. It's a Ferrari.

Yeah. Oh, my moose.

It's on the battle pass holder list. My God.

Yeah. Yeah, it's up there.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's good stuff.

Congratulations to everyone who made that horse video game.

That seems like a fun thing to explain to your in -laws at Thanksgiving.

That's all the games we were talking about this week.

Uma Musume, Pretty Derby, Rematch, Ruffy and the Riverside, and Dune Awakening.

Frank, do we have some emails here?

Yeah, people can send us emails, podcast .noclip .video or in our Patreon Discord or the podcast chat channel.

Neil sent us an email about weird history games.

They said, hey, loved last week's pod about climbing games.

It reminded me of a great indie shooter called Isonzo.

It's a Milsim FPS set on the Italian front in World War I.

Isonzo has a game mode called Ascent where the Italian team has to literally climb the mountain cliff face with pythons, ropes, and ice picks while Austro -Hungarians throw rocks down at them.

it's bizarre vertigo inducing and it really happened uh those battlefields were up in the alps both the italians and austria hungarians hungarians would trigger avalanches blow whole tops of mountains and dig massive tunnels insane stuff i was wondering if there are any odd or weird historic events you think would make a great game i was thinking the 1908 new york to paris car race could be a brilliant pacific drive like oh that's good i like that yeah there's a bunch bunch of really good i mean racing wise there's um what today used to call them there was these point -to -point races they did in south

america which were completely insane just like sort of dakar rally baja sort of stuff baja stuff where you're you know doing long long distances and we'll see you at the other end i didn't know about this is zonzo it's on steam for like uh eight bucks at the moment and yes is it an it's an indie ferocious alpine warfare so i guess this is like war world war one italian front which i know nothing about but it's presumably happening in like those mountains in the north that is completely not um i'm a big fan of uh jfk reloaded yep that's a good to start game yeah otter weird historic events i have i

have always wanted a spanish civil war fps um asymmetrical warfare between the the fascists and like a bunch of anarchist farmers get on it machine games it could be the next one that's a good one um i was so close to getting my um viking waterford game and they fucking did dublin instead with that valhalla dlc in ireland oh yeah it was crestfallen i was so close to get my weird little hometown in a video game um frank you got any you're a history buff yeah i mean i always think about the titanic there is like an adventure there is like a like a cheesy adventure game like you know first person like

whatever mislike uh you play poker and stuff but i don't know i was trying to think like you do like a beat them up and on titanic or like do something cool or some alt history stuff with it i don't know do it like gfk reloaded but it's the opposite where you're trying to not hit the iceberg you're trying to sink the ship yeah or you're or like the ship that starts with hitting in the iceberg and you are like a you're like the captain and your job is to save as many people as possible okay wait alternate flip on that you are an adult man and you're trying to get on the life boats without seeming

like an asshole so you're like okay do i dress up like a woman or do i dress up like a child or you get you're like women and children first oh there's one seat left i should probably just take it yeah exactly yeah exactly yeah or do you jump on last minute or just like like steal one without anyone knowing and have it to yourself like because billy zane's character he takes the kid it's like oh me my child yeah yeah you're just billy's it's like that's pretty that's what the game is he stole a he stole a seat and a human all right yeah he human trafficked his way off of the titanic he's at the top

of the leaderboard on this fictional game that i'm proposing or you could uh you could just cling on to a piece of wood and there's like a stamina meter for how frozen you are you could like try and hold on it turns blue your face turns blue slowly exactly yeah exactly that's a good shout that's a good one titanic uh i would love a game that um what was the fucking forbidden forgotten city what was the game that was the puzzle game i would love a game that is kind of like in that style where you're just like a philosopher in ancient greece and you're just like walking around the agora and people

are like oh i invented the triangle you know that's cool do you know what i did recently is i played the play test of i am am jesus christ oh my god dude i got on the play test of i am jesus christ um are you allowed to talk about it i am that it said you could publish your gameplay so presumably that also means you can talk about it i mean yeah it's right there um it's not going to win any game of the year awards let's say that um sort of respect for trying to do it but i feel like uh it's very weird playing a video game where you were jesus christ is it like it is very weird is this a game that's

made by religious people to spread the gospel this is not like a silly this isn't like goat simulator correct this is level one quest one meet john the baptist like we are we are starting off with Jesus you know we're starting off after the 15 year gap or whatever you know I mean after the 20 year gap he's a young man he's he's about to start his uh his uh his uh his his journey um in a way it made me wonder if Mary in real world was like kind of like a like like kind of like the motivator for this whole thing she was like like you should we also met angels in our life you should you know what i

mean i had this like weird mom yes i had a little i'd never considered that in my life that actually might be blasphemy i don't know yeah it definitely is that mary was maybe like a like a dance mom and and sort of like pushed him in that direction and and filled his brain with stuff and joseph was like just let me cut some fucking wood over here jesus christ wait you probably didn't say that um it's weird when when people call you jesus because this feels like they're cursing um it's like an open you know you go to the stall and the romans man they're fucking people people are just chatting about punches

pilot it's it's very like what it's it kind of reminds me of like mr burns the movie miss have ever seen that mr burns the i think we talked about it on here before it's called mr burns the play it's a play uh where the first half is a bunch of people talking about it's like the end of the world happened and they're all talking about their favorite simpsons episodes and then when you come back after the intermission like 200 years has passed and there is a religion based on the simpsons based on like misinterpretations of episodes of the simpsons that people have forgotten about that have misremembered

and stuff like that um which is you know it's a very cute interesting novel play on how we remember history and and all that sort of stuff and there is a bit of when you're playing this game you're like they're just constantly referencing scriptures i know like none of the people who lived in this time had anything else to say except for what was captured by the gospels it's just entirely which look you're making a game about you know but there's no one like just like you know i guess some i've heard some people complaining about you know this and that but it's usually like oh the romans are keep

taking our grains and all this sort of stuff so i don't know interesting curious as well everyone's curiously white um what i mean mary is in particular and joseph and probably jesus but everyone else is a bit more ethnic but um yeah hey look i didn't i wasn't in judea in the fucking year year zero or whatever so what do i know i think people uh knew how satisfying it was to say jesus christ's name as an exclamation even when he was like a guy that was around yeah it must have right it's got a good uh it's got a good timbre to it it's got a good mouthfeel just like jesus christ like it's it is just a great it's

just it feels good to say three syllable bam bam bam there you go three strikes you're out um yeah i'll play some more g i am jesus christ um he's got a like jesus vision like he's got like a detective vision oh yeah it's like arkham it's like batman vision yeah Or like Witcher Vision?

It has a name. I forget.

It's like Spirit Vision or something.

I forget. Something like that.

I went up to a guy who was clearly had leprosy and pressed E on him and they said, you have not unlocked this miracle yet or something.

So I'm looking forward to getting the saving leprosy.

Hopefully there is a you have unlocked the forgiving the tax man tax tax man and I can find Zacharias and going to get the table flipping ability exactly yeah yeah so i don't know i kind of you know it's not it's it's very indie you know it's probably someone's first game or close to it so i'm not gonna i'm not gonna it's too easy to drag some that right for you know for daring to make a game about their religion or for you know making a game about something so lofty but it's not it's not like a gonna be a polished double a experience about jesus it's going to be an indie game about jesus which is weird

it's weird to be walk i wanted to get to the quest faster so instead of walking i jumped along the rooftops of this village you skyrimmed a fucking village as jesus as jesus it felt particularly weird because i was jesus if i was if i was just myself in this world this like like open world i was just like an like a proxy whatever that'd be one thing but i was jesus christ bounding across people's houses and that felt very strange you know it'd be an interesting game is this is not a i'm not saying this game should be this but just like an alternate game pitch it would be cool to like you know

how like in those days there were a lot of sort of people popping up who were like actually i'm i'm a prophet and i know what's up and you should follow me it'd be cool to have like a uh like a early 2000s peter molyneux style game where you're like building a cultic following but there's like other other people who are like going around uh and yeah i don't know maybe there maybe there's a reputation system like that great yeah there should be like a cult simulator cult of the lamb sort of did a lot none of it none of it was about like tricking people to join you i thought right obviously that's

like the sort of most interesting part but cult of the lamb was very funny in that it was kind of about the economy of running a cult which is also very very important you know um you know the the mormons have tides but in cult of the lamb you got to sacrifice people so that was that was that was pretty cool who do you sacrifice do we have enough x for this and you know when your cult gets big enough then suddenly you're like you know there's all these extra strains on everything there's not enough people praying praying you know we gotta get them over there to pray um you're right that would be

a fun one i feel like a drug wars kind of style you know isometric cults you know age of empires but without the combat you know you're just like building a society and then like oh people are starting to not believe and like shit got a new order of kool -aid coming in or you know what i mean like something like that that'd be good let's combine that with the history one should we do do like a you could do like a there's no manson family game there's no uh what was that famous one where the uh the atf just fireball ruby ridge or waco waco yeah yeah waco you could do like a waco simulator and you

could try and get out of there you you're the one who doesn't drink the kool -aid needed to get out without getting killed by the cult people or the atf there's a horrible fucking movie version i'm not saying it's a horrible movie although i thought it was about about the the whole kool -aid incident and i had i had a friend who wanted to watch it one time and i i he was like oh it's so good we gotta watch it and we smoked a ton of weed and no i would say two -thirds of the way through the movie i paused it and i was like this is this is horrible why why did you want to watch this there's like child

actors pretending to die this is this is horrible uh so yeah don't that nightmare blunt rotation you any of your friends and the the the everyone dying from kool -aid movie jones people tried to make columbine games was that a thing i mean on new grounds yeah yeah there's pico saves the school oh yeah i got it forgot about that that's sort of an anti -columbine game it is that's the thing i don't think anyone's making a pro columbine that gus van sant movie elephant was pretty good i remember that it wasn't really technically specifically about that incident but it was i thought that was that was was well

done it was very like human level and shocking there are probably like i bet someone's made like a doom mod that's just like in a high school or something it's called like columbine dot wad dot wad yeah exactly something like that anything else for uh sad that all of our all of the moon landing has anyone done a moon landing game i gave about faking the moon landing yeah yeah you're you're uh you're on the set you're doing the whole thing um yeah i don't know not many movies about making the movies except the movies like great bullfrog game a lot have you ever seen the the guy from nirvana the band made

that movie about uh faking the moon landing is that right oh i haven't watched that one yet have you watched blackberry yet no i still haven't seen it oh watch blackberry it's so good yeah matt johnson uh one of the best called again that moon landing one uh operation avalanche i think i might have it's it is i think it's a little rough around the edges at times but it's it's fucking fantastic and part of the joy of it is that in proper nirvana the band style they went to um the they went to like where the actual like control room was at some like nasa area which is now like a museum or whatever

and they they went in period appropriate clothing uh and they filmed there like without permission my god so i get i forget the exact story i mean this movie came out in like 2016 so it's been a while since i've seen it and since i read about this but if i recall correctly matt johnson is wearing his like you know control room 1960s 70s looking outfit and uh the tour guide brought them in there and he was like can we just like have a minute alone in here and the guy was like yeah and then they shot a scene in in there so they just kind of like beg barred and that is incredible incredible I actually

think I haven't watched this I think I've watched the trailer so many times and never have I'm gonna watch this this week it's good it's you know it's uh also it's fucking I don't know how I didn't connect this the dirties is also a Matt Johnson movie which is like a sort of like a Columbine inspired movie yes you're right I love that movie I've not seen that one either oh god go watch the again filmed in like they would just go to fucking schools and film this movie that's about like you know a potential school shooting happening um I'll watch this if you you got to watch blackberry blackberry's

all right yeah yeah blackberry's matt johnson film club when is their new one coming out aren't they doing the nirvana it's been it's been screens um okay i think neon actually acquired it so i think it's getting official distribution finally uh yeah october or something march 9 2025 it aired at south by southwest oh brilliant i had this weird um uh thing where was i i don't know where i was i think i was on the road and one night i decided to watch the tom cruise cruise movie oblivion because i thought i'd watched it because i remember chunks of it but i remembered a totally tangential version in my

head and so i couldn't tell if i had like watched it while stoned perhaps or like i just watched the trailer and read enough reviews that i'd filled in the gaps gaps in my head of what i thought the movie was but i sat down to watch it because i was like i don't remember the end of this movie and then i went to watch it and it was like completely different it was like in my memory i had an alternative version like cut of the movie where like other characters weren't in it the antagonist was this other person uh it was really strange were you thinking of edge of tomorrow no okay so that's which i've

have also watched but you're right yeah it was that movie but i had just a completely different like cut in my memory it was so bizarre and then i watched the movie and i was like no i haven't seen any of this shit halfway through it i was like i don't i don't know what happened did i have a concussion when i watched it and it just made the weird version in my head it's a it's an alright movie it's pretty good i think it was because i was missing playing dune awakening because it's kind of like dune awakening just like on a big planet no water running around on a a fucking little speed scooter

thing maybe that was it um yeah history video games there we go got another email uh yeah quick one um josh wrote in said you talked about f13 on last week's podcast in windows you can actually use f13 through f24 i replaced caps lock with f13 and i have f14 bound to a foot pedal for push to talk and discord do you have any unique customizations you use in your setup our workflow do you use a lot of hotkeys you guys use macros and anything wow wow yeah i haven't i haven't done macros since wow i think yeah no not really i mean i use a shit ton of hotkeys for like blender and premiere oh yeah unity

and stuff like that but but I don't have any, like, fucking foot pedals.

That rules, though.

I think I, if I remember right, I think I use Final Cut Premiere shortcuts on PC, but I use Premiere shortcuts on Mac, which is very, like, my brain is broken.

It's, like, not a good way to do that.

But for whatever reason, when I get to the other keyboard, because I have two computers hooked up to this monitor, so i have my mac here so i just swap the input on the monitor and i edit on one machine and then render on the other machine and bounce back between the two of them um yeah i'm able to do that which sucks but yeah uh i started fucking around with davinci resolve a little bit the last couple weeks um yeah just because uh you know it's got some powerful color grading tools so uh if there's ever a project where we need to make it look like a you know 1970s italian indie film or anything

you know to call let's make italian spider -man what's gonna happen italian spider -man um i don't know was it you that was the sicko to use the roller mouse for most of your yeah i used to get so much shit at gamespot for it because we'd play uh we play counter -strike and i had to bring my own trackball mouse although i was vindicated in later years because there were uh fps like competitive fps players like pro players using trackball mouses because you can and just fucking send that shit can you even like can you even like buy a trackball mouse anywhere i feel like it's like probably is that yeah

is that yeah are they super expensive no this is uh oh my god wait why is this so this is the shitty one i had was this uh the logitech trackman marble mouse and it's why is this 200 on amazon that's supposed to be like a scammer like i wonder are they have they become like the menthol cigarettes of mouse things fallen so out of fashion you can't find them anywhere anymore and it was the best though because like fucking like i would break you know if you have to say you're in an inhospitable environment without a say you're on a plane you and you what are you going to use the little nipple mouse

on your shitty fucking oh my god remember those yeah or like the little you know flat mouse yeah no just get your trackball and set it on your lap and you can be playing counter -strike in the sky look wow look at that well you can't because you can't connect to the internet but you know otherwise you can play against bots like in which case you probably don't need a very good house you probably don't you probably but yeah i'm speaking of bots i played um i had to fire up battlefield 2 for a second for the edit yesterday just to feel there was like three little b -roll gaps and one of them was a one

shot of battlefield 2 and i just filed it file fired up a bot match yesterday and i just like it all came back to me that game is fucking fucking perfect dude if you like battlefield 2 go play against boss for five minutes uh and you'll feel something i guarantee it get your fill you'll feel it man you'll feel it in your loins speaking of our loins frank i believe next friday is tony hawk's pro skater three and four day so looking forward to that personally uh you guys got anything else you're gonna play over the weekend uh this week happy canada day to jesse by the way he's not around and happy

fourth of july everyone else in in the states look at that hopefully there hasn't been some sort of civil war started or maybe maybe it's about time i don't know it depends who's starting it i guess and who wins uh yeah i don't know if i've got it i'm checking my steam wish list right now i i could i would love to have something but i've been editing for the last like four days straight on this battlefield thing so uh i need a little a little game time um yeah summer sale came and went for me because i just wasn't i wasn't here um and i slept that's trying to play and doing to play and a bunch

of other stuff to play so um yeah watch this space folks we will be back up on uh noclip crew for now uh jesse's working on a another indie recommendation uh video this one all about summer games games with a summery feel that you can play and you might not have heard about he's got some great stuff in there including a new game from the bocono people people that came out last year apparently that completely flew under the radar yeah that's mom yeah exactly uh is that what it's called not so mom yeah not so mom beautiful it looks good i only haven't grabbed it because it uh it is i think 40 let

me confirm that uh it is oh no wait why maybe it's on sale oh it's 50 off it is 40 it's currently on sale for 1999 though maybe this this is the time um i'm gonna have a little look at this world war one in zonzo game is this online only or is it single player i can't tell it looks completely bananas um uh yeah we'll have a so we'll have that video up we'll have a bunch of stuff hitting it is july actually now as we're recording this so welcome to july a bunch of stuff coming and then the noclip pipe including the um um uh interview with david goldfarb about the basically a level by level breakdown

of battlefield 3 not every level but all the the big hitters and a bunch of other good battlefield bits and bobs in there so if you're a battlefield fan you should dig in on that uh disco elysium is the forefront of my edits at the moment gonna get that out later this month and then we are doing lots and lots and lots and lots of secret work on secret tape uh i guess i can officially just say that now maybe a little bit we'll see um the noclip crew uh project rebrand world that we're building over there um there's been lots of stuff happening in the background here so we'll be excited to talk

to you about that later this month that'll all be launching in july so um keep your eyes and ears peeled for that um over the next uh over the next month and uh yeah we'll be back um soon after that if you have any question or if you have any emails uh shoot them in what is it again frank podcasts at noclip .video on patreon .com slash noclip if you want to support the work we do over here on the documentary side uh all right that's it it's been a couple of hours happy canada day guys happy canada day happy canada day happy fourth of july bye Thank you.

[A Summer of Road Trips, Gamerscores, and Gaming Deep-Dives]-[Dune Awakening, Death Stranding 2, Umamusume: Pretty Derby]

📋 Summary

The J-Crew's Summer Odyssey

Rematch: The Arcade Soccer Surprise

Dune Awakening: A Sandbox Survival Marvel

The Death Stranding Debate

Ruffy and the Riverside: Texture-Swapping Puzzles

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby and Cult Simulations

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript