Fellowship, Steam Next Fest | Noclip Crewcast

Thank you.

Hello friends and welcome to episode 269 of the Noclip podcast.

We have a full crew for the last time for a few weeks.

Frank Howley is shagging off to Japan again.

Frank, how excited are you about your latest Japanese adventure, your first of 2026? i'm i'm very excited i feel a lot like clear-minded going into it because i feel like every time i go to japan i'm like this might be the last time i go i gotta do everything but now i feel like it's it's just like no i'll i'll keep finding reasons to go back so i feel way less stressed like so much so like am i forgetting anything i don't know but um i feel like this trip more than any others before i've intentionally booked where i have like lots of free time to just figure out once i get there like almost every night there's wrestling shows but my days are free to like shop go to museums or go wherever so i i um yeah i don't know it feels like it'll hopefully be more relaxing than in previous trips where it was like non-stop going from you know points to points to points so um yeah and hopefully the weather should be clearing up it was snowing like a few like like a week or two ago but okay the weather's getting better and better Well, the snow has not been kind to other parts of this beautiful world.

Jeremy Jane, how are you doing in the beautiful northeast at the moment?

Is this a nor'eastern or is this just a straight-up blizzard?

I don't know if this is a nor'easter, but it's a fucking blizzard, all right.

Yeah, it's been snowing for like I was.

I go to bed at like 5 am because I'm a vampire and it was snowing very hard already.

We're going to get like two feet, 20 inches, something like that.

And the wind is going ape out there.

So if I suddenly if you if you scrub halfway through this podcast and I'm gone, that's why.

Because the house blew over, you know, by Boston or by Massachusetts standards.

Is this like pretty, pretty crazy or is this like somewhat normal? uh it's definitely not normal but it's definitely not the craziest blizzard i've ever seen it's i mean it's it is up there i would say this is like a maybe like a seven out of ten a six or a seven six or seven six or seven jeremy jane damn it no we need to reclaim those numbers i can't it's because it's not an eight and it's not a five okay fair enough that's a shout out to all of our um What do we call that generation of people?

They're not millennials or Gen Z. What are they?

Alpha?

I think what comes next?

Sigma?

Omega?

Isn't Alpha first?

Don't they go back?

Don't we go back?

Are they Omega?

I have no idea.

I think we'll go through the Greek alphabet.

Omega will be the end of the Greek alphabet, right?

Yeah, I guess so.

I don't know.

You're asking the wrong Greek guy.

Only thing I know about Grace is hades too.

That's all i got.

Um, maybe this is what america deserves after uh, you know, finally getting a gold medal against the canadians in a in the hockey.

Uh, jesse gracia, how has the mourning period been for your great nation?

I mean, as you know, we've been holding a funeral for our own collective consciousness this uh, this last 24 hours.

It's been quite depressing knowing that we lost to the americans in a 3v3 shootout.

Over time took like four seconds.

Um, I may never recover from this and I am leaving the podcast unfortunately, as a result.

This is our tariff on you guys is I'm done listening to your opinions about sports you, son of a, And video games.

And video games.

That guy had like no teeth and he scored.

Unbelievable.

That was the most talky thing I have ever seen.

It only would have been more hockey if it was a Canadian guy who did it.

True.

Yeah.

I feel like that's where it all comes from.

Where it all comes from well uh commiserations, how else have the canadians done in the winter olympics?

You know, we did uh, poorly relative to how we usually do.

We came in 11th uh, with fewer gold medals than normal.

Um okay, but we still did.

Okay, we still did, you know, i mean, top 15 worldwide.

You know i'll hold on to that forever um, but yeah, not as good as normal, not as good as we won curling, even though we cheated a lot, which is, you know, maybe the best thing you can ask for in the olympics.

How do you cheat curling?

They were touching the stone after it had passed over the line.

I'm not going to act like a curling fan.

I just started watching it during the Olympics.

But there was a lot of physical interactions that they shouldn't have been doing after releasing the stone.

So why didn't they get like a yellow card or something?

I mean, it's one of those things where, during this Olympics, everyone was being very particular about stuff and catching things that, like the referees, weren't.

I don't know what happened there.

Like there was there were six men on the ice with the Canada Chechia game.

Oh, really?

It was like no one called that out.

Like there was no ref on that.

There was one point there was seven when they were doing the switch.

It was like, what?

They have like 360 degree.

They have literal bullet time.

Yeah, they have matrix bullet time and they can't catch one extra guy.

It's like he's from Czech Republic.

I don't know.

I can't see.

Wow.

There you go.

And you dead named that country just there as well.

Oh, apologies.

What do we call them now?

Just Chechia?

Sorry.

I think it's Chechia.

I don't know.

And Turkey, we have to say different.

We have to say like, like Turkey or something.

I don't know.

Okay.

Apologies.

It's also less confusing because when you talk about Turkey, you know, it's like, it's just, it sounds like a bird to me.

And that's not, there's no shade against the nation of Turkey.

I just grew up as a sheltered American eating Turkey every year.

I think that's why they renamed it, because they were just sick of people calling it after a delicious bird.

Why does the president keep pardoning us every year?

What's that about?

Yeah, exactly yeah.

Turkey's problems go deeper than just the name.

Let's say um yeah uh, commiserations.

I don't know how ireland did we?

I don't know why we had people in there.

You know, top 15 is not bad for for a country that has snow.

How many countries have snow?

I feel like you need to.

You need to.

You know, filter that one down to.

You know.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Probably about 15.

Yeah, man.

Finland winning makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

They won the pushback the Russians event, which was pretty good.

Pretty easy this year.

Were the Russians in the Olympics this year?

Were they allowed?

I don't know.

I don't remember.

Because what did they do last time?

They just like, they operate under like rest of world or something like that.

You know they discount their, their nation.

They cast their nation aside to do it.

Uh, we're not going to cast you aside, dear listener.

We have some video games to talk about.

We don't have that many video games to talk about, because next best is on.

We're holding some of our cards for for that, frank is obviously getting out of town.

We're actually filming this week.

Um, myself and frank are down in la for some secret tape.

Nonsense, fun nonsense you'll hear about in the future.

I'm sure we've loads of emails to talk about.

Jeremy's been jumping into fellowship.

We've got a titanium court map map and some other things to talk about.

But First of all, thanks for our incredible gold medal winning battle pass holders.

Brian Baru.

Oh, look, Arlen did win a gold medal, it turns out.

Lil Toast.

Lovepreet.

Yush.

Dwayne the Rock Lobster.

Anthony Thomas.

Nico Passateri.

It's-a-me, Ferrario.

Senator Armstrong.

Reed Dredge.

Harry Flanagan.

Joosh.

Arno.

Matt Pearson.

Mark Ross.

Quote.

Tucker Morgan.

David McGarry.

Goddison.

Sven Hooster.

Pez.

Bone Mold.

And my favorite, ricin.

You're my favorite.

Did you guys ever see Ricicles?

No.

You know Frosted Flakes?

We call them Frosties in Europe.

I'm sure I've said this about Ryzen before.

I'm sure I have.

I've not got that many stories.

I definitely only know Ryzicles because you have explained it before.

I don't know if it was on the podcast or potentially in a meeting.

Oh, look at this little guy.

Important meeting stuff, yeah.

We only talk about really important shit at the meetings.

Like defunct European cereal.

Yeah, they're basically Rice Krispies, but with the Frosted Flakes stuff on them.

Sugar, I guess.

I like the mascot.

Yeah.

He's got a little helmet on.

He's flying through space.

He looks like a pretty cool guy.

He's got a jet pack.

But then sometimes they replace the stuff on the cover and there's just one that has him and then a really big Spider-Man on it.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

And it's called the, wait, it says water squirter.

Okay.

All right.

I couldn't see it.

It's so small.

Excuse me.

Yeah, I know.

That's what I'm saying.

I don't want that.

The name of the Spider-Man guy.

I, that's his name.

Yeah.

Mr. Spider-Man water squirter.

No, I think it's like you know when you he does the web spitting, but this time it's water instead of webs.

So maybe you get one in the pack.

Remember?

Yeah.

I guess so.

Remember?

Yeah.

We used to get video games.

We got coins for some people reason, i don't know.

It's like dirty money in this.

Yeah well, it would be like it was like a commemorative uh kellogg's coin with tony the tiger on it or something like that.

They're like we won the gold medal in hockey, we're great.

Yeah, the gold medal in cereal.

They were food.

I still love getting the.

Uh, we used to get the.

You know the little like clicky clackers for your, for your bike, you know your bike spokes, oh cool yeah, yeah.

Or like a reflector or something like that, Like a Kellogg's corn cock on it, you know.

The cock roll?

Yeah.

I don't remember getting shit in cereal, and I'm definitely old enough to have gotten it.

I feel like it was always like, collect 100 box tops and send them in for 100 hours of AOL.

We used to always get stuff in ours.

Frank, did you get stuff in yours?

What were you eating, Jeremy?

What the hell?

Yeah, I don't remember anything specifically.

I remember...

I mean there was like Chex Quest, but I didn't, I didn't physically get that, because they were software included.

But I remember as a kid, like this sounds so disgusting.

I don't know if this is true, but like you would rip open the bag of cereal and put your hand in the thing to grab like a plastic toy.

But I was.

I mean, I didn't have like like like, I think this year was always just mine, but like, the idea of just like me going in and just going into the family seal to grab like a little plastic toy seems so like so, so ill thought out.

But yeah, I remember doing that.

I don't know what like, like whistles and just like, it's the same thing with like Cracker Jack.

It would be like stupid shit like stick on tattoos, stuff that you know got phased out by the end of the 90s.

But yeah, there was always like plastic crap.

But then that became a food hazard and choking hazard.

But yeah, there was always freebies.

Yeah, maybe i was just eating the prizes.

Maybe i'm the reason they stopped putting them in you're 10 cd at this point.

Every time i cough it makes like a whistle noise.

Yeah, what is that?

Yeah, i remember you said i sort of pulled the bag out so i try and find the inner bag.

You know like kind of push at the cereal to try and find, see which end i had to open and then to sort of minimize the amount of like hand and wrist that went in.

You know it was in the bag for you guys.

I feel like it was always like taped to the outside of the bag or on the inside of the box.

No, ours, ours were always like a bag in the bag, like a little plastic bag.

That's disgusting.

Yeah.

In the one thing.

One thing I remember.

I don't know if this is hard to pull up, but like there's literally a trick, cereal had a color changing spoon.

I remember this.

Oh yeah, the idea was like you put it in and then like i think it changes the color.

No, because tricks changes the color of your milk, but the spoon changes.

But i remember getting yeah, that that stuff too.

But yeah, i don't know, but it could be right, maybe inside the, because when you open up a bag of a box of cereal there's the cardboard and then the plastic thing inside.

Maybe it was wedged between the cardboard and in plastic.

Mine were 100 inside of the bag.

I, because i remember coming out with like rice crispy dust all over my hand.

That's nasty.

Yeah, I like this one.

I looked up prizes from 90 cereals.

I'm putting this in our staff chat here.

I would describe it as an Alcoholics Anonymous token with Monterey Jack from whatever that mouse cartoon was.

Oh, my God.

That's for one year sober off of watching Rescue Rangers.

That guy's name was Monterey Jack.

Yeah.

Okay.

I did not know that.

Was that Rescue Rangers?

Looks like it.

Yeah, I think so.

I also wouldn't have known that was a cheese until like 20 years later.

Really?

Yeah, they don't sell that in Europe.

What do they call Colby Jack for you guys back home?

We don't have Jack.

We don't call things Jack.

You didn't know Jack?

No, I mean, I'll be honest.

I wouldn't be calling a cheese product Jack.

You know what I mean?

That's the same problem I have with Jack in a box.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, you don't want to do that.

I don't want to eat someone else's jack.

I don't want to eat my own jack.

Especially when it's described as a white semi-hard cheese.

Yeah, you just leave it out there long enough.

This happens every time we do a podcast.

Look, there's one person you could point at here.

There's a common denominator in this happening at the opening of the episode.

It didn't happen last week.

Last week was astronauts fucking beating off on the moon.

Yeah.

The Ricicles guy.

Maybe that's his jam.

The Ricicles guy looks like an old lady, even though he's supposed to be a young boy, I feel like.

Monterey Jack?

No, the Ricicles guy.

Monterey Jack looks like a middle-aged man with a mustache.

He does.

I haven't seen the Ricicles guy in a while.

He must have a name.

He just looked like a knockoff, you know, Snap Crackle and Pop, you know?

Whoa, throw shade at the fucking Snap Crackle and Pop.

Ricicles.

Captain Rick.

Captain Rick?

Captain Rick.

That's a whack name.

So is it supposed to be pronounced Rickicles?

Like, what happened there?

Yeah, why is it a Captain Rice?

Yeah.

Kind of looks like the... Captain Rice sounds like a derogatory name.

I regretted it as soon as I said it.

Oh, brother.

What else we got?

Is Coco the monkey?

Is that his name?

Coco Pops?

Probably.

Is that the guy who's Cuckoo?

I thought it was a... Isn't it a... That's Coco Puffs.

Oh, okay.

Coco Pops.

Sorry, Pops.

My bad.

Sugar Pops.

What about, what's the one, is it Corn Pops?

Gotta Have My Pops?

Corn Pops was great.

Gotta Have My Pops, yeah.

That shit was great.

Gotta Have My Pops, is that what they said?

I'm itching.

I'm itching for my Pops.

The marketing and PR for cereal back then is so funny.

Probably still today, I've just, I don't watch like the Nickelodeon and Disney, so I don't see cereal commercials.

Oh, yeah.

But they're all like, It's like corn.

So it's healthy.

And it's just like it's corn sweetened with corn and then it's coated in like corn syrup.

That's why you got to love corn pops, because you know what?

They were honest about it.

You are eating corn.

Enjoy.

It's the same as it's the same as people who are like, oh, it's like harmless.

It's a plant.

And they're talking about cocaine.

Yeah, I mean, it's good for you.

It comes from the earth.

I mean, didn't the guy invent... This isn't my fault, okay?

The original sin of cereals is that the guy who invented cornflakes did so to stop people from jacking off.

Oh, yeah.

That's a real thing.

I'm not making that up.

That is real.

Wasn't he, Was he?

I don't want to say, I don't want to throw the Mormons under the bus again here, but wasn't it, Was he?

He might have been Baptist or I don't know.

He was...

He was someone who took his faith seriously and was like, I need to stop all this jacking off.

I need to invent a cereal that will.

Yeah, John.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

John Harvey invented cereal as part of his broader belief in a bland diet to discourage masturbation and promote a healthy lifestyle.

There you go.

Little did he know it would actually increase it, at least on this podcast.

Especially if they put Monterey Jack in the box.

Exactly.

Whoa, wait.

Monterey Jack in the box.

That's a Jeopardy answer.

That's a before and after.

Is Monterey Jack in the box?

Yeah.

There's lots of America.

When I moved here, I definitely indulged in, you know, I need to see.

I need to taste all of the ones that we don't get, like Fruity Pebbles and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and things like that.

One that I don't think I ever got because maybe it was gone before I got here was Boo Berry.

Yes.

Do you guys ever eat?

What is Boo Berry?

That's in like the Count Chocula universe, right?

Part of the CCU.

Can't wait till those movies start coming out.

I've been waiting, man.

Where's my movies?

I never had Boo-Berry, but this guy looks high as fuck.

So does Frankenberry.

And so does Chocula.

All three of them are stoned.

Look up OG Count Chocula.

OG Count Chocula when he was Jim Henson.

Like Jim Henson Chocula.

That is the scariest thing you could see.

You get blitzed out of your mind.

You go to eat some cereal because you're craving some snacks.

That's what you see on the box.

He's going to jump out and kill you.

Oh, yeah.

Look at this guy.

Right.

Yeah, it is.

You're right.

It's a Muppet.

Yeah, it's actually like literally a Muppet.

It's Jim Henson's Count Chocula.

It must have cost him so much to print that.

Oh, it's got like so many colors in it.

You know what I mean?

Like, why would you waste all that production stuff on that?

That's that's very strange.

I never had the original, by the way.

That's the that's the newer one.

The Henson ones.

Anyways.

Oh, it is.

OK.

You never had those.

I think they were seasonal.

At least they were for us.

We couldn't buy.

You couldn't buy anything up here other than Count Chocula, but you could only get it around Halloween.

The other two we never saw until quite recently, or at least I didn't in Ontario.

OK, man, is it just chocolate?

And they look slightly like like faces.

Yeah, they're like shaped in the.

Yeah, I haven't seen half of these, though.

There's like one called Fruit Brute and yummy mummy.

Fruit fruit is a stretch.

That's a term we use in ireland.

That was.

That is probably like that is the irish version of milf.

Okay yeah, it's yummy mummy, so that's okay.

We have to talk about this.

Count Chocula box.

I'm going to post this because I feel like without the visual, there's no context for this.

There is a box of Count Chocula.

This is a 1987 General Mills boxed cereal, Count Chocula.

And it is the Count Chocula mascot looking scared.

And behind him is a very realistic rendition of Count Dracula.

I saw this.

Yeah.

Oh, man, that's Bela Lugosi right there.

Why does he have a star of David?

Oh, yeah.

Wait a second.

Hold on.

Wrong religion.

Whoa, whoa.

Wrong religion, guys.

General Mills is making a statement here.

Yeah, you keep talking about this.

This is going to end up on an Alex Jones episode in a second.

He's going to be like, did you know that Count Chocula was originally?

They're trying to turn us gay.

Cereal.

One bite from Count Chocula.

That's a pretty good Alex Jones.

That is pretty good.

Wait a second, you Alex Jones.

Rip my skin off my face.

You're using like a TikTok, uh, uh, Instagram filter this whole time.

Yeah.

I've been AI generated this entire time just to hide my face.

If anyone was going to go AI generated blackface on a video game podcast, it would be Alex Jones.

So that makes sense.

Oh, so it's the other way.

Yeah.

Oh, you think I, you think I'm doing Alex Jones?

No, no, no.

Alex Jones is moonlighting as me.

Wow.

It's an honor, sir.

You guys want to buy some new tropics?

Yes, I do.

I'll buy some old Dropix.

They should make.

I'm surprised they haven't.

I'm surprised they haven't made like a cereal that's like for men.

You know what I mean?

Like we do wipes.

You know what I mean?

We have all these like stupid products that are like for men.

I feel like they'd be in the shape of like nails, man like yeah, little dicks, you're a man.

No no, hgh in it.

You know there's a cereal called man cereal.

Is this real?

I just googled cereal for men.

I'm gonna be sure that advertises having protein.

Is man cereal by rogan o's?

Oh, i'm gonna get the worst targeted advertisements.

Now that i've googled cereal for men, i'm gonna get like a carnivore diet bullshit on my youtube.

Now i guess they have all those like uh, the keto ones, you know, like the, There's like non-grain ones.

You know what I mean?

Protein.

I guess protein shakes is what they do.

Yeah.

Things like that.

Too much damn proteins. protein and everything.

We got to start putting fiber and stuff.

That's the real problem.

Get the fiber in there.

This is the most 30 year old man podcast ever.

Get those shits going.

Get them flowing.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Protein.

We got enough protein.

I don't need, I go to Starbucks and they're like, you want a protein drink?

And I'm like, brother, I'm at Starbucks.

I want sugar.

Give me sugar and caffeine.

I don't need protein.

What are you talking about?

If you're a meat eater as well, you eat a lot of protein.

Even if you're just eating broccoli and tofu, you're fucking set for the day.

If you accidentally eat one cup of beans at some point in the week, you've had enough protein.

If you eat a can of beans a day, you're 150% fiber and protein.

Exactly.

You've had more protein than most of, like, human history has had in their lifetime.

Yeah.

A group of 1800s farmers would look at you as a god for the sheer state of your colon.

Wow.

You don't have to sit there for 45 minutes waiting to go.

This guy shits.

We said they use you as a sundial because you shit at the same time every day.

He's shitting.

It's 4 p.m.

Go, go.

Oh, it's time to sow the seeds and till the soil.

Oh, we love Sir Jeremy.

He's so regular.

Yeah.

Everyone stands outside my house with their farming implements waiting.

Do you guys have Weetabix?

We do.

There was a joke in a Zig and Zag book I had as a kid, which I still remember, that said what do aliens have for breakfast?

What?

Sigourney Weaverbix.

Oh, my God.

That's good.

I got to give it to him.

It's not bad, is it anyway?

That's enough serial chat padding for today.

Let's talk about some video games.

And jeremy, i want to go to you first.

Uh, this is an interesting one.

So fellowship, this came out, i want to say, in early access.

Was it last year?

Yes, october last year.

I believe It's sort of a co-op-y dungeon crawler type thing.

I shouldn't be explaining this, but you've been playing it with your friends.

Apparently the season two update came out and that's what you guys were jumping in on.

What is Fellowship and what you've been doing?

So this is a game that was so.

I have a friend group who have played games together, but we haven't found a game that we could all agree on for maybe like 10 months or something.

Okay, so i was very skeptical of fellowship um, but they were very gung-ho about it and you know me, i'll fucking.

I'll play checkers if i can hang out with my boys on a discord.

Call uh, four-way checkers.

So fellowship is a.

It's not an MMORPG.

But if you have played MMORPGs and done dungeons in them with a group, like if you've done Deadmines in World of Warcraft, it is essentially just the dungeons and no world, no quests outside of it.

There is sort of like an onboarding thing tutorial.

It's literally a skippable tutorial.

That's sort of the only quest in mini open world.

The rest of it is just you queue up with a group, you run a dungeon.

They're very, very short and they're very, very fast and furious and optimized.

They're all on a timer, um.

Structurally it's very similar to i.

I haven't played world of warcraft since probably 2007 2008, but uh, there is now something.

In world of warcraft apologies if you're a wowhead and i misrepresent this even slightly there are dungeons called uh, mythic plus dungeons and they are essentially instanced dungeons that you load into.

It's like an end game activity, i gather, in retail wow um, and you are just trying to blast through it as fast as possible.

There's leaderboards, I'm pretty sure.

They're timed.

It's sort of a competitive, hyper-fast distillation of the dungeon experience.

And Fellowship is basically just a game that is only the Mythic Plus dungeons.

Okay.

So the, i guess, point of them is not just to complete them, but to complete them as quickly as you can correct.

So it is about optimization.

It's a, there is a.

You know, back in the day you would have to download 17 mods to get your, your world of warcraft optimized.

Uh, this has baked into it.

Like the dps meter is on by default.

So as soon as you start playing, the dps meters popping up there and making you neurotic about how much damage you're doing.

Um, but it's uh yeah, it's an interesting experience.

I am not.

It's not a 10 out of 10 for me, but I was surprised by how much fun I've been having with it.

It is both better than I thought and also lacks in sort of the exact way I was expecting.

The good of it is that it is very just like a fun distillation of the dungeon run experience.

It sort of starts you off.

It has, I would say, a little bit of a rough onboarding experience, because you start with a character who is sort of like an endgame WoW character or like 70 80 of the way there.

And when you play an MMO, you know you get your first spell and then you use it for like seven hours.

And then you really know that spell inside and out by the time you get another spell.

I had to just sit there and hit target dummies with my eight to ten spells for like an hour.

Well, i was like, all right, so if i, i cast the engulfing flame and then searing blaze and then the searing blaze procs, but while the searing play, this is their synergy with the fucking fire wave and i gotta cast the fire wave, but it's like there's a lot to take in.

I would say it's sort of a baptism by fire um, which is that's not a pun, but i'm a fire mage um uh i, but i'm, i don't know, i'm enjoying it.

It's like it lacks the thing about MMOs that I love the most, which is, I feel like, has been sort of de-emphasized by a lot of MMOs.

Um, which is when I played wow for the first time, when I played dark age of Camelot, when I played a lot of these old MMOs.

It was just the exciting thing was just like being in a world.

Uh, it wasn't about like min maxing.

It wasn't about optimizing.

It wasn't about looking up builds.

Uh, you would check like thought bot occasionally to look up one thing here and there.

But um uh, was more about like immersion in a digital world and even retail wow now has shifted way.

More like retail wow is like a theme park themed after the original world of warcraft.

Um, and this feels much more like the theme park side of things.

But it's just the rides.

There's no.

Like you don't walk around epcot and drink a beer or whatever.

Have you been like sticking to one?

Like is the, is the, is the combat?

So sort of like you need to spend time wrapping your head around it that you have stuck to your one class.

I have.

Only because I sort of finally got a handle on it after running a couple dungeons and I wanted to see how far it goes, but also because there is progression.

You do get gear.

It's a little different.

It's not like every mob and boss drops individual gear.

At the end of a dungeon you get a big chest that has supplies and materials and an item or two in it.

Um, so you are progressing your character.

And then, after you complete certain dungeons and certain difficulties, you get new rows of talents, kind of like world of warcraft.

You get new talent points.

Uh, and so you can sort of build specs for different, uh, characters.

So I I stuck with it, a because I was getting used to it and B because my friends would have had to run lower level dungeons with me to level up another character.

Um, but uh, I feel like that is part of the fun is like if someone wants to, you know, re-roll as a rogue or something.

You could basically blast them up to the same level as you very, very quickly with a high-level group.

Okay.

So yeah, it's definitely not like World of Warcraft, where it's like I want to be a new character and it's like all right, I'll see you in a month then.

And, yeah, it's enjoyable.

It's like, like I said, it's both better than I thought and also kind of exactly what I expected.

It feels a little bit limited.

It is early access.

I should reiterate that.

Um, i think there are.

I think there's like eight regular dungeons and then a handful of these like capstone dungeons which allow you to progress to a higher difficulty, but the higher difficulty is the same eight dungeons but with like new mechanics and twists and more difficulty and stuff.

So you are just sort of running these same eight dungeons over and over and over.

Um, So once I had seen all of them, there was a little bit of a drop in the like.

The novelty value kind of dropped off quickly because it was like all right, we're doing the pirate one again.

Stranglethorn.

Yeah.

A lot of them are very well themed.

It is funny to like play them and be like, oh, yeah, I've been here before.

Or like there's a we're fighting a boss and a pirate ship.

And I was like, oh, look, it's Van Cleef over there.

Yeah, right.

I'm watching gameplay but it is funny how, like the the length of the animations and like the pop ups of health and like the engagement distance for enemies and stuff like feels very like comfortable or familiar.

Maybe it is very well adjacent.

Hmm yeah yeah, even like there, when you interact with stuff like um, if you mouse over it and there's an interactable, it'll be like the little gear that lights up when you're close enough.

Like everything about the ui is very world of warcrafty um, and it's.

It's clearly trying to evoke that intentionally.

This is sort of a, you know, a standalone mythic plus alternative right, but yeah, it's actually a lot of games trying to capture this aspect of MMOs or even like action RPGs, like Hell Clock from last year, which I don't think is out fully yet, or whatever.

There's DLC coming out this year.

I have tried to capture what it feels like to play the end of those games, which is not exactly what you're going for from the sounds of it, Jeremy.

Like you like the exploration and world stuff.

And I've been trying to think of like why...

Despite liking the idea of the end game of an MMO like I watched my buddies play the end game stuff for Final Fantasy 14 and I was like oh I get the appeal of this it's like trying to coordinate 15 people to all stand on the same sigil on the ground and like time your skills right as as weird and bizarre as that might seem on the outset it's like it's still.

I see what's fun about that, that tactical teamwork.

But at the same time, that's not what I like out of those games either.

It's like I want the end game, but I don't want to have to do 500 hours to get there.

But the 500 hours is what's what makes the back end feel fun.

It's like when you get a new expansion.

It's exciting to have more world experience, more story stuff to go through and then new things to sort of grind out with your buddies and get down perfectly.

But when you remove that buildup, it's like yeah, the thing you're missing is the excitement of there being somewhere to go next, as opposed to just doing more combat stuff over and over again.

I just can't get into them.

I wish I could. because i want to play that version of world of warcraft i think these games there's going to be one that will figure it out and i'll love it forever but we just got to get there and i like seeing all these iterations of it like fellowship but i've played a couple um next fest demos in the past that have tried to do something similar um but they don't quite they're just there's there's just something something they're missing maybe that's just not for you because i'm in the same boat i like whenever i get to the end of an mmo or like my arc raiders uh character at the moment is is like I've done everything like I did everything three weeks ago and I'd be doing the trials.

And this was the first week that I sort of fell off the trials.

I was like, you know, I'm just I'll wait.

I'll wait.

I'll wait until the next big map thing comes or. or whatever or maybe i'll maybe i'll come back but but i'd love to know numbers i'd love to know like when people got to the end of like burning crusade or they got to the end of like a modern wow expansion how many people actually do that end game stuff yeah like i i've always assumed it's like a passionate minority like it's 20 but they play it loads you know what i mean right yeah but i don't know but obviously that's this is aimed at those those people but i'm similar to you guys we're like i never really engaged with this stuff like when i did dungeons it was it was to do the quests that were associated with the dungeons you know and party up with some randoms and apparently that's something the game is struggling with just because of the nature of the Player base and needing to have four people to go in.

I read some of the reviews before we went live and people were saying that, like some of the queuing can take a while.

Like, if you don't go in with a group of four Jeremy, you could be waiting around a while just because trying to get concurrent people on at the same time and all that.

Yeah, that's what I've heard.

I feel like that was part of the reason my buddy was like oh man, it's like you guys got to play this game.

It's like it's so fun.

It was.

We were, like you know, ribbing him a little bit in a friendly way, because he was trying to get someone for every role.

And he's like, obviously, everyone wants to be DPS.

So he was like, I'll heal and we'll have two DPS and then like someone has to tank.

And the three of us were all like, yeah, we all want to be DPS.

And then he kept being like, oh man, like, but like tank is so cool.

Like, man, like tank is so sick though.

Like, yeah.

We were like, oh, why don't you do it then, man?

It was so fucking funny.

But yeah no, I.

I there was the other night.

He was logged on earlier than us to play and was like just posting pictures of being cued for like an hour.

Oh man, so i that is.

If you look on steam, this game has like, recent reviews is mixed and i think most of them allude to the fact that this game is unplayable if you don't come to it with friends.

I wonder if this is like an off-season world of warcraft thing, because they just did midnight right, they just dropped their big expansion for that, and i'm sure there's some other.

I don't think it's not okay, or two.

Whatever the case, maybe people are prepping for it, like getting resources or whatever.

I wonder if this is like Canadian football starts right after American football ends.

So there's something to watch if you're really into football.

It's like, oh, wow, I finished all the wow content.

I'll hop on fellowship for a season.

And then, when that's over, the new wow thing will be out, or Final Fantasy 14, whatever they're playing.

I could see that.

I could see there being appeal there of like people who want new content in that format but not getting it from the MMOs.

Yeah, yeah, this could be, like, a warm-up for midnight or whatever.

A friend of mine was saying the other night we all should have just waited and played midnight.

But like I don't know,

I haven't played WoW in so long.

I don't know if I could play retail.

Yeah, but now you can get a house.

I don't want a house.

You can build it and you can decorate it.

I don't want a house.

With your buddies.

I don't need that, though.

Isn't homesteading what you've always wanted to do?

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

I said this to Jeremy.

They have a Zillow for World of Warcraft now, do they really?

Yeah yeah, i sent him the link the other day.

It's tragic, crazy man.

There's like there's like uh, world of warcraft themed agents that you talk to to like buy the houses they're turning.

World of warcraft used to be a place and then it became a theme park themed after that place, and now it's becoming a a job themed after that theme park.

It is like the millennial power.

Fantasy is to be able to buy a house and do your job in a regular cadence from home.

Wow, this is dark.

World of Warcraft is just work from home.

It's just like you just get to log on and do your dailies and browse Zillow.

I've been playing some crafting games recently and I was thinking about how I would play the game for a while.

And they collect all these resources and build build like a house or do it.

All these these things.

And then afterwards I was like is this just because my real life is harder than I like doing it here?

You know what I mean?

Like, like I was thinking cause you know I was I have to like do a bunch of stuff in the, in the barn to get it fixed up.

I had to put up some, like you know, slats and and wood paneling and and uh and, and you know, put a hang some things.

And I was like, fuck man if this is a video game I could just walk up and press a button and it would like put the picture exactly where it is now but here I have to get the fucking tools and I gotta use my little scanner to make sure I'm not hitting any wires and you know all this stuff and it's like yeah what if I just collected it enough stone yeah build something that is the appeal of those games is like the fact like people like doing we enjoy labor we enjoy the act of maintaining things it is a fun but it's exhausting it is tiring especially if you have other work to do um so the idea of getting to do that with no you know oh i don't have to go call the city first to make sure that i'm in the the border for this i gotta get some guy to come check to make sure the wiring is done right you just you hop in and you do it and it's fun and it's like an enjoyable part of the crafting game universe but i would like a game that was absolutely brutal like that where i have to go wait gotta wait for the permit to come back city hall's gonna email me permits in the game i want that give me that it is funny that like i i think you're right i think a lot of the sort of like productivity simulator games are just tapping into not only how difficult labor is inherently but also how like bureaucratic and covered in red tape everything is because like i you know i was working on trying to build a cabin on a family plot of land and ran into a million fucking local ordinances some of them statewide some of them specific to this county some of them specific to this town and navigating all of that shit turned like a a cheap cabin build into something that it's like i might as well just build like a three bedroom home like it would be almost as expensive um right because they're like oh what you're just this is like an art cabin well what you gotta have like a full fucking setup for like i've what if you build three more bedrooms and it's like i'm not going to though right and so i i think that it's not only the septic tank oh well your leach field has to be this far away from you know um and i so i feel like it's not only that the labor itself it's hard is hard it's that like You can't it's not like the Wild West where it's like, all right, we'll go cut that.

Me and my son are going to cut down a tree and then we're going to chop it up, put a house up.

It's like, oh, no.

Did you get the permits to chop that tree?

Did you call?

Like you know like, if you I've looked at property on the California coast?

Because you know, for obvious reasons, because it fucking rules.

And you have to for each individual tree that you cut down.

In some areas you have to file for each file and to pay a fee for each individual tree you cut down.

And it's like.

And that's like, that's insane.

And I get it.

Like it's the idea is to it's conservation.

Like, but it's like, this isn't clear cutting for timber, which does happen as well.

This is like, I need to cut down three trees so I can, you know, extend the leach field 10 feet.

Right.

And it's doubly frustrating when you're like, I just want to cut down one tree.

Let me sign this paperwork so I can do that.

And they're like, no, it's going to take you six months.

But the alternative is you know, a million dollar corporation, just a billion dollar corporation, just does it, pays the fine of whatever it is and keeps it rolling.

You got to like do it the right way or you're going to be bankrupt.

And they're like, OK, three hundred dollars to cut down a tree.

Nothing.

I'll get to the no clip libertarian podcast.

Yeah, we prefer we.

We demand small government.

No no no, i want the roads full of potholes, like god intended.

Uh yeah, no.

So i feel like it's not only that, it just like sucks.

It sucks for reasons that are so artificial to do stuff like that.

You know it's like i just let me you should be able to.

This is my my final hot take on this.

I think you should be able to file a permit to build a structure.

That is like you have to put up a big sign that says like I didn't build this according to code.

Enter at your own risk.

And you can't sell it to anyone.

And if you ever sell the property, you have to tear it down.

But you're allowed to live in your own death trap.

Yeah.

I like it.

You're right.

This is my left libertarian arc.

You're a full libertarian.

Yeah, it's over.

But, like, cool, like, Noam Chomsky pre-Epstein libertarian.

Okay, a little Ayn Rand libertarianism.

No, no, no, no.

That's not my flavor.

All right.

Well, I mean, presumably she's so good she could just build her own house.

You know what I mean?

Well, true.

The sweat of her brow.

Talented, you know.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Anyway, that was – sorry.

That was fellowship.

Yeah.

The summary of thoughts on Fellowship is it's very fun if you have a full group.

It's probably not if you don't.

And I think you should just play EverQuest on a private server instead, probably.

But I'm a fucking weird old crusty man.

Get a group.

Hit some dummies while you're waiting.

Fellowship available for it's 25 bucks.

Usually 25 off at the moment until March 2nd, the day that World of Warcraft Midnight comes out.

Maybe they know what's going on.

Developed by Chief Rebel out of Stockholm.

So many games out of Stockholm.

And published by their Swedish buddies over at Coffee Stain Publishing, which I think is in Huvde.

And Ark Games, not to be confused with ark raiders i guess um different company although maybe also swedish who knows who knows i don't know or maybe they're you know old testament fans well are they embracer it's ark and i think i think they are i'm looking at embrace are also swedish there you go well that's that explains it so that would be our games yep yeah it used to be gearbox publishing coffee stain also did oh that's not swedish then that's their gearbox publishing but owned by based in sf yeah or yeah so Gearbox obviously based in, well, they were.

Sorry, their parent is Project Golden Ark, so maybe they're split off now.

Oh, but at least Coffee Stay in December 2025 spun off from Embracer Group and became independent.

Okay, good.

Also Swedish.

They did Valheim, right?

Yes, they did.

I think they published.

Published it, not made it.

Yeah, also made in that same town of hovda.

So is um satisfactory also is uh, coffee stain?

Originally their big breakout was goat simulator series.

Ah, all right, i was gonna say.

Valheim and fellowship is funny because they just have the games that are like pseudo mmos at least two of them now.

Oh yeah, you could just combine val.

Well, valheim i guess also has all the crafting stuff which wow doesn't have.

But But it is true.

It is.

Both of them though, like made me feel like I was playing an MMO when I when not playing one, which I think was part of the appeal.

Right.

Yeah.

I'm still in early access.

I wonder when it's that's 1.0 came out five years ago now, February 2021.

That was a big, big season two of COVID games.

For sure.

Season two.

Did you get the battle pass to COVID?

Oh, I got the battle pass.

Oh, shit, man.

Dude, they're dropping new shots I got to take for this.

This is brutal.

It's a live game, man.

Yeah.

It's a live game.

Sponsored by Moderna.

Fellowship.

Yeah, all my games are basically embargoed or Next Fest stuff I want to talk about at a proper clip.

Uh, later on we're gonna have a next video out.

When are we doing all that stuff?

Jesse, is it?

I would love that to be out friday, so if we can all get together, to be great.

But if it comes out next week, not a problem.

Courts and bits and bobs and send them over to jesse.

But you've been playing some Next Fest stuff you want to talk about.

Yes.

There are tons of games that I'll probably end up talking about.

This is a really cool Next Fest.

There's a lot of great projects that I've been waiting to play.

So this is really cool.

But I'll just talk about a couple of them here to not overshadow the video that's coming out at some point in the near future.

So one of them that I was excited about from PAX East.

I played a demo of it a while ago called Lucid.

This is like a Celeste-style 2D platformer that leans a lot harder on the hardcore platforming gameplay stuff.

It feels sort of what I was saying with Fellowship of wanting to get to the endgame stuff.

Lucid pretty quickly feels like the endgame of of Celeste, of like doing big action platformy stuff.

It's not just trying to do a dash.

It's like, can you dash off the floor to get a thing?

And can you do, you know, are you wave dashing in the game?

It feels a lot closer to that.

It's slick.

It sounds great.

It looks awesome.

There's really not much to say about it, other than it's just it's a really good feeling, good looking version of a 2d platformer that I think uh, for people who want more of that late game Celeste style gameplay it's, it's something you should check out for sure.

It's a ton of combat in it as well, sort of not like in the traditional sense.

It's sort of just like dashy style combat stuff.

Um, it's pretty cool it's, it's very.

I think it's it's worth checking out again if you want that kind of end game.

Stuff looks um yeah, it looks great.

Yeah, pixel art's really good.

I think it's a team out of massachusetts, i think they're definitely american black.

There you go.

Yeah, or sorry, matt black matt black, matt black, not black matt.

No um yeah lucid, very good game.

Uh, the other one, map map.

I think i've talked about this one in the past, at least in in passing.

Um, this was one that I believe won uh, some of the grant from Alan Hazelden's.

Uh Hazelden, or yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Is that right?

I think so.

Um, Drackneck and friends grant.

Uh, so big project that they had a lot of faith in.

And just from the demo, I am love with this game.

I think this looks and plays fantastic.

So it's a game about, um, trying to place different, uh, POIs on a map onto like literally on a map, like you are putting the Google Maps pin onto an in-game version of the map that you have.

You walk around and like, yeah, sorry, you walk around in third person in 3D as the character.

I forget what the player character's name is.

Um, but they're all like young kids.

Like it's a little girl you're playing as and you meet like a friend and they all.

There's a little bit of dialogue stuff just to sort of set up the game.

Um, pretty early on, you kind of get the idea of like okay, I'm placing a Google maps pin with no direction.

You have a map with like no landmarks written on it, no names, no direction, no compass rows.

There's, you get a legend sometimes.

Um, but that's about it.

Uh or like scale, but you have to using the in-game tools of like you have a pen and paper, or so you have a pen and a crayon and like an eraser and you can draw stuff on the map to uh, to make it look.

However, you want to keep track of what you're doing as you're maneuvering around on the map, sort of track your character and then figure out where you have to place the google maps pin.

Now, at first i was like this will be pretty easy.

The maps are pretty straightforward, it's not a big deal.

Like the third level of this game, which i think is still tutorial mode, took me like 20 minutes, like it was really hard.

You can count your steps by holding at least on mouse and keyboard left click to like walk forward.

Every step is tracked.

10 steps on the map is like a certain amount of space.

And you go from there and like try to trace your steps and figure out where something is and then mark it.

And you're rated based on how close your pin is to the actual thing you're trying to place on it.

So it's like, it's kind of like geoguessr, but it's like, like a third person geoguessr.

Exactly.

It's like you're not limited by the Google Maps thing.

You can, if you.

Sometimes you're playing that game you're like man.

I want to see what's behind the store.

You can go behind that store.

This is my Todd Howard pitch on MapMap.

You can see that store.

You can go behind it.

It's man.

I really, really like this.

I'd love to see how long this goes for, even if it's just like a four or five hour little puzzle game.

I was in love with the presentation of it and the way they did everything.

There's so many little smart like not landmarks but just things that make it obvious how to sort of like breadcrumb your way back to something like oh, I saw this stick sticking out of the ground with this leaf on it.

Okay.

So that means that that's where this is.

And like you feel like you get lost in the woods when you're out for a really long hike and you're like, oh okay.

Thank God.

It's those three rocks I saw an hour ago.

We're almost home.

Do you have a compass?

Not not always.

From what I can tell, it seems like it's based on the level you're doing.

They give you certain tools right out the gate.

They do.

You do write a lot of stuff down.

This was something I was actually surprised by, too.

Your point of is there a compass?

Sometimes it seems like every map actually has it.

So far you're on these little archipelagos, the little island that I was on, they will usually have a compass rose on it, like a big landmark stone compass on it.

Ah, and you have to write that down in your map.

If you want to keep track of where it is, they don't always put it on the map automatically for you.

So stuff like that, where like, this is a useful landmark for me to figure out positioning.

I have to write that down.

It's not like the game always keeping track of it for you.

So maybe you don't think you need it.

Maybe you do.

Maybe it's helpful.

Maybe there are things that aren't literally a compass on the on the map that you think might be helpful.

Um, Yeah, it's a very, very smart demo.

It's one of those things you play, you get it kind of right away.

You're like, I want to play the full thing.

I don't want to keep playing more of this demo, which is a compliment.

It looks cool.

I'm definitely going to get this go.

It's like a deconstruction of sort of how we think about maps and because you take it for granted that games is going to tell you everything about where you need to go and how fast to get there.

And this is kind of saying the opposite was thinking about the.

The cairn video that jeremy made of like this is the.

This is the direction version of what cairn does for climbing, of like trying to figure out how to traverse an area on your own.

Truly like it's not, you know, red dead redemption scale or anything, but it is still a detailed enough map that you have to like oh, the ravine is here, but which ravine is it?

And how does it split off from the creek relative to where i'm standing?

So i know how to keep track of the steps i'm taking.

Like little things like that, even on again, a tutorial level, that just feel really like mind-blowingly.

Like you know, i just i figure i ignore this stuff in open world games.

So when i'm realizing it again in such a beautifully rendered but like not overly detailed game, it makes me rethink everything that i've done for the last 15, 20 years of playing video games.

Yeah, karen is actually a great comparison, because not only because it's like in a similar way, drawing you into sort of like immersion in the world and paying attention to details, but also the.

The counter example i used in the karen video of what karen does is like big open-world games where you're just playing the mini-map and this is the inverse, where it's like you're regenerating.

You have to like think about the map in the reverse way that maps function in video games, which is like you are the map maker.

It's, like, in the same way that, like, um...

Not to bring up World of Warcraft 10 times on this podcast, but the original WoW map was very representative.

It wasn't one-to-one.

It was sort of like, here's Goldshire, and it was like a little picture of a building.

But it wasn't one building.

Goldshire was like a couple small buildings or whatever.

In the way that maps are representative...

Because it's not exact when you perceive those places you're not like.

Oh, here's the one building from the map.

You're like, oh, this is the place that was represented by that thing.

So when you turn that on its head, it's like, Now you're like, oh, there is a ravine here.

Let me like add this to my my mental map and also to the physical map of the game.

That's very cool.

I want to play this, too.

Yeah.

Give it a shot.

Also, if you like it, I don't know if the demo is still available.

Let me check.

But it's for a game called Locator on Steam as well.

I talked about this one in the past.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That is another one of those.

That's really, really great.

I like those two games in particular.

I'm very excited for I got really into GeoGuessr for a while.

So. you guys are so fun dude it's so much fun it's so fucking good there's something so addictive about the first time you're like oh this is the fucking we're in the andes and then you drop a pin and it's like 800 meters i'm a god i'm so smart you get the street turn it like yeah or like eventually you hit somewhere you've been you know what i mean yeah like a major city you visited once or something and you're like yeah amazing yeah that's pretty cool uh yeah map map a game about maps is the full title on that and then uh you also had is a titanium court yes yeah okay i'm gonna get this one out of the way quickly because i feel like if you keep up with demos or you keep up with games journalism in any regard you've probably seen the name come up a couple times it's a new game from uh ap thompson i believe is the name correct um yeah it's uh a very weird video game in the same sort of way that i think I think you play a game like Titanium Court, a match three auto battler game if you want to give it some genre descriptions.

And it's like it doesn't make any sense.

Trying to give it genre descriptions feels unfair because it's like it's not about that.

It's almost kind of making fun of itself while letting you play the match three of it.

Like I played. just enough of it for me to go, OK, this is weird.

And I stopped playing after a point where it was still in the tutorial, like 20, 30 minutes.

It was still explaining things to me almost in a way where it doesn't feel like there's anything serious to do about it.

It's just go play the demo.

Go play.

It's so weird.

It's like an absurdist uh visual novel mixed with a match three game mitched with a match with a you know.

There's like a million things going on.

They're mitching, they're matching.

It's crazy.

It's just, it's a bizarre game.

There's a reason.

Nobody has been very explicit about what you do in this.

Not because it's like you need to see it for yourself.

It's just like if i explained it it wouldn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense in the game either.

You, You just need to see it.

I'm watching the trailer here and I'm like, what is going on?

It doesn't make any sense.

There's a reason that the presentation of it is like a, like a stage play, like there are curtains on both sides of the game.

They have been drawn open.

You are watching an absurdist play in video game form.

It is absolutely the weirdest thing I've played in months now.

And it is.

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

I don't know.

I need to play more of this before I can give a genuinely positive description of it.

But it is at least fun to play something that feels this bizarre right out of the gate.

It's not like like Frank was saying about Romeo is a dead man.

Like it's nice to play stuff that you just don't know what's coming around the corner every five minutes.

And this game is like every 10 seconds.

It's so weird.

Yeah, we had fun doing a quick look for it.

We recorded just at the end of last week.

It went up today, actually, on Noclip, too.

That game is.

Yeah, what a.

I was trying to think of a title for the video and I was like oh, this is like a love letter to so many different types of games.

Some you'll be familiar with and some that I didn't have a clue, like when Frank is making tonkatsu and trying to chat up that nurse.

That was so funny, that was great.

Um yeah, it's just a wild ass game.

Uh cool, titanium course map map, a game about maps, and lucid are the three games jess was talking about.

But make sure you check out our next best video um, which will be coming out pretty soon, at time of recording here uh, our time of release of this podcast um, over on noclip2.

We also have a great pico 8 video from nocaps which uh, May or may not go out this week.

She did a great job.

It's all about Source.

I would call it a sort of introduction to the world of Pico-8.

Like, what are Pico-8 games?

How does the engine work?

And what are some cool games you can play?

Which, yeah, I dabbled in that world.

I think it came up in a couple of our docs.

I want to say, like, I don't know.

Did we, Jeremy?

I know Spelunky wasn't that, but I feel like some Pico-8 stuff has come up.

Maybe it was just on the pod, i don't know.

Maybe, maybe not.

Um, but yeah, very cool little engine sort of uh design constraints forcing innovative ideas, that type of thing.

So very very, very cool.

That's all the games we have to talk about this week um, i believe.

But we do have some emails.

Frank howley Yeah please, if you want to send us emails, write to us podcast at noclipvideo or in the patron server in the podcast chat channel.

You can at me, Frank, and I'll add it to our list.

Our first email comes from Eric asking, what are the oldest art games?

Are there any games from the early days 80s, early 90s you think really stand the test of time as great works of art?

Not for their innovation, but for the qualities we typically associate with the more recent art games.

Great writing, emotional resonance, philosophical themes, clever upending of expectations, etc.

I'm having trouble thinking of anything that fits this, but I'm sure there must have been some clever, insightful gems from as far back as the text parser era.

Any and all genres welcome.

That's a great question.

When did games start to start to?

You know, when did the our games arsh conversation?

I feel like that was a early 2000s conversation.

That was like an indie game, renaissance thing of like.

Yeah 2005 2006, i think.

The early one i can think of is like passing passage, i think it's called by jason roar.

Um, that was one of the first ones i played.

That was like purely trying to just be an artsy fartsy.

No, you know, complimentary uh, video game uh, but i can't think of earlier ones because i wouldn't have been alive yet.

I've never played it.

But Heather Campbell always talks about another world or out of this world.

I was.

I was literally I was.

I was thinking, I had it in my head and I was Googling, trying to figure out the name, because I could not remember the name.

But you're right.

Sorry.

Go ahead, Frank.

Yeah no, I've never played it, but it's.

I think it's just like a cinematic platform where we're just going from left to right.

But it's like, I mean, well like prince of the original prince of persia just in terms of animation is outstanding but i think another world is kind of like that but just the cinematic adventure maybe it's two hours it's like it was like a free game on ps4 i meant to play it i have never played it but i've always heard of that was like like i remember when heather told me about it year decades whatever so long ago she was like yeah this was like what i think she probably wrote about it for like action button she was part of a collective with like tim rogers and that was like you know the the cashier de cinema like cashier to gamers like early 2000s everyone like yeah like her like i think those articles are still up but i think she wrote a piece about yeah i've played it i played it um i mean it came out on everything back in the day i had on the on the amiga but there was a genesis version it's it came out on everything i think just because of how beautiful like like it was sort of um i want to say it was made in france And it has that sort of like French sci-fi feel to it.

You know, we always talk about Mobius, but then like even games like Outcast, you know what I mean?

Or like Omicron, The Nomad Soul.

Like there's a sort of a, you know, who's the director of Fifth Element again?

What's his name again?

Yeah, Luc Besson.

He does a similar thing as well, right?

There is a Frank franco tech sort of look that you get with some of these um, but yeah, it was called another world over in europe, i think.

Out of this world was the uh um, north american title for it, but yeah 100, it's sort of a it's.

It's in an era where, like a lot of like side scrollers were very gameplay focused.

This was very much a style I don't want to say style over substance, but definitely more of a style art kind of experience.

It was very different back then because of that, you know, because there were other games that like look great.

Like you mentioned Prince of Persia or like Beneath the Steel Sky.

There was, there was, there was games that had this sort of like beautiful pixel art.

You know, in the case of Prince of Persia, rotoscopy and stuff.

But but another world was very. about how it looked and sort of what it was saying rather than the gameplay of it you know he sort of played it despite the gameplay if it was relatively simplistic sort of gameplay wise yeah i feel like a lot of because i played that game as a kid i actually didn't know what it was called for like 15 years after i played it as a kid i played it i would always play it at my friend andrew's house and i had no idea what it was i just we could never get anywhere in it but we were just weirdly obsessed with it um but i feel like it's similar to how i feel about silent hill where it's so much about uh atmosphere and like creating like a sense of mood um i think that's that's a strong aspect of a lot of like art art games or whatever um as opposed to i think when a lot of people hear art game now they're like it's a first person walking simulator about how like your sister killed herself or something um i am trying to think of other ones there's sorry i mean i'll be honest another world is a walking simulator yeah yeah that's fair uh i was trying to remember the name of it i just finally found it um uh the marriage from 2007 by rod humble um another sort of like early art game very very abstracted it's just like spheres and boxes um but it attempts to use purely mechanics to talk about sort of the uh it's been a long time since i played it like the dissolution of his marriage or like the tension in his marriage but told entirely through gameplay mechanics right um i i remember playing that a very long time ago and thinking it was very interesting that Like, to me, a game that was like an art game was something where it's telling you with text or with voiceover or something.

It's like, oh, my marriage is falling apart.

It's very cool to have the title imply all of the context and then have the game mechanics sort of explore it.

So Flashback, I mean, it sounds like Another World.

Sorry, not Flashback.

Another World is probably, I mean, because we're talking like early 90s on that one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Actually, all games are art.

The earliest one's Tennis for Two.

Okay.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Is Tennis art, though?

No.

There's an art to it.

If you take a sport and you make it a video game, it becomes art.

Oh, wow.

That's the wildest thing you've ever said.

Brutal sports football is art.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a barbaric, pointless activity, and then you make it digital, and now it's art.

Whoa, oh my god.

If I could hold a controller playing this thing, it suddenly becomes important to me.

Oh, Deluxe Pain 3.

Okay.

That's an art game.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, Mario Paint.

That true?

You make art in that game.

Mario is missing?

That's not art.

That one I'm voting not art.

I would also argue, like, Pico's School by Tom Fulp is, like, in terms of, like, progressive art.

Like it was a game made about the Columbine Massacre, like shortly after a satire of it, and like also just using brand new mediums.

It was like, holy shit, it's like john waters dude.

I've never seen this before.

This game looks insane.

You've never played this game that you have just explained.

The like five year age difference between yeah yeah, that's crazy.

There was five years of internet i missed out on.

I got into madness.

That was about it.

This was the closest i remember playing a game where you were like condoleezza rice and and uh, george w bush and Fighting off terrorists trying to break into the White House.

That I remember, but this I have never seen before.

That's wild.

My wife's grandmother's next door neighbor.

Really?

That's insane.

Yeah, in like an apartment building in D.C.

That's so cool. yeah uh i would love to someday just sit in while jesse plays a bunch of old flash games that are like influential to me but you have missed out on like it sucks because i played a lot of flash games i was poor as hell man flash games was like where i went to play video games um but this stuff i don't know maybe i saw it and i was like what's the fun in that there's no cute little turtle for me to toss and toss the turtle or whatever i don't know talking about tossing turtles oh all right okay is this a thing too all right i didn't know toss the turtle we need to get you to watch that uh do you remember that counter-strike uh flash video i don't remember this one all right i gotta find that thing i've definitely unlocked some memories and some listeners on that one it was like a yeah pretty weird thing jesse did you ever oh sorry i was just gonna say jesse did you ever watch pure ownage pure ownage the name doesn't ring a bell dog man the owner unfortunately yeah i don't know cooking with dave his name is dave so we're cooking with dave cooking with dave he's pro at cooking oh dude we gotta just do like a fucking like a flash flash game in old internet culturing jesse do it like i mean jesse has no excuse on pure ownage because they're fucking canadians That's hey, listen, I don't know everything that's going on up here.

I don't read the Globe and Mail.

I don't know who's writing for them anymore.

Give me a break.

Red Green Show.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, that's just you watch that when you come out of the womb.

That's different.

Yeah.

You know, I do like the idea of that, though.

It's like everyone's older brother sitting down to show them the funniest thing ever.

And then the kids do not laugh at it the entire time.

I'm not sure if if a bald man shouting boom headshot over and over again would make me laugh as much as a 40 year old.

But yeah, I used to have a pure ownage like uh, i own iphone noobs shirt i got, which was like self-aware but like really wasn't if somebody saw you wearing it.

Um, and they released the dvd.

I want to say like six, seven years, oh god sorry, um years ago we did uh, didn't even catch it.

I have to do it myself.

It's like when you pass a church you gotta bless yourself, you know?

Um, they released a DVD.

I have a copy of it here, but it was like a Kickstarter thing, I think.

And I think they did a new season, actually, is what happened, with the owner returning.

But yeah, we should totally interview those guys.

I bet they'd be down.

We could totally get them.

That'd be fun.

Yeah.

Did you ever watch Cooking with Dave?

They did a bunch of split-off stuff, and they had a friend...

I believe his name is Dawei.

He was the Asian-American guy.

And he said they did a cooking show with him.

And it's just funny.

He has like a beautiful assistant, but they're always like way better than him.

So he replaces them every episode.

It's pretty good stuff.

I do not remember that at all.

I got to find that.

All right, Frank, keep the ball rolling.

Yeah.

Alt asked, how often do you use guides as part of your gaming?

There are some games like the Yakuza, Like a Dragon series Labyrinth of Galleria, in which game facts have been a staple part of my experience as a way to opt out of systems I'm not particularly interested in or as a way to make sure I'm not missing anything.

It also feels like the Souls-like games are often built around encouraging the community to share info and have a reference handy when you're playing.

Hmm.

I don't really do it.

I try to avoid using guides as much as I can.

I'm not really interested in completing everything or if I miss something, that's okay.

My intended or my version of the game that I just played is the one where I didn't see that content.

That's okay with me.

Um, but I do like watching or reading, uh, like old written let's plays of games.

I'm never going to play where someone goes through their experience like early versions of let's plays that were written guides.

Those are fun, but like guide guides, I mean, it's not my job to finish them a hundred percent.

So I don't care.

I'm sure Frank, you act, you have to dive into the, uh, game facts for some real crap sometimes.

I bet.

Yeah.

I mean like with me, like just a just playing a game, like if I get stalled for more than five minutes I'm not having fun.

I'll just Google it or pull it up. um and then on the other side of like looking at uh like trophies or whatever it's like okay here there's a very specific trophy but it just takes 10 minutes go to this menu this many menu equip this item use it on this like i'll do that and then um yeah i'm trying to think of example with like no clip stuff like i feel like like like one example of is like outer worlds where there's like three endings of stuff like when we did that like five years ago like it's like to get this specific ending or whatever, I have to look up guides, like, use this dialogue option on this character to get, so it's like, you'll have to go back and stuff like that. and i feel like like with a lot of survival horror games i can't think what specifically i feel like silent hill 4 got to a point where that game was so hard i was like suffering and my ai companion was bloody the entire time i was like i'm just using a guy like the second half of the game because it got so horrific um like um yeah so i i have no no the thing i avoid is like i won't look at a guy before i dive in like i'll fit i'll i'll wander blind for a bit and then once i get stuck i'll i'll google it and look it up and then it's kind of like letting go of like a rail like okay i can i can kind of like the equivalent like like when i'm rollers trying to roller skate or something it's like oh no okay let me do this and as soon as i start to slip i grab the guide again so what i've just realized right now is that one of the games i was playing the embargo is up on wednesday oh okay And it's a game that at one stage I was like, I wish there was a guide after this.

Cause this happens sometimes, where you're playing a game and you're like like pre-release and you're like fuck, I'm stuck man.

I can't like this up.

So I've played like five or six hours of Resident Evil Requiem.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Thumbs up, thumbs down.

I like it.

Yeah, I think it's great.

The, you know, so this is like basically Resident Evil 9, right?

This is the one after.

Renanquium, yeah.

So it's like half first person where you're playing the girl and it's. half third person action game where you're playing as uh leon is it i'm so bad with the lore yeah i'm so bad with the lore of resident evil i'm worse with final fantasy so you should definitely listen to our um advent children patron exclusive podcast over on noclip um uh this week uh but uh yeah yeah i've been enjoying the first person stuff more for sure i'm less interested in the the third person bits and bobs and they get introduced a little bit later um but uh yeah scary atmospheric story stuff even though i don't really care all that much about the broad you know um lore of this because it's referencing people obviously from two obviously with him and then you know outbreak and other stuff so it's it's i i think it's attempting to pull in more of the you know what i liked about seven and eight is that they were when i was close um they were uh sort of divorced largely from the resident evil world i know like the ending of eight becomes very resident evilly and it's kind of fun that it does that but like they're kind of their own thing you know what i mean yeah this this feels more like it's about uh the the you know i'm not all that far into it but um it feels more stepped in steeped in that i'm i'm less interested in that from a narrative perspective but the narrative stuff has been like well delivered and cut scenes look gorgeous and um yeah the the you know the first person walking around the hat that you know the buildings you're in at night type stuff just has never looked as good it looks super super slick um yeah you can you can also the game at the start asks you if you if if if you want to play the other games in the other modes so i'm pretty sure i haven't done it yet but i'm pretty sure you can play third person first person stuff and first person third person stuff like you don't have to do it that way um that would see i would based on how the games play, I think both of those scenarios would be nightmarish.

Um, cause they really have been designed clearly with those things in mind.

Uh, but that's an example.

Sometimes you run into, or I'm playing a game that's an alpha of a game.

That's why we're not going to be here for years now.

And like, there's no guides for that.

So you just have to try and figure it out.

Like I was looking for a recipe for something for ages and I was like trying to figure out where to get it.

Um, but yeah, I, I tend not to use, um, guides.

The one I did recently was there was somebody in the R creators community who made basically the sort of like cookbook of what stuff you should keep and what stuff you should get rid of.

Yeah.

You know, because one of the problems is like if you're doing the expedition, eventually you might need three rusted gears.

And you've been selling these things for hours.

And then you're, you're like, so I have to go find three rusted gears.

Like till stage four, all of a sudden they're like, do you have any, uh, humidifiers?

And you're like, Oh yeah, a hundred percent.

And you're like light bulbs, stuff that you just you sell it cause they're worth a bit but they're they're not all that important looking.

Um, so what I got there was somebody who had like a page and you could like get it for free or pay what you want.

And I paid them like five bucks and I got this like basically a big PNG.

That was just like here is the shit you need to worry about later.

Don't sell it now.

And that was super helpful.

But yeah, otherwise not so much.

I have kind of an inverse guide experience.

Sorry, I have a frog in my throat.

Jesus.

A literal frog.

Get him out of here.

Trying to stay warm, is it?

We're all fighting for our lives out here.

Um, playing pathologic 2 has been like a.

It's an interesting experience, because not only have i not referenced a guide for it, but i've had this feeling that i might do a video essay on this someday.

I think it's there's meat on this bone to explore.

But um, When Pathologic 2, when it progresses a day, it'll be like certain opportunities have been lost forever.

And it doesn't tell you what that means.

It doesn't tell you what opportunities.

People die and, like you may finish the game never knowing, if you just like don't go to where they were at or run into them again, or run into people that were associated with them.

And it's interesting because the thing that it does is it doesn't tell you like Go talk to this guy in the next six hours.

It'll just give you a bunch of stuff and then a day will progress and then like a bunch of new stuff pops up so you can let stuff fall by the wayside and kind of never think about it.

Um, but but the the freedom to not know if you're fucking up is very empowering, because you would think like more information is empowering.

You would think like, oh i, if i?

I know this is going to end sooner than this, so i need to prioritize this over this.

But having no fucking idea is like a way more free feeling, because it's like you're gonna fuck something up.

You know that.

And so accepting that off the bat makes you feel free to just do what you want, because you have to accept that you can't do it all.

And I think that's cool.

Like to Jesse's point, it's like my playthrough will be my playthrough.

I don't need to be a completionist.

And in Patho's situation, it's like, I don't even know if you can be a completionist.

There is very like picking sides in some of it.

But aside from the faction stuff, it's just like, I don't think you can do it all.

So you might as well just do the stuff that interests you naturally.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Frees you up a bit.

That's the thing about a lot of guide stuff, especially in the Souls games, is that I like the mystery in the Souls games and it's only when I'm pushed right to the edge I'm like you know what.

I should probably look this up.

Or maybe a certain boss I'm having trouble with.

I might be like oh, what's a good strategy for this?

But it's only when I feel like you're sort of pushed to do it is when I feel the need to do it.

So if you don't feel that pressure, you're like oh, there's different ways of doing this stuff, then it's less on your back.

The only thing I was ever glad I looked up in a Souls game was in Dark Souls 2.

There's a boss that is near impossible unless you're very, very overleveled, unless you go and you light a certain thing on fire in the world before you fight them.

And I was just like, I was like, why is this boss?

Like, what am I fucking missing?

What mechanic am I missing?

And I just never would have even tried that.

Because you don't light anything else on fucking fire in the game.

Like, there's no tutorial for it.

There's no, like, onboarding.

It's just like, you better think of this weird orthogonal thing.

It's like a dev tool they put in, you know.

Fuck, I got to do the thing again.

All right, I'll just set up.

So if you light this one fucking lantern, it takes half its health off, or whatever.

The debug windmill.

Exactly, yes.

Frank, we got an interesting message from China.

China.

Oh, I thought you were talking about the wrestler China.

I was like, what?

How do you know that?

Jesus Christ.

Is she dead?

Yeah, but there's a lot of WWE 2K26.

There literally is a 6-7 emote in WWE 2K26.

But Whirling Candy, which is Mizuki's finishing move from TJPW, is going to be in the game.

So I'm very, very, very happy.

We have an official Joshi move in the game, which is huge. wait why i'm so confused okay we go back to china i just i just love if you talk about if i mentioned china to you you're like you you are so into the world of 90s pop culture that you assume that it's yeah china the the abusive domestic partner to tupac or xbox sorry not tupac no i regret not hijacking the serial threat because the biggest thing my life happened this last week um we i finally reached the um the bird shit era of wcw so i've watched two hour two years of wcw now i've reached april 1999 wcw where they have changed the logo and it's completely all downhill from here okay and they've changed the soundtrack from like cheesy 90s willing guitar riffs to like drum and bass and jungle music and it's like the greatest the like so yeah so i it's just like oh i'm i i'm trying to watch as much wcw as i can before i go to japan and then when i'm in japan i'll buy as much wcw merch as i can amazing and then come back and head to wrestlemania vegas weekend and all that stuff wait what was the serial connection i was also curious no i i just i just got to disengage i apologize but like the serial stuff is just like i wish we could have gotten to email soon or something i just i just like check i so i feel so bad but i just don't want to talk about cereal it's just it's like a it's like a such a mundane thing that was like oh my god i felt so bad my brain was like it was traveling light speed like was there a serial promotion on wcw but it's like i felt so bad i was just like i just don't want to talk about serial who gives a shit about captain crutch no that's why i want to talk about wc who would be the worst wrestler to get a pack of like china owes would be pretty bad but like chris benoit because like oh my god yeah of course of course like that was a fucking soft lob if ever i was yeah okay yeah all right let's keep going all right what would you call you could call them like crossfit cripples crippler rose or something like that it's like uh yeah let me see crippling crossface you'd have to like Let's not.

Okay, okay.

All right, all right.

Wait, the New Day has cereal called Booty-Os.

Okay, all right.

Booty-Os are great.

Yeah, that's a good point.

That's a good one, yeah.

Alfred asked about game merch.

Last week, I finished a month-long internship at a cool company in Hangzhou, China.

The office was around the corner from the official Black Myth Wukong store.

On a day off, I made the trip over there, and it blew me away.

Life-size models of Sun Wukong and various bosses filled the store, and the walls were plastered with concept art and random historical artifacts, like real armor and swords from various dynasties.

Ooh.

I'm trying not to make this sound like an ad, but I picked up a button shirt from there and I have not stopped wearing it since.

My question is, what piece of video game merch apparel do you most appreciate?

Either something surprisingly high quality or something you bought in a special place.

Ooh.

Hmm.

I mean, I've got Jeremy's Mario grailed hash here in the studio.

From Poland, baby uh.

I got a uh t-shirt for my birthday from chelsea and it's a uh.

It's a silent hill three and it's a screen print of heather standing in the bread store the bakery in the mall at the beginning, and it just says it's bread, which is what it says when you inspect the bread in the bakery perfect, it's bread.

That's fantastic.

I purposely tell people to never buy me video game merch, because I would rather not have all my friends and family think that's the one thing I care about in life, even though I do play a lot of video games.

So the only thing I have relative to that is when I was a child.

I got into the Digimon series because of Digimon Adventure.

And I found this photo recently while I was making a slideshow for our baby shower.

It's my brother and I – I don't know how to focus –

I am Agumon and he is Gabumon.

And that is maybe the greatest picture of me that will ever.

I'm posing my ass off.

I straight up.

I'm digi posing.

You are.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

Did you get much candy?

Do people know what you are?

They're like, oh, you're a dinosaur.

I think I got a lot of, oh, it's Charizard.

And that probably would have been it.

I don't know what they thought my brother was, though.

Which in fairness, it is kind of Charizard.

It's basically the same fucking thing.

His move is called Pepper Blast.

Like, okay, whatever you say.

Pepper Blast!

Yeah, all right.

I had a t-shirt in middle school that said... You could never wear this at a school in 2026.

It said zombie hunter.

It had the head from the zombie from the beginning of Resident Evil.

And it had two crossed shotguns, like a skull and crossbones.

But it was a zombie and two crossed shotguns.

And I... got toothpaste all over it and then it wouldn't wash out.

So it was stained with toothpaste.

Oh yeah, you got toothpaste all over it.

I literally did get toothpaste all over it.

And then I went to school and someone was like, why is there like cum stains all over your shirt?

And I never wore it again.

I was so sad.

I was like, no dude, it's toothpaste.

They're like, yeah, we're fucking, all right.

You're triggering my trauma.

You're bullying me all over again.

I literally got toothpaste on a shirt yesterday and laughed about it because I was like lol, toothpaste.

It is devastating when it happens.

It's indistinguishable.

But it was a sick shirt.

You skipped your cornflakes that morning, huh?

Yeah, yeah.

I was too busy hunting zombies.

Oh, my God.

Hunting zombies.

My my, my super lame answer to this is after we did the secret tape Half-Life documentaries, I wanted to like I was so like I kind of we had so much fun there and we took pictures there like Frank and I and we, you know, you know, had fun but we didn't have like a know i did that was maybe the project that i was like most proud of, just creatively, because it was really difficult and it's my favorite game ever and all that um.

So i was like uh, i'm going to get something like super special for this and i found the um on ebay, the gordon freeman like statue.

Like it's like a foot tall gordon freeman.

I forget who made it, it was like one of the good statue maker people or whatever.

But they stopped selling them, like you know 15, 20 years ago or whatever.

They have one at the Valve Studio and I got one of those on eBay.

And it's it's basically the like on a table in the studio.

It's like my favorite thing.

It's right there.

So probably that.

But then I also have all those or not all, but I have our own copies of the signed Half-Life one and two posters that we did during that shoot as well.

That's cool.

I have my little Half-Life shrine in the office which hopefully I'll be recording out of there soon.

It's like almost done.

There was a bunch of extra work to do with just making it look nice, but it's almost there.

So I'll be recording the podcast out there pretty soon, which will be pretty cool.

I've got to film some B-roll for one of Jeremy's docs.

The Star Wars Galaxies box I have out there at the moment.

Going to record some shots of that.

Yeah, so we'll have some cool stuff.

Um, speaking of march, we should hopefully maybe we'll be able to talk about it soon have an interesting march drop for the 10th anniversary of noclip in september.

So yeah, keep your eyes peeled for that and in the meantime, just you know, grab a copy of developing hell over on fangamercom.

That's the podcast this week, folks.

If you want to have any more, though, become a patron of NoteClip.

Our new patron-exclusive podcast this month is a review of Final Fantasy Advent Children, which we are recording after that.

I'm already seeing reactions from people here.

We're going to record it after this, and it'll be up this week.

A nice double feature with our previous review of Final Fantasy Spirits Within.

Sadly, no Steve Buscemi in this one, though.

Um, some other other good stuff half the kingdom hearts voice cast apparently, are in this one.

Yeah, depending on what version you watched.

We're gonna have to talk about that as well.

It's a bit of a weird situation um, but yeah, that's uh.

That's it for this week.

We have a great stuff up on the noclip2 channel at the moment i am trying i basically episode five of disco is done.

I'm still finishing episode six.

It's the last episode for early access, so i can't mess it up, so That's why it's taken a little bit longer, but hopefully shouldn't be too much longer now.

And we'll get those two out kind of back to back, I suspect.

But just make sure you check out Jeremy's awesome video essay on freedom and games all about Karn and Breath of the Wild and Death Stranding.

And make sure you check out Frank's awesome DDR like mini dock feature over on Noclip 2 as well.

And those are a really good sign of the stuff that we're doing on Noclip 2 and want to do more of um, you know, more sort of feature length stuff.

Uh, you know well produced, post-produced um stuff and it seems like people really like them, so that's awesome, of course.

Uh, great new games you need to play as well.

For january we put out and we'll have something on that in february, although the uh next fest stuff might trickle into that.

We'll have to have a little chat about that.

Uh, there's a romeo is a dead man.

Quick look up on noclip2 as well.

It just went live before the podcast recording here today.

Um and yeah, like i said, no caps, pico eight video as well, and then, once we get a, once we get a disco done, we have a couple of things.

We have some more videos from torby about the making of ever bloom.

We have uh, jeremy's uh star wars galaxy video, which he has been very patiently waiting for me to get around to getting in the hopper.

Uh, our cyberpunk series and loads more stuff and hades too and loads of other things.

So loads of stuff coming On Noclip and Noclip 2 as well.

And then later in March, we'll be able to talk about it.

We are collaborating with a bunch of underground devs on a interesting Steam festival that's coming.

And we are going to be sort of media partners for that and showcasing a bunch of really cool games.

Kind of the type of stuff we've already been covering on Noclip 2.

By sort of happenstance, one of the folks who's organizing this uh, this awesome festival was like oh, you're already talking about like the types of games that we want to highlight in this festival, so let's, let's do a collab so we'll be able to talk about that pretty soon as well.

All right, i'm gonna leave it there so the lads can take a quick break and we can talk about the longest final fantasy cutscene ever made.

Um, thank you so much for listening to this pod and we'll see you next week.

Good luck.

[Noclip Podcast Episode 269: Blizzard Tales, Cereal Nostalgia, and Indie Game Deep Dives]-[Fellowship, Steam Next Fest]

📋 Summary

The Noclip Crew Returns

A Deep Dive into Cereal Culture

Video Games: Fellowship and the Search for Meaning

Next Fest Highlights

Gaming Philosophy and Mailbag

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Noclip Podcast Episode 269: Blizzard Tales, Cereal Nostalgia, and Indie Game Deep Dives]-[Fellowship, Steam Next Fest]

📋 Summary

The Noclip Crew Returns

A Deep Dive into Cereal Culture

Video Games: Fellowship and the Search for Meaning

Next Fest Highlights

Gaming Philosophy and Mailbag

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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