Mario Kart World, PEAK, Steam Next Fest | Noclip Crewcast

Hey what's going on gamers?

Welcome to the Noclip Crewcast This is episode 232 We out here, we in this You know who's not in this?

Daniel Dwyer, he's off He's not on the beach this week This week he's on the vacation He's enjoying his life with his family And himself I hope I hope he's having fun Because we're out here toiling Working hard over the gamer's stove To bring you content As you'll see more and more over on no clip crew or whatever that channel is called and here on the crew cast and of course i'm joined by the always lovely frank howley frank how goes good yeah it's uh i i'm like tired because i've been we did summer games fest and then i did this jet set radio thing and so like five they're like i don't know

not not not even that much it was like two weeks of like filming and editing and driving it back and forth to la constantly uh i'm finally like finished the sprint of stuff so now i'm just very tired but i guess relaxed and like appropriately exhausted so and then now i'm like less than two months away from being in tokyo again so now my brain is just hyper fixated on that so i'm good i guess i'm in a flow state so i'm happy nice hopefully those two months between now and japan are as chill as you'd like them to be because it sounds like you've done a lot and then you've got like a fun a lot like

going on vacation is still it's still work right yeah and then two weeks from now is anime expo so i get like a small like yeah and there's also gonna be wrestling at anime expo for the first time do you ever take a break is it possible are you capable i don't see i remember when i broke my arm or elbow i had to wait like a month and that sucks so you have to be forced basically yeah i don't know it's like i what's the kind of thing if i stop moving i like i i will i have to keep moving if i stop i get like terrified and so anxious so i just have to keep keep moving you like a shark I just have to

keep moving I get that I feel you you know fellow shark who can probably speak to that idea Jeremy Jane is also with us hello what's your favorite shark tale character uh the shark tail character I thought you were going to say shark tail I don't have I've never seen shark tails uh thresher shark good tail um yeah yeah I don't know you mean like literal tails on a shark yeah yeah like sharks have different shaped tails I thought you meant like you had a shark style Ahab story to share no I don't know Chelsea's obsessed with sharks she knows everything about the ocean so phone a friend get her

on yeah we should get her in um hey can i just apropos of nothing because i have nothing to do with video games i share a gripe with you guys just an everyday this is gripe corner this is the less we talk about video games the better let's hear it okay so you guys tell me if this is insane okay i had to set up an appointment with someone who works for for an official board in a in a city to to have an appointment.

This person, the last time I emailed them, did not email me back for five days after I emailed me and after I emailed them and they called me.

The second time I emailed this person, they emailed me back.

I emailed them at two in the morning.

They emailed me back six hours later and said, hey, can you come by in a few hours?

That's it's psychotic to set up a hey, can you come by in a few hours via email?

Am I is that correct?

Well, along with the delay is the thing that i'm having a hard time the the dissonance between the two response times one being not at all and one being six hours later and not only that but the like that's like sending someone a letter and saying hey do you want to get lunch yeah i was gonna yeah i was just gonna say the email is sort of that middle point between a letter where that would be certifiably insane if you sent someone an e a letter being like can we go get lunch this weekend like that's not gonna work what if it's lost in the mail but then also it is somewhere between the text message

where it's like okay yeah instant response it's a text message so yeah there is that window there of like six hours you don't know if I'm checking my inbox yeah I'm at work it must be a generational divide because every young person I've talked to is everyone under 40 I've talked to is like that's fucking psychotic and then I mentioned this to my parents on the phone and they were like that's like no you should have checked your email it's like what do you mean it's like what are you talking about anyway nothing to do with video games this is just my this is a gripe corner coming to a close no that makes

that's so frustrating I feel like the city in general or any municipality that's a city uh it just has like a problem any government office whenever you try to get in touch with them they'll take forever to get back to you but you have 24 hours max to get back to them and if you miss it you gotta wait three months before they get back to you you're on a list now and you're at the bottom of it like they do not want anything to do with you if you don't get in touch with them it's it's a real frustrating situation especially as a guy who recently acquired a home that uh constantly needs changes i

get where you're you're coming from it's very frustrating thank you that was cathartic for me and and listeners if you're out there in the comments put a that this guy sucked you know just don't do that you know that really grinds my gears yeah let us know in the comments all right that's enough small small town fuck it this is uh like the garrison keeler segment of the podcast well you know who else probably has some gripes they'd like to share with us it's our lovely battle pass holders who support us on patreon .com slash no clip along with a ton of other people and we're so gracious or grateful

rather i'm having a hard time talking uh you want me to do the battle pass holders i've never done it dude yes please you actually haven't yeah i would love that uh but yeah thank them we like to thank them all for their support they give us money that allows us to pay for things including video games and allow us to go on vacation and be here uh with you recording all this great content about our our struggles with uh municipal contacts uh and they give us all a ton of money including our battle pass holders hit the list jeremy let's go all right apologies if i mispronounce any of these we got

love pre you duane the rock lobster anthony thomas nico passateri it's a me ferrario pappy lappy senator armstrong i'm saluting for that one if you're listening to the audio i wouldn't salute him no way reed reg or reed reg i always forget which one it is so i'll do both you get two for one harry flanagan joosh arno matt pearson james James Brown, Mark Rojas, Tucker Morgan, David McGarry, Godison, Sven Hooster with the umlaut, hell yeah, Pez, John Akers, Ewan Nate, Tim Robinson, Forrest Pruitt, Jonathan Kremen, Eric Hamilton Schneider, Christophe Fatui.

I don't know. I've never done a camera live.

This is a big moment for me.

You got this. Okay.

Camera live. Wow. From three rooms away.

I was yelling to someone else.

Anyone else in this building thinks I'm in trouble.

Eric Hamilton Schneider.

I went backwards. christophe patu again quick cameron ladd again zachary stater alex couche george zerkotas jacob godserv entheogen james med tohyer tilliev and ryzen well done i think you did a great job i did a few of them twice no it's okay it's okay they paid they've paid enough i think they deserve a second go every once in a while that was really good well done we'll skip them next week that's a joke we're not gonna no we're not gonna do that we're gonna if anything we'll say it three times next week just to make sure that they uh that they heard yeah thank you so much for all your support

this means a lot to us especially as uh this year has been brutal for a lot of games outlets and we're trying to spin up some really cool stuff uh we got a lot of cool stuff in the in the pipes but also we've been doing a lot of really i think fun coverage over on noclip crew for now whatever it's called youtube .com slash at secret tape whatever that means couldn't tell you i'm not i'm not danny who's not here uh but we do have a lot of cool coverage coming uh frank did talk about briefly uh a jet set radio experience that he spent some time i don't know frank do want to talk about that at all

or you want to wait until the world can see yeah yeah yeah so uh this was like in the middle of summer gate like we went to summer games fest and that was fun i put a video out with a lot of stuff and then as i was editing it my friend carlos from sega messaged me was like hey free friday and i'm like well i'm trying to finish this video it's like you you should come to this thing and yeah so what it is is uh sega put a 25 year anniversary event together with a uh la i don't know art collective design brand uh called brain dead and uh they have this two -week celebration at their studios in los

angeles where they're doing a bunch of film screenings to commemorate like jet set radio so a bunch of like films about like graffiti skating skating, you know, things like that kind of a thematic inspiration.

But to kick off the event, they had a special night where they had the creators of Jet Set Radio come down, autograph a bunch of stuff, do Q &As.

A bunch of concept art is in the walls, a bunch of merchandise, all this like just I don't know, like it basically turned into a mini Jet Set Radio museum.

So I went over, interviewed people, filmed stuff and hung out.

But yeah, just getting to meet the creators of Jet Set Radio and like see a bunch of other hardcore like Dreamcast fans and memorabilia was really exciting.

And um yeah and then uh and then even even like for the video thing just I just got you know got to replace with Jet Set Radio which is always uh very exciting.

You got to understand the concept of love.

Yeah. Understand understand.

The one like I love I love Jet Set Radio and like the aesthetic of everything but like the game itself the controls are still rough.

Future is so smooth like Jet Set Radio Future is very smooth and easy to play.

But the original Jet Set Radio is like oh fuck the controls are a little rough.

but you know that you know that's like the one that's like the the the one negative everything else is perfect yeah hey that's a it's a classic series with great music also apologies to uh the video viewers i did disappear it's 300 degrees outside and like mostly humidity i think my camera is uh is reaching the end of its life which is a shame because it's expensive but anyway um frank you uh you were talking a little bit about some of the memorabilia that you saw there what was uh were there any cool hidden bits of merch that we haven't seen yet for jetset radio that you saw the event i'm trying

to think what the coolest thing like honestly one thing i really liked is like some dude brought a bunch of like like japanese copies to get signed so someone had the japanese copy of jet set radio future which is really rare because like xbox barely sold in japan so there's so few copies like in circulation so just seeing that was really cool um i'm sure they even had like merch that they had put out for when jet set radio got like a remaster like back in 2013 i remember at pax they gave out these like jet set radio pins and i only got like one one sheet of them and i had those on my backpack

forever so i lost them but it was so funny to like see like pax swag from like a decade ago like behind the museum glass and it's like oh that's crazy like i remember just getting this for crap for free and now it's like oh look at these in the olden days of of conventions when they gave out merch uh but the biggest thing really was just seeing concept art and like in the q a he talks about how they didn't even have an idea what the game would be the the artist like he just sketched like oh this is what the kids are are into these days and they were all in their 20s too so like he just made all

these funny characters and designs and they're and like with those concept arts they they were like i think we should make a game of this and even going to the music producer was like you should make music that sounds like this they had like such a loose like all this stem from just it's like concept art and so seeing that in person was really cool so i'd never seen any of that art before i don't think anyone has um so just being willing to on that and like there was people who brought like their dreamcast to get signed and xboxes to get signed um i don't know so just it was just i mean like even

the dreamcast itself was such a like had such a limited lifespan it's such an interesting console just in between like because it's like it like there it was immediately you know it like wasn't in conversation of like that console war with like xbox ps2 gamecube as soon as like gamecube and xbox came out like dreamcast was done uh it was like just two years and that was it whereas uh even the generation 4 playstation n64 had such a long shelf life or whatever but dreamcast is like this in between but everything and anything that came out in the console is like is revered as a cult classic and so yeah

like i was i was doing game capture of jetset radio stuff but now my brain is like oh i always like playing other dreamcast stuff even um that capcom collection that just came out a few weeks ago that was all dreamcast games like street fighter alpha 3 right rival schools um and all that stuff and it's like oh my god like yeah and i just i I just want to be able to make videos on every Dreamcast game.

I don't know. It's such a fun – it's such a fun, like, moment in video game history.

Have you ever played Seaman?

Excuse me? I don't – Oh, no. That's the – oh, God.

Who's the guy? Leonard Nimoy?

Yeah, he is the narrator.

I think so, yeah. And in Japan, I think they did Seaman 2, but I don't think it came out here.

Yeah. I don't think I ever – They made the sequel to Seaman.

It was, I think, PS2.

I think I had, like, the disc, but I didn't have the microphone.

So, like, I think I, like, had booted it up but couldn't progress it.

it but yeah i never i never actually played c -man i've always wanted to play c -man it seems i don't i don't even think it'd be particularly like i i guess fun is the wrong word but it seems like it just seems like interesting i don't know you could just like teach it words and stuff we should do a we should do we should see if we'll buy a c -man microphone for you do it yeah i'll hang out all day with you while you train a man fish i'd love to have that on in the corner i think uh to your point frank about the dreamcast being this sort of like last hurrah of of that style of console because the vmu

as a concept the like memory card that plugs into the controller also being a game on its own such an interesting idea it's like you know the switch 2 came out recently and i think we're going to talk about that a little bit later when you uh when you talk about mario kart world if you want to uh the the consoles and danny's talked about this on twitter i don't know necessarily how much i agree but like the consoles have gotten a lot more boring a lot more more like vehicles to the video game which has its its you know positives and negatives but man the dreamcast was just like a cool weird thing

to me that's the last toy console and it kind of just stopped being that you know like the wii was maybe the very last version of that but even then it was like hey they didn't have no vmu they didn't have you couldn't play a game based on your game save on the memory card like what a weird idea all the games that on and have that are on to have a very specific look or like feel to them like you talk about dreamcast games having a very specific those dreamcast blue skies the sega blue skies and all that yeah such a weird period of time it's a shame that that was how it ended for sega at least

in the console space and then it took them forever to sort of i feel like rebound and find their place and it's the yakuza series of all things that rejuvenated sega as a brand yakuza console it's the only way you're right yes what is that it's just an ashtray the cigarettes out in a Sega cure you cube yes the cure you cube that's good that's good uh but yeah sorry Frank was it uh nice coming did you meet any people at the event that were like big jet set heads or was it just like people passing by yeah like there was there was one guy who who straight up found out about the event and then 12

like drove all the way down from Seattle I guess just to make it like he wasn't even sure he was gonna make it and then that guy ended up being like an artist I had like like briefly had a conversation with like back in 2009 or so like i i got recognized a lot at that event but it's also like i feel like if you're a jetset radio fan it's like that's already like the corner of internet i'm in you know what i mean i'm like oh yeah like i feel like so it was like oh i knew so many people there like there's also like a bunch of old hardcore mega 64 fans that were like have like talked about seeing

the videos i made back when i was in high school it was like oh like that like i don't know so it was it was uh yeah it was uh it was really cool and And then, like, funny enough, like, I didn't know, but, like, the concept artist behind Jet Star Radio is also the guy who designed Kiryu and Majima.

Oh, wow. What? Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying.

It's, like, I'm excited about this video.

Like, it's, like, yeah, it's, they were so cool.

And then, same thing, it's always, like, I've done this now so many times that I tried it at Summer Games Fest, but, like, yeah, now meeting more and more Japanese developers, like, anytime, like, it's so silly, but even just saying, like, Atsukade and, like, just, like, small things like that, they're always, like, oh, my God, like, very, very stoked on it.

so it's it always feels really cool um and then i was terrified because rita ueda the concept follower followed me back on twitter uh because i posted the picture but they liked my shirt so i had a shirt that i had on that i'd specifically gotten in harajuku and like the reason i got that shirt is the the graphics the art style kind of reminds me of like parappa the rapper or even like the graffiti that is in jet set radio like it's very much that like y2k japanese aesthetic and like yeah i had that shirt on and they couldn't they like like my shirt the shirt also in japanese says like ganbare na which means

like i won't try hard like i won't do my best and they thought that was so funny like oh ganbare na oh okay like they were generally like so tickled by the shirt i'm like oh my i don't know so i i felt very cool i was like oh they like my shirt oh i got narujuku oh um so yeah i don't know that's why i gotta go back to japan i gotta buy my my 2026 wardrobe you gotta keep the shirts coming so japanese game developers servers are like oh shit gaba and i this guy knows what's up yep yep you'll get all the good hits that whenever you gotta interview devs at these sort of events you just walk up and hit

them with a couple japanese words show them your cool t -shirt let them know you're into stardom they'll be like whoa hold on this guy come here what do you want to know it doesn't have to be relevant you could just hit him with like a gochi so sama deshita they're like this guy clearly doesn't speak japanese but he knows some words and that's enough they're like you know what he's fucking trying you could be like i bet you speak i speak your language i bet i speak your language go ahead go ahead go ahead try me say anything in japanese i bet i could translate it and then And they're like, they

just say something you don't understand.

And you're like, yeah, I knew it.

I'm not going to translate that, but I knew what it meant.

Yeah, trust me. I understood.

Yeah, yeah. You're like, yeah, I got you.

Just do that at the whole event.

They'll love it. They'll love it.

You should try to see if you can hit anyone up when you're in Japan.

That'd be really cool.

Even, like, just for yourself.

No, I would love to.

It was so funny. I felt like I was so bold at Summer Games Fest. I was like, where are you guys based?

I'm like, Oklahoma.

Oh, I'll be in Japan in August. I'm like, just putting out feelers.

Yeah, just so you know.

know it was like but it's like yeah I don't know I feel like I got you gotta try so I thought it was so funny um yeah I don't know but hey if anyone's listening to this for Japan let me know um but yeah so I don't know I feel like if I just keep going enough stuff will happen yeah absolutely dude they'll let you sleep at the Sega hotel just give it a shot give it a shot like Capcom has their big video that's why the next trip I need to go to Osaka I need to go stand on that bridge that's in Yakuza and see the little crab restaurant see the little weird weird drumming clown thing um so yeah we'll

see what happens uh i'm just double checking hideki naganuma the director right or composer he's the music producer he wasn't at the event but they like shout him out and stuff but but yeah because like all the people think of jet like that's like 90 of the game is the music the visual style is huge and stuff like that but like those tunes drive it it's so good yeah so that's also why like even editing was fun because i just edited with all that music and it's like oh it's so good it's so good hell yeah brother uh but yeah i'm just i'm just double checking his Wikipedia page uh very obviously

astounding career lots of great games did uh voice editing for the original Yakuza series and all that um but there's a little note here about I guess his trajectory as a freelancer so uh let me to read this out this the summation on his Wikipedia page by the late 2010s he became popular on the social network platform Twitter where he frequently interacts with fans and posts internet memes memes, and shitposts related to Jet Set Radio and other media, such as Family Guy, Among Us, Juni Senshi Bakuretsu Eito Ranger, and Big Chungus.

Is Big Chungus a link?

Oh, yeah. You can click on it.

It'll explain where Big Chungus came from.

Oh, I hate this so much. It comes from a Wabbit Twubble from 1941's Wabbit Twubble.

I don't like saying that out loud.

It sounds like I'm doing a voice and not reading the actual phonetic way it's written.

Yeah, it feels like you're making – now I'm on a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

British politician Nigel Farage has recorded several paid videos on the platform Cameo per request that mention memes such as Big Chungus and Among Us Imposters.

Wait a second. Wait a second.

Nigel Farage, Big Chungus crossover?

Is Nigel Farage secretly Hideki Naganuma?

He's like, we need to deport Big Chungus.

Immediately. That's all I know about Nigel Farage.

That's all he's ever done is Brexit.

Brexit and Big Chungus.

I know two things about Nigel Farage now.

Oh boy. Okay. Well, you know what?

I think this is a better...

There's going to be really no better time to talk about Mario Kart World and the Nintendo Switch 2.

Because when you think about it, all I want on that console is Big Chungus because that would give it one more game to play on top of the current only game to play on the Nintendo Switch 2.

Mario Kart World. Frank Howley, you've played much more of it than I have at this point.

How are you feeling on both the Nintendo Switch 2 and Mario Kart World?

Yeah, it's funny. Last week was just all summer game sets.

We didn't even have time to talk about a brand new video game console.

That's right. Switch 2.

That's so important.

It was so funny because, yeah, I was so paranoid about not getting it.

And then thankfully a bunch of people complained to Target's customer service, and people were getting $50 gift cards.

And then they got posted on Reddit.

And then Target was like, we have to shut this down.

so what they did is they expedited everyone's shipping so instead of getting it like a week later it just came like two days later but then i couldn't play it until like i don't know several days after all the summer games fest stuff but yeah i i i uh i don't know like less than 10 hours maybe maybe about eight uh but uh yeah it's super mario kart i always call it super mario kart world it's just mario kart world um i like the super though super that's what i'm saying we gotta get back it's the new cons i just gotta call everything it's the switch too it's like the the super nintendo's that call

everything super so i was i was certain they were gonna call this it's obviously maybe stupid in hindsight i thought they were gonna call it the super nintendo switch i thought they were gonna do that it's so sick it actually is a way better title i'm more fun before you go on frank i feel like that would have solved the problem that like the switch two feels to me like it's like the uh like the xbox one elite or something like it i know it's a different console but it just feels like it's like the switch with the yeah the new chip xbox Xbox One X, our fastest Nintendo Switch 2 ever.

Yeah, Super Nintendo Switch. Nintendo, give us a call.

We're available. Or I call it the Shin Switch. The Shin means new, so it's like the Shin Switch 2.

Shin Switch sounds like your wrestling move.

Like that's the thing you would do.

And Howie, it's the one to Shin Switch. The Shin Switch. I like that.

So, yeah, Shin Mario Kart World.

No, it's awesome. awesome it is just so bizarre playing like a Nintendo game in 4k that's not running off an emulator yeah like it's like oh my god this is great uh but the the real chaos factor is it's 24 players I don't know I don't know how it was in Mario Kart 8 or whatever I feel like it was like 16 24 is so much you are constantly getting blue shells but I think that's always been an element it's it's kind of nuts to where I see so many theories online of like don't bother being in first place stay in second and until the last minute but that's not fun that's not fun so i just i don't worry

about that but um yeah it's been fun what i really like is online like doing the online lobbies is so much easier like it's easier to share room codes people to drop in and out i like the online stuff in mario kart 8 because oh you could have all the me's run around on the globe and people would spam voice chats that's like i'm using tilt controls um whereas this one in an online lobby everyone's in free room so people can drive around mess around i think you can unlock stuff while you're in free roam in an online lobby um which is really really cool and then yeah just doing the online matches

is really fun and easy it seems like online stuff is very is very smooth I've now done the thing now where I've done like I think there's seven cups in this game and I'm assuming I mean I'm sure there'll be DLC and stuff uh the rainbow road is really spectacular there's a level called like booze cinema that's so awesome because you jump into a movie theater and you're you're the tracks you're you're writing on celluloid and it's like like oh this is sick so um and like there's uh yeah there's a lot of like re -envision as always like we'll do remakes of old n64 levels and stuff like that wario

stadium is now this giant everything is so the scale of all these levels is so insane that like i'm always just focused on drifting and like i rarely have the opportunity to like take the levels in i feel like i need to play at 50cc to really stop and smell the roses uh but yeah it's mario kart it plays great the one thing i really love is i didn't buy a switch to pro controller or whatever i still have the old pro controller that works but i did get the gamecube controller and that works with mario kart and so playing nice the new mario kart with the new gamecube controller feels so nice uh because i

was using my old switch pro controller but it's like seven years old and it's so like i don't know like it whenever you play a new controller it's like oh you can tell so uh oh my god yeah so it's the game controller buttons are really crisp so i'm enjoying it i haven't done too much of the free room stuff it is pretty nice because you drive in any direction you'll see little uh piece they call p switches but then it'll be like a 20 it's like um i feel like crackdown or spider -man had this a lot where it's like any of these open world platforming games like okay jump across all these buildings

and get the five collectibles whatever or it's like it's like doing the red coin challenge in in mario 64 but yeah an objective will spawn up and it's like all right get to the ending here and you have 20 seconds to do it and it's like a tony hawk goal and if you mess up you can press start restart it so that's that's pretty satisfying you're grinding on rails and stuff to to uh to get to your objective and then you get unlocked costumes and things like that there are so many costumes and characters to unlock you you can play a lot as like npcs so you see people running around playing as like

the cow cows are just like random mario machi mole yeah like it's like oh this it's really fun and i feel like there's less of an emphasis on stats and cart building i remember in 8 the big deal was like you pick your the body pick the wheel you pick your parasol all this crap now there's just like like 30 different vehicles i know there's stat modifications but nothing matters because you can be blue shelled by 23 other players at any time um but it's been fun so and like i think the fun of mario kart is the chaos so yeah i've enjoyed it it's mario kart so it's just it feels like this thing where i've

had 30 years of muscle memory playing it so it's always i don't know it's always the same but it's always great um i am i do want to see more deal like dlc for because there was a lot of levels in eight i loved i love the animal crossing level i love the zelda stuff stuff they did i love like the they have these few series of levels there was like a paris level i don't know i missed some of mario kart 8 levels and it's like all right just put that in this game i we have the engine i know i want i want i want more levels but that's good does the open world serve as like um is it a totally separate

mode with like the tony hawk kind of objectives you mentioned or does it serve as like a diddy kong racing hub i'm sorry to mention diddy kong no you're right every every game is diddy kong it should just go back we like is it are you you accessing other stuff in the game through the through the open world thing or is it a totally sort of like siloed off mode it's almost like fours it's it's very much like fours on horizon like if you actually want to do the grand prix you press start you do grand p and you go to the four tracks but what's really fun like the best example is in multiplayer mode

where everyone does a mission bowser's castle whatever and then the grand prix ends everyone is at bowser's castle and then as the host is picking the next level you could just drive around the rest of the map so it's all the tracks how the knockout tour works or is there like a different mode and that's a separate mode that mode is incredible we can talk about that in a second the um all the maps are contextual are like on the actual giant world so it's like over here's peach's castle over here's the boo cinema whatever and so the fact that all the levels are kind of grounded is incredible and it's

the same way forza does it where it's like if you have a mission it's like here's what the where the checkpoints are and that's the race but the whole world is there fair and so i think with the free roam um i think it just it just kind of grounds the universe where it's like oh i see how this exists and i think on the free roam map you can teleport to other thing other people it'll show you i think in the area how many costumes are to unlock you'll not costumes by eating fast food which is very funny so there's like drive -through windows you pick up and like in like a lunch bag but it's hamburgers right

yeah it's like hamburgers are like i don't know it's just like ice cream sundaes or whatever and depending what food item you eat as which which characters has you unlock?

But it's either dairy or beef, and you can play as cow.

That's true. So you eat hamburger.

No, cow, don't do it.

Which cow character is there?

Just cow. I think it's the Moo Moo Farm Cow.

It's one of the playable characters?

Yes. Yeah, you're right.

One of the cows that you run into and go moo, that's what cows do.

Go moo. And you unlock the characters in a mission.

You get turned into an NPC by an item, and then you unlock it to your roster, and you can play it at any time.

time i think i don't know if every level has an mpc but like as you're just playing the game more and more whether it's through free roam online or just the grand prix stuff you're always unlocking stuff there's a lot to unlock i'm almost maybe near the end of unlocking stuff but there's so many characters uh costumes um which is really cool and then yeah the knockout tour is incredible that is like the i don't know if you call it battle royale mode oh it's like the f -099 okay the battle royale mode yeah the battle royale but but so with with knockout tour i think there's was like four courses

and it's all streamlined like it's like okay you'll start at the north part of the map and here's bowser's castle i'm always using as an example whatever um the different levels and so the first race starts there's 24 competitors you have to finish in the top like 16 so if you're if you're not first you're last whatever if you're hell yeah give me a little shake and bake if you're 17 through 24 you're eliminated and then you can spectate or quit out and join a new lobby so then lap mission 2 is like all right 16 racers you have have to be in the top 12 oh shit and then top eight top four and so that's

where you really want to try hard and like get in there and that's very very fun um so yeah i think the knockout tour stuff is pretty cool i haven't done like a full online lobby but anytime i played online it's usually with like maybe like seven or eight friends total and then the rest of the the room is popular with ai i think you can disable the ai but it's fun having the chaos um and so I can't imagine how sweaty it is just doing Knockout Tour with like 24 online freaks like ready to go.

It might be terrifying.

It might be cool, but that's a really fun new mode, and I think you can unlock stuff.

I was looking up how to unlock the mirror mode.

To unlock mirror mode is crazy.

You have to do all missions in 150 CC.

You have to do all the Knockout Tours.

You have to do 10 PC switches.

I think there's open world collectibles.

You have to get all this crap.

They make you play the game if you want to unlock the final mode.

I can't believe it.

I know I hate that I can't believe it I have played a little bit of as well a little bit of Mario Kart World and I just wanted to mention one thing that I think is very strange about so first off the free world stuff people talk about the free roam as this like big aspect of the game it's the new big part of it that makes it different from all the other Mario Kart games which by the way this is the first Mario Kart game in if you don't count Deluxe being a separate release 11 years that's crazy that's a really long time because it launched on the Wii U Mario Kart 8 I think 2014 that's a long that's

a long oh um so the free roam world was yeah set up as this big that's called mario kart world you want to see the world it's right there it's just like you press plus on the starts menu right there's not like a option like on the left you've got like grand prix knockout tour online local play and then it's like free free roam and if you feel like it in the corner you want to try just hit plus which i thought was very strange i also the world feels dead in this way that i don't really like like it's cool to see the way that everything's interconnected and see all the stuff on the map the p -switch

stuff is really good like i like when they when i find one and i trigger it i'm like oh this is a fun like one of them you start at the top of this curvy hill and it's like drive through all the obstacles and you just go into a truck and then you become the like transport truck and just like drive through stuff very inventive fun fun idea for a single player mode in Mario Kart.

But it's also just like outside of the piece, which is not really anything going on, which I thought was a little disappointing.

I was hoping there'd be like races you could find on the map like in Forza or other special things that like trigger.

Maybe they're waiting to do that over time and they're just going to keep adding updates because this is probably their forever Mario Kart until the next one.

Right. So the next console.

But the other thing that I thought was really weird and I don't know if I like it yet.

I've OK, so maybe tell me if I'm wrong, Frank, because you probably played more of this game than I have at this point.

You definitely have. When you do a Grand Prix, if you're doing a whole cup, the first race is three laps around that first track, right?

Every other track, you drive to the track and you do one lap and then it's over.

Is that right? Is that for the Grand Prix?

Yeah, for the Grand Prix.

i think i can't remember i know like rainbow road is like a single there's some levels that's just like it's like there's a snowboarding level so it's like you do that one lap there's you don't do it multiple times there's like rainbow road i think is one track so there's some that's like multiple laps and some that's like oh just get to the end and that's the mission so i think i think it's based on the the design of the level i think but yeah i think in grand prix you finish the mission and just takes you to the next thing like in the tournament mode yeah i don't know how i feel about that it's

so different from all the previous mario karts where like you do three laps around the same race and it's sort of like you learn the intricacies and whatever but here it's like now you're driving from one point to the next then there's like little things you can notice like there's a lot more shortcut opportunities they added six lanes they finally did it all we asked for was one more lane so we could go faster down the highway uh but here it's like i don't there's something about it that i don't find as enjoyable as like mastering a track on the fly and like noticing the way that players maneuver

along it and sort of going okay they're gonna go here this is where i place the banana now it's like if you're if you got a banana what a waste like you're just gonna drive through the track get there do the one lap and that's it so you've placed a banana buddy that's like 400 miles away we're not even thinking about that one anymore who cares uh yeah i don't know overall i'm a little mixed on that part of it but i do like i like the idea of the open world i like the idea of the free roll mode i don't know i don't know if there's enough there yet that's me i don't know uh jeremy do you have any

interest spending six hundred dollars to play mario kart world nah no i think uh my interest in the switch too is that um in 2026 when dusk bloods drops i'm just gonna send a casual text to everyone i know who owns the switch too and they're like have i ever mentioned how much i value you as a friend and like you're i mean you don't need you've had your switch too for like a year Yeah, you already played Donkey Kong Bonanza.

There's nothing else to...

Just let me borrow it.

No reason. Yeah, if I could just borrow someone's Switch 2 for like two weeks and I can no -life Duskbloods and then be done with it forever, just remove the poison from my body.

That's all I really need.

That's also the plot of Duskbloods.

Yeah. It's like Synecdoche where I represent the character.

Yeah, I don't know.

I would love a Switch 2.

There's not a sufficient lineup for me to get one right now.

If I was flush with cash, maybe i'd buy one but uh that is not the case stop building a house and just buy a switch to who needs who needs a roof when you can you live inside a switch to actually speaking you can nintendo switch to welcome to our bay you can i you can trap yourself in it like a horcrux uh do you guys know about mario kart live home circuit what the hell is that i don't know when you said there hasn't been a mario kart game in so long is that the like when you make a cardboard cardboard box mario and it's oh yeah yeah it's like a little it's like a rc car and then you race it on a like

in your house uh i it didn't get great reviews but i watched the trailer and i don't know maybe i'm a mark but i saw this and i was like whoa that's fucking cool i take it back you're right we have had a mario kart i'm such a i'm such a gamer one of them was like an ios game and one of them is this like augmented reality nonsense for your driving yeah we're where one of the obstacles is like driving past your mom while she makes you dinner mom how are those nugs coming along as you're zooming by and you're a little speaker on the mario drive into the kitchen it's like those little toys they have for cats

and dogs where you can like ask some questions like hey hey jim get off the couch get get down i'm shocked actually since you mentioned that i'm shocked that in this trailer there isn't a moment where because you know how like mario kart tracks will have like the weird like spectacle moments where it's like like oh no there's like cows on the track or something i'm shocked they don't have a moment in this where like someone's cat walks on the track although i guess then you would risk like hurting your cat by running it over with an rc car so maybe that's like bad press for mario or for nintendo

pita gets or sorry nintendo gets enough shit from pita i don't think they need to risk it by driving a mario kart into it yeah they've already got an anthropomorphic cow eating other cows so i feel like at this point they got to watch their back but anyway no i just saw this and i was like i'm out of touch with what nintendo does because i i own like two games i bought a a nintendo switch for breath of the wild and then i hated tears of the kingdom so i'm i feel like i got burnt by the switch one uh but this looks kind of sick uh speaking of uh uh tears of the kingdom i so i bought the switch

to mostly because it was just there i thought it was going to be out of stock and i was like i don't really want to fight for this i don't care that much there's nothing on it um but they had a good amount of them and i was like this is not going down in price i might as well buy it now um before the tariffs hit before we get tariffed baby i love winning i'm so tired of winning i wish i wish it would stop um but i've been playing on it the one game that i was waiting for the switch to or the switch shin switch to to show up was uh tears of the kingdom i wanted to play it with decent performance

because i'm a dork about that for some reason because that's the one thing that was keeping the game for me yes it was it was gonna be good if the ultra hand was just more performance it was gonna be more i would have loved it here's the thing right it it is 60 fps it's the but it's the same it turns out the same game turns out if it runs better it's the same game if you don't like it before you're not gonna like it now i told you that but i weirdly for me my struggle was that it kind of just was like ugly to look at like that was your problem with tears of the kingdom i have i don't i like the ultra hand i

like the ultra hand oh yeah no tears of the kingdom has like incredible tech and i think the shrine i think some of the shrines in tears of the kingdom are like better than the shrines in breath of the wild i just as a whole package it did not uh did not entrance me or do anything for me i thought i didn't feel the same way i watched my wife play the first little bit of it i think she got one of the first whatever they're called followers something i don't know spirits uh i don't know anything about the game i didn't play it i was just watching her play um but i was like okay i'll play it this time

on switch 2 and it will be better because it'll be 60 fps and my life it'll fill the gaping void in my soul um and i i finished the tutorial prologue area which i forgot is like four hours long and then i landed and i was like oh oh that's it you're just here they just drop you in and you're they're like all right go here now like i don't i just felt so dejected as soon as i finished the the tutorial area and i was like oh i gotta i had to just go do whatever yeah i guess it's like breath of the wild but i just I played 120 hours of that already.

Do I need to do that again?

Yeah, I feel the same way.

I love Breath of the Wild.

I could talk forever about the difference between the two games, but I feel like Tears of the Kingdom made me like Breath of the Wild less, which is an impressive feat.

Brutal. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, Frank.

I cut you off like 10 minutes ago because I just wanted to make my stupid point about free roaming in Mario Kart World.

Did you have any other thoughts on Mario Kart World you want to share?

No, it's good. I like it.

i uh yeah i haven't like messed i haven't messed around too much with free roam stuff like um yeah i think i like it's also the kind of thing where it's like i'm sure at this point now there's already guys like here's how to get every costume every character so just being able to chip out and unlock stuff is nice but uh yeah i think now it's like all right now i'm excited for more more tracks and playing online just like learning the tracks that are out there um but yeah online like just the way the switch 2 works is like the online is very easy to drop in drop out even even transferring saying

up the switch was no issue having the game controller is really nice but yeah for me the biggest thing now that like the switch to exist is i'm eager to like i never played bayonetta 3 because it did not run at a good frame rate now it runs people are saying like at 60 frames or a much better frame rate so now i'm like oh my god i want to get that and uh just take a look at uh old switch games i've completely ignored or forgotten about uh there's that one game that's like there's like a j -pop fire emblem rpg it's called like fire emblem fates or something oh really yeah and so i've always wanted

to play that it's not i thought you were talking about tokyo mirage session that's it yeah is that it tokyo mirage but it's like a fire element gamer tokyo mirage sessions hashtag f yeah hashtag fe a little bit there's a hashtag in the game title it's actually it's proud sharp because it's music it's a show it's a music game so that's the game i that's the game i want and i'll probably buy that so that's the game i want to play it takes place you got shibuya and harajuku i'm in i'm there uh all right i gotta play this now but so now old switch games run better and then also now that i'm in if i

go to japan again i want to like just track weird old cheap switch games of obscure stuff because it should work run uh internationally um unfortunately a lot of switch games didn't get switch to upgrades and they'll have to uh buy the developers like it turns out it's anything that was cpu bound or limited it sounds like needs to be upgraded because a lot of the new stuff in the switch is like gpu related so you have to switch a bunch The code, I don't know.

I'm not, I'm not an assembly line programmer.

I don't know nothing about that.

Uh, but there are a handful of games that were running on, uh, on what's the word uncapped frame rates.

So fans of Mario cross rabbits, kingdom battle folks, you can play it at 60 FPS.

Finally, that was the first fucking thing I checked.

Cause I, I always wanted to play those games, but I was like, why does it run at like 10 FPS?

This is so frustrating.

Um, so yeah, it's cool that like, I'm with you.

I remember you were talking about a long time ago about how the the Switch you never really played because it was like everything looked ugly it was blurry and the performance was bad and I agree because like I think Jeremy has made the opposite point of like you could you know it's like eating food you could eat it off of a kitty plate who gives a shit but like for me for whatever reason Switch games especially the the first party stuff those tend to run okay but if it's anything else it's like I don't even want to play on this and of course I have other ways of playing games because I'm a loser

who has all the consoles but like now I i want to play stuff on the switch too because i like holding it frank what are your thoughts on this new console the form factor the way that it feels the way that it looks the joy con i have not like taking it out of the docs and setting it up oh that's so funny he's going to get it now i want to play like smash brothers like i think i'll take this to be on my on my japan trip just to try it out and again to practice weird old switch games but like i mean the one the thing that like freaks me out is i love my steam deck but now the steam deck feels so bulky

and heavy in comparison whereas is like this is so oh this feels so nice the screen looks so good can you take the joy -con out of the thing for us can you give us a little switch to asmr yeah that's why i got an update on mario kart yeah actually the how the how the fuck how do you oh yeah there's that little trigger on the back oh these are this is nice yeah right oh you haven't even done that yet wow not really you're not kidding so cool we're getting the first look here yeah that's why now i got the gamecube controller it's like this is all i need does that also can you pull that apart and attach

patch it to the sides of the switch yeah just actually you can rip it hard if you rip hard enough you can pull a gamecube controller in half and then it's like two separate wemotes but i want to play smash brothers now because like smash brothers i like but i never i think i unlocked all the characters or i just bought like the dlc thing to now the thing is blaring um there's gotta be rhythm games on the switch right oh tons yeah yeah there's like a million of them you can play uh cadence of hyrule the crypt of the necrodancer zelda theme game oh oh there's a that's what i should get is the is a hyrule

warriors oh yeah i wonder if that runs better it must right right because that was another game that looks cool but yeah yeah because all the dynasty wars games are good um there's a zelda dynasty war there's a zelda dynasty wars and there's two of them yeah what's the new one called age of calamity that's it i want to say yeah forget here's the key the hyrals of yeah age of calamity oh my god this is awesome yeah you could play as linkle girl link oh my god okay i gotcha you say linkle that's her name is that real yeah google winkle i'm not no this is not a conspiracy here lincoln lincoln lincoln

okay cool let's see is lincoln girl link yes link i don't know what the lore is oh my god i don't know if it's lincoln it's it's link in drag he's killing it uh lincoln no i don't know what it is that's pretty cool she got guns oh they're crossbows and shotguns she looks like uh what's the hell oh god oh she's just another character she's not related to link it it seems like now this is sick all right yeah i gotta check this game out i gotta play as linkle all right i'm glad i know that linkle exists now um also before we move on from switch i just had to say since you bring brought up tokyo mirage

sessions uh sharp fe i don't know how you say uh i was reading the beginning of the plot and there are two elements that i think this is this is the ultimate frank game number one first sentence it begins in modern day tokyo so that's that's a win right there and then it says the companies go to a talent audition and end up in a place called the idolosphere so i it seems to be some sort of the idol sounds like something that like some philosopher in the in the late 1900s late 1900s late wrote about yes about the idolosphere yeah it's just outside the new sphere was the idolosphere right that's

a joke for one person yeah now i want to look it up now i want to look it up on the the nintendo store or whatever and get nintendo what's it called idol sphere no you've thrown off the name of the game now it's the idolosphere idolosphere and the the reason it's sharp fe i think don't quote me on this is because the like uh stands like it's tokyo mirage session so i think it's related to the persona series like the original persona series or something like that um like it's smt backwards right tms yeah it's smt backwards so they're they have stands or like whatever the hell they're called like

the jojo stands the characters that they use to fight with are fire emblem characters oh which is like a weird crossover and that's that's why it's interesting that's fair i did not say interesting i said it and i did not say wabbit season i was thinking of wabbit i was thinking of wabbit wobble i did not say wabbit at 12 i said i read web at 12 as it was written in 1941 i was just being historically accurate it's in the lyrics bro i'm allowed to say it it's in the lyrics i just went to the concert i was just singing along i got caught up and i said web at 12 all right yeah oh i was at the kendrick

concert by the way it was a lot of fun that was my first kendrick lamar concert oh that's awesome who opened for him did mustard open for him yes dj mustard he had a set it was great he ended on uh we are young i think by fun okay yeah and party in the usa by miley cyrus that's an odd selection i know that's what i was saying it was very strange it was a good time though yeah it was a lot of fun it was uh can you believe it kendrick lamar uh good anyway yeah uh yeah switch to uh i like it you can buy it now maybe if it's if they sell stock at your store probably they're they're a lot of money

i feel like not a lot of people bought them i was uh yeah like i feel like in america they're pretty they're not there i was like there's common uncommon whatever the they're they're not yeah yeah whatever you can find them still keeping an eye i was talking about how some wrestlers can't get a switch to shoko nakajima who's a wrestler for tjpw was was sad because she did not get accepted in the lottery to buy a switch too so she still does not have one so in japan they're still hard to get again in japan the switch twos are much cheaper but they're region locked you can buy for 20 000 yen more

uh you can get the international switch too but if you want the cheaper japan only one you gotta you gotta get into the lottery system so it's still still tough out there in japan but you know globally damn you can get a switch it's like a japanese citizenship that it is to get a they're just handing them out like it's just here you go yeah you just say gochi so samadesh they're like you're in baby wow frank you know what to do when you're there just say it say the magic words they'll let you in it was yeah oh my i'm ready i'm ready uh yeah it's funny that it's turned around by the way with the switch

too because they were so concerned about people buying switch twos in japan and then shipping them back home because they were cheaper and now it's turns out all the japanese wrestlers got to buy american and switches and bring them home take that just go over with a bunch if you were rich this is what you could do you could just go with a bunch of switch to well i guess they'd be region locked never mind this plan sucks would they be region locked i think it's just i don't know how the regions okay then buy a bunch of american switch twos and then go up to your favorite joshies and just be like

hey i know it's tough over here you want to they'll bring you in the ring if you do that they really like people really do give presents like there's one wrestler chan yoda after every show she'll post like an instagram store it's like thank you for all the presents and it's just like all the the spread of crap she gets i'm sure dude you don't but that's how you get trapped in the idolosphere sphere is you start giving presence and it's like a fucking vicious you get sucked in not the idol sphere not again that's why i'm going back i gotta i need i need more of the idol he's addicted to the idol

i really am the air is different in there it's fucking if we were allowed to name these episodes not the content of them i would totally call this one yeah i got i gotta play token mirage session though you have to report back from the idol sphere i need to know more i kind of want to play this game now too check out our new fat session on on also i was imagining when you said the the sharp thing i was imagining if uh some like a like a like a zoomer gen alpha musician going to a session and being like yeah there's uh there's three hashtags on the staff so oh my god so that's what it was like

in high school for me it was we had music class and you know kids didn't play instruments until then because it was a bird course and they would like they'd be like sir why are there hashtags on this and really that actually happened i think he burst into flames when they asked that question i think he didn't know what to do i thought you were gonna say burst into tears i mean same thing yeah my brain went like because i know in music classes like i gotta practice like oh i just asked you chat beach oh dude chat gpt musicians could oh oh that's bad you just invented like one of the top three worst

things ever i feel like i've had this conversation with all friends we might have had it here but i'm happy i i like it's so insane to me that's like oh i did like the work of going to school and going to getting a degree and stuff whereas like now if i was a teenager i would just chat gpt everything and play fortnite and like you're describing the intellectual version of like man when we grew up we used to drink out of the hose yeah we didn't care yeah we didn't have chat gpt and now like we're we're we're i don't know like rightfully like like you know we're that generation i feel like not to

not to you know big up ourselves or anything i'm a little bit younger than you guys but not by that much uh i'm like the tail end of your generation are you cusp you're zed i'm cusp i'm right yeah i know if i say zillennial i'm automatically a millennial i uh I will admit that I'm gen z but just barely um although I'm sure the rest of the gen z would tell me that I'm a millennial but whatever it doesn't matter um point being I feel like that era of of people we just like we grew up with the internet and we knew how to parse it in a way where we could tell if something was bullshit or not and like

people who are younger than us are having a really hard time and people who are older than us obviously never had a good time with that sort of thing of parsing like misinformation but even like young people are even bad at doing regular computer stuff like my cousin who is 21 22 he can't figure out how to like set up a computer i'm like brother when i was growing up we you know back in my day we had dial up we had to plug things in we had rca jacks we had to do three colors we had to work hard our grandparents asked us to set up the vcr time because it kept resetting every time they unplugged

it we had to we had to to do it the hard way so it does suck yeah the kids now are stuck in this weird limbo of like they don't know how to do tech stuff because everything's a phone and then they also don't know how to do how to like parse information because everything's chat gpt now they're like yeah i just ask it and tell me what to do and i'm like yeah it's but you're not learning how to learn you're just learning how to ask something for information and hoping that it's true uh i learned my lesson on internet misinformation when i was reading an internet rumor site for uh zelda ocarina of time

and they said that you could get the triforce if you went through a ridiculous series of rigorous actions and i spent dozens and dozens of hours trying to get the triforce and never did um this i've mentioned this website uh i i fuck i forget what it is i found it again on archive but it would play the um the x files theme in the background when you were on the site so sick so it was like the most fucking 1998 website so i remember as a kid reading this and it was so i was just like scared being on this website like it was like like i was reading forbidden knowledge like in a in a lovecraftian way

um and yeah just reading about like and if you do this and if you go here and you have to like fall through and then the redeads grab you and you like bring you to another place it was this whole fucking thing but uh yeah once the triforce didn't exist i was like i'll never believe anything on the internet again and so since then i've been inoculated against misinformation yeah they can't get you the The propaganda machine will never defeat you because you learned young.

You learned early. I wonder if there's a version of that for the younger generations of that sort of thing.

Of the X -Files. I feel like every TikTok is bullshit, so it's like that's what the hell is.

Yeah, but they just seem to buy it.

The amount of times I've been told, like, oh man, I learned this thing today.

I'm like, brother, that's not true.

That's not how that works, even from people roughly our age.

I'm like, TikTok is not all facts.

It's a lot of lies.

nice i just remember when we were kids there was like people would post like uh like recipes on 4chan and be like oh you can make like crystals out of this and it'd be a recipe for like mustard gas yes dude mix ammonia and bleach and you're like oh that's how you make a really strong crystals and it's like no it fills your home with deadly gas yeah hey just did this uh can't breathe what's going on yeah i forgot about that until this moment that's fucked up yeah man it's i don't know it was like harmful pranks was was what we came up on i you know runescape or or any mmo back in the day i was like

if you want 100 gold press alt f4 now to to get the best armor you can get in the game that was like a fun prank and now it's like the president of the united states invented the moon and you're like some people are like yeah that sounds real because like there's no repercussions i hate it yeah as soon as i got scammed out of a unique item in diablo 2 because because someone was like, I can duplicate it.

Let me show you the dupe glitch. They would stand outside of the rogue and came in on the other side of the fence and then steal your shit.

I never fell for anything again.

Dude, after my RuneScape girlfriend killed me and stole all my armor in the wilderness, that was when I realized that, yes, there's no such thing as reality and everything's a lie.

That's really traumatic.

Yeah. It was that or Habbo Hotel where my bub was at. You know?

Somebody should want to jump to the emails because there's a really good one about this, but we'll talk about it later.

Jeremy, you've been gaming this week.

I've been gaming so fucking hard this weekend.

And I'd love to know your thoughts because it sounds like you haven't just been gaming.

You've been climbing.

You've been climbing through the ranks of two great games, one of which we covered on No Clip Crew in a quick look, White Knuckle.

You've been playing the game.

How have you been enjoying it?

And I guess it looks like you're done with it.

I know this game came out at Early Access a couple months ago.

I had played the demo.

I dabbled a little bit.

I was like, oh, this game seems fun, seems hard. This weekend something just came over me.

And I had an experience of self -mastery and self -reflection that is paralleled in my mind only by Sekiro of just like, White Knuckle's fucking hard. It's a hard game, man.

How far have you gotten in White Knuckle, Jesse?

So, okay, here's what happened.

I did two, no, I did probably four or five runs.

And then we did the quick look.

And I made it pretty far.

No, I got to the end of like the first area.

Yeah. And then I did one more run after that where I got all the way to the end.

did the very last thing and died i didn't have enough time oh shit okay i just barely made it so white uncle for the short version is it's a climbing game where you um uh there are a bunch of handholds you can hold and you individually uh mouse right click or left click to grab individual handholds and then wasdy to kind of like pull yourself up uh there's stamina on the individual hands and then sometimes the game will ask you to like hold right click to hold on to the the right thing and then use your left hand to pull out a there is it piton pittance whatever the piton i think it is i'm gonna say

pitton because i feel pretentious i like it don't like pitton um so you hold on with you're holding right click and then you have to like tab open the menu left click on the the piton you have to put it in the wall switch hands because you're running out of stamina so now you're left clicking looking back at the thing take your right hand off pull out the hammer hammer in the piton grab it with that hand and then just like just these insane like it's like if quop was you were going to fall a thousand feet if you didn't quop correctly like it's just i really like games that have this sort of like

bizarre control scheme that it's you know when you play like a metroidvania or something and you've played a million 2d action platformers there's sort of this muscle memory you go into it with where this i feel like the skill floor on precision platformers has to keep going up because people have been playing them since you know whatever mario one um whereas this is like the the it is a challenging game but part of the challenge is also just becoming competent with this totally new control scheme um it doesn't really remind me of anything i was trying to think of like this individual hand climbing

if there's anything else like this um gorilla home and grow up okay series of games by a smaller ubisoft team has something similar it's not not exactly the same but each of the robot that climbs like a little red square robot trying to climb up a thing hence the name um has individual handholds but it's not like i don't remember if there's a stress meter there might be of like stamina but something similar to that but sorry yeah gotcha all right cool so regardless it is like it's even if there are sort of like similar touchstones it's a very uncommon extremely novel um control scheme so the other

thing that's incredibly brutal about this game is that it's a rogue like i guess it's not really a rogue light but it's a rogue like that sort of there are like unlocks you can achieve in each run like you know like isaac i guess is kind of similar um but uh but yeah there are very limited sort of like retry points and so if you die you're starting this whole game over and i cleared my first run i played like 12 hours of this game and i just i could not stop it was like once i get obsessed with one like a game like this a hard game it's just like i don't know i don't know if it's like ocd or something

but i just am like i become so fixated on doing it um and so i had to i had to get the poison out of my body and just get it done um and yeah i mean a full run to beat the game took me it was 42 minutes which i don't think is a very good pace the world record speed run is like seven and a half minutes but that's like if you watch it have to be hacker oh no it's real is a a clip of that it's real it's real oh my god okay you have it's a very particular set of perks you have to get um in order to do it there's like a double jump you can get and all sorts of bullshit that i didn't get um but i think

a normal human being has to play like 20 to 60 minutes of this game without basically without making more than like three mistakes the entire time and a mistake could be as simple as like the handhold is here and you click and your mouse just like grazes next next to it but doesn't quite overlap it it's so fucking punishing um and yeah i think this is like this might be my game of the year uh jesse's picking your face like someone's breaking into his home i think there's just like a torrential rainstorm just started okay it sounded like there was a lion outside of my window i appreciate that but anyway

no this white knuckle is like this is one of the best games i've played in my life like i this for me this is like i'm not not being you know this is not like a recency bias thing i have like digested this game uh for a few days now after beating it and it's like this is like up this is like inscription level brilliance to me um i think this game is uh unbelievable and uh yeah it's but yeah it's fucking punishing like know what you're getting into if you go into this game it beat my ass i was shocked that uh more people have beat this i mean not really because it's kind of short relative to this but like

i I looked at the percentage of people who have beat Sekiro on Steam versus people who have beat White Knuckle.

And I was shocked that White Knuckle is is like 33 percent of people have beat it because I found it like grueling.

But it's so compelling, like the challenge of it, because you feel yourself getting better every time you play.

Like every new run, you're like, OK, I don't have to be afraid of this anymore.

I understand. I have muscle memory for the jump distance.

I know roughly how far I can go when I'm running and jumping or when I'm regular jumping and how high I can go.

I know, like I have faith in whether or not I can grab a handhold after jumping off of something or how long the stamina lasts.

It's like, it's like learning how your body, like you described it, I think really well that the joy I think of playing this game is the fact that it's so novel in its design.

Like it's, it's not a lot of games like this.

It's like when you play Dark Souls for the first time, you're like, Oh, R one is attack.

What do you mean? Square is square is attack.

Why is R one attack?

What do you mean? Why am I healing when I'm trying to attack?

Like getting used to that as part of the challenge of playing those games.

games but with white knuckle it's like the challenge is something that's so automatic that half the time you don't even have to think about it which is climbing and basically every game has been turned into the whole system and you have to be used to how that works both in its simulated mechanics but then also just like getting used to the act of both left click and right click being a hand that you have to remember to hold on like i want to grab something else i have to still be holding my left hand or i'm falling if i let go with my right hand trying trying to grab something else so there's

like a lot of intrinsic game stuff that you you sort of accept as a player and that you have to remind yourself is not here which i think is really fun like seems like to be that's the case for most people but then even further than that i think it's like it's just you getting better like you said this is a rogue like it's not a rogue light which is such a minor sort of thing but it's not like there's an upgrade that you can you know you you get enough coins, the more you play and then you spend the coin so that you can upgrade your stamina on your hands and then your hands can hold stuff.

No, you have to just get used to how long it takes to hold on to something and how quickly your hands sort of lose stamina and you're forced to let go.

It's all up to you learning how to get better at that game.

And it's so it's just so compelling.

And I think that's part of why people just keep playing and get to the ending more than something like Sekiro.

Yeah, it's it is. It's interesting that like that sort of deconstruction of of familiar game mechanics like climbing in most video games is um you know you press like e or whatever to interact with like a rope you're affixed to the rope and now like forward moves you up and down back moves you down on your controls or whatever um or if you're climbing a wall like breath of the wild or like peak which we'll talk about in a minute new climbing game which i think is a really interesting juxtaposition with this game because they're both new climbing games um you you like stick to a wall and there's

like a stamina meter in both Breath of the Wild and peak and uh and you move up and down it but like the the game design brilliance I think of White Knuckle is it has this like Bennett Foddy like deconstruction of familiar mechanics where it takes something that like Mooncat and UFO 50 is a great example of this same thing where a platformer precision platformer like I said a genre that like you I was playing as a baby that like everyone knows it's like your first genre that you play as a a child um and making it so that like move half of your controller moves you left and half your controller

moves you right and then combinations make you jump it's this bizarre fucking deconstruction of a familiar thing and so in white knuckle it's taking this familiar thing which is just when i climb i adhere to surfaces and it's like what if what if we deconstruct that and make within that deconstructed space a new complex version of this that takes each of the component pieces of what are automated in the simpler version and make them all manual and uh and i think that's really interesting because it creates room for like like skill expression like um it creates this window for player skill expression where uh

in like i mean we can kind of like slowly transition it to talk about peak because i think this is relevant we're like in peak you look at a surf peak is the new mountain climbing game from landfall and aggro crab um uh first first published game i think which is pretty cool oh cool and it is a very good game i'm i'm about to contrast it in a way that sounds negative but i just think it's a simpler version of climbing in peak you look at a mountain face and you're like do i think i have enough stamina to get to the top of that and it's just sort of this like visual analysis based on what condition your

character is in and how much stamina you have remaining but there's no like within that there is no sort of like mini micro level game that you're like all right if i like click fast enough i can make it to the top or if i like maneuver my hands fast enough i can make it to the top there's no sort of like micro level like that whereas white knuckle is 100 that like you you have a fixed amount of stamina with it i mean there are perks that augmented and whatever but like given any situation you have a fixed amount of stamina and it's like it's not do i have enough stamina looking at that that i

estimate can i make it it's like can i maneuver quickly enough to have i mastered the game well enough to have self -mastery enough to like perform well enough within that to have the skill to make it and uh i think that's a really like that's a really meaningful difference because it's like it puts you in in a in a role of great agency as opposed to just sort of being the um the evaluator or something yeah um with peak could you describe a little bit more what that game is just for people who may not know or yeah yeah yeah uh yeah i kind of like soft transitioned into talking about peak no it's

a really it's a great game so i'm excited to hear more about it it's also a perfect like contrast with white knuckle because Because it does very different things in a similar genre of, you know, all these new climbing games.

Peak is a co -op, sort of like silly physics -y game where you're climbing a big mountain with your friends.

And much simpler climbing mechanics.

It's sort of just like stamina -driven and seeing if you can make it up to these things.

But there are also tools like ropes and chains and you have to eat food to maintain sort of like your stamina bar fills up.

but then like the if you have hunger it offsets the max total if you take damage it offsets the max total so you're managing equipment and all these sort of factors to keep your party in optimal climbing condition um but it's it's fun i mean it's i find it to be like a pretty simple game but it's it's on sale for five bucks right now i think it's nine or something it's a steal yeah it's it's a cheap fun co -op game um yeah have you guys played bunch of peak yeah i played a little bit of it last night with my buddies um we had a bunch of technical issues which was a bummer but yeah sam eventually

i restarted my computer because of the tech issues and i got a blue screen that i'd never seen before which was a little scary um but regardless it was uh once it worked it was really fun i think uh peak sort of sits in that space it's peak uh i already did it i already did it uh i hate that i hate it so much i've been saying peem meme as a misspelling of peak and i just keep saying that instead it's peem it's literally so peem i like that um right that's better than peak because that's just aggravating um but no it's uh not not the game though the game's not aggravating the game's a lot of fun

uh it's co -op you you mentioned that it's yeah four player co -op but it's not co -op in the sense that like like i don't think of it the same way that i would you know portal two where like you need the other people to advance it's sort of like you could play it solo and for a lot of the time one person in our our party did and just carried us which was nice um but but the co -op part is sort of like repo or lethal company and that it's like you're kind of just hanging out with homies yeah content warning was uh also made by landfall who worked oh really did they publish this or make this i can't

it was a collab between aggrocrab and landfall but i don't actually know who did the development on peak landfall oh it's just landcrab which is aggrocrab and landfall okay so it is a true collab on the development um okay but yeah the studio landfall has like hangout games and content warning which was very successful so there's like they also make haste oh my god they did uh who is this why are they making so many good video games oh no they did make it you're right um yeah landfall i've made a bunch of cool stuff they i think they also did tabs yeah i was about to say i think tabs is the one

and cluster truck hold on yeah landfall's got a bunch of good shit based that's awesome um yeah yeah sorry what were you saying um i don't know i lost my train i thought i was sucked into the oh i was just saying that there's like precedent for this is like it's not really a hangout game because i feel like this one is a little more punishing um than what i would you know this isn't like big walk where it's like look at me do like a silly gesture um although there are silly gestures but uh yeah um me and chelsea play this just the two of us so i'd be curious to see how this plays with a larger

party it's way more chaotic for no reason it's like it's funny because i think it's a hard game it is hard it's very challenging we got i think to the end of the second no no we got to the middle of the third area which hey just so you know the peak keeps peaking um but there's a little bit more to it you think you you think you made it no you didn't um but the climbing is like the way that you interact with other players outside of doing little gestures and like talking to each other there's the mouth sort of animates you can make your own character and all the options are very funny but the mouth

animates a little bit so that's one way that you can sort of you can talk in game and it echoes like you're in a cave and stuff it's a very good communication system i think you could ping and the ping is like your character's arm just appears wherever you pinged and is like pointing at it which is really cute um but the main way that you interact with other players in the game outside of feeding them stuff is uh when someone's climbing you can reach for their hand and pull them up to sort of uh save them if they don't have enough stamina to make it a certain distance which is a really really

interesting system and works i think in the co -op mode but then it also i think gives players this false sense of security of like oh i can trust my friend to remember to grab me but if your idiot friend is too busy grabbing some coconuts and throwing them at the ground to split them in half while you're trying to climb up and not fall to your death well guess who's falling to their death it's you um it's so it's it's definitely it's not more hectic necessarily necessarily but i do think having more players gives you a lot more opportunities for comedy which is kind of what these are all about right

i it brings up an interesting point which is that i think that this game has a lot of like silly physics -y shit like messing with your friends but it's also it's like a punishing game and i feel like those two visions for what this game are kind of create a little bit of friction where it's like if it was a little less punishing i would feel better about it being silly and if it was a little less silly i'd feel better about it being punishing um where it's like you know in white knuckle there's no like oh let me put like a banana peel on the ground because you lose like 40 minutes of progress

if you fucking follow the banana peel yeah um i feel like that you know there was a moment where i was like oh we should like try this out it'll be like fucking hilarious that it's like oh no now we're dead and then we had the game is over much less funny yeah it's not it's not that funny i'd be like if you if if you've like fucked with me and we lost the whole game i wouldn't be like oh that was i was was oh what a prankster so hard yeah you're so funny fuck you dude we're fucking we're at the DCing I'm fucking I'm refunding the game I want my five dollars back I've had enough of your ass yeah

uh I yeah I agree I totally that's a really good point because part of the reason that you're climbing also I don't know if we I don't know if you mentioned this uh peak the the reason that you're trying to get up the mountain is because there's a mist rising from the ground much like a battle royale game circles closing exactly you don't want to be in that you gotta be in the circle um so you got to keep climbing to avoid the mist or you'll die it's just like the Stephen king movie it uh so it's like a stupid bit um but you're trying to avoid that so you got to keep climbing you got to keep going

higher and higher and stay away from the the mist or the fog as it's rising um so even if you fall you can lose health but you can also just fall into the mist and die and that's it so like you yeah you lose all that progress and it's not as it's not as fun you're totally right it's not as fun to fail it's funny once and then after that it's It's like, okay, all right.

Can we move on? Can we all just, can we all hunker down and agree when I'm climbing, you're going to pull me up.

All right. Can we all do that?

Throw the rope down.

Um, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a good time for five bucks.

You'd be much worse off.

Yeah. No, it's a, it is a very cool game.

I think it, um, like I said, I think it has two sort of visions of what the game could be that are fighting against each other, but I think both of them are compelling.

And I think that like, yeah, when it works, it's, it's, you know, there, there is like like a legitimate sense of accomplishment when you get up these big yeah i mean when it has a really good sense of space too when you look back down you're like holy shit like i really don't want to fall it gives you that like jelly legs feeling when you're not quite as much as white knuckle i feel like well it's interesting to say that because i i did get that a lot in white knuckle but because white knuckle is segmented like you'll get to the top of a room and the door closes behind you uh i got that less

because there's sort of these discrete biomes with there There are exceptions to that.

But yeah, in peak rather, you're like, look back at the top of the, you know, you're almost at the top of the first biome and you look back and it's like, holy shit, like, I really, really don't want to fall.

It's scary. Legitimately scary to look back and see like the ocean stretching out for a thousand miles in every direction.

Yeah. Very good point.

Yeah. Check it out on Steam.

Five smack roonies.

For now, it's still on sale and it will be until June 23rd. So when this episode is live, you'll still have a little bit of time to pick it up on a discount.

but even if it's not a discount still really cheap and whatever you do leave a positive review but for just don't say it's peak in your review no you have to because no don't fucking no do it i have a oh wow i'm looking at the reviews yeah there's a handful of uh thoughtful ones and then it's peak a thousand jester awards on steam yeah exactly game is peak uh great freaking game it's peak it's peak it's peem hey one peem all right there we go um yeah that's that's white knuckle and peak we love our climbing game folks don't we we're all talking about climbing uh frank did you get down with if anyone

that i know personally or otherwise was ever going to rock climb it has to be you do you did you ever do that it's funny enough in montreal i don't know what it was i think it was just a sports store i don't remember what it was but in montreal there was a sports store that just had a rock climbing section i think and like you could just do it I don't even think we had equipment, but I don't know.

So I've like dabbled in rock climbing as a kid.

Like I think a friend had a birthday party.

We went to like a rock climbing thing.

So I've done it a few times at like rock climbing gyms, not in real life, not like Mission Impossible 2 where Tom Cruise is like taking off the mountain.

It's an extremely good workout.

It just feels also like one of those things that's hard to self -motivate.

But if someone is down to do it, I think in both cases, I went with someone who was like way into it.

So they taught me it.

And I'm not done it myself, but it is a super good exercise and I do like the idea of it I I dude I've have like I don't have social anxiety for like hanging out with people but when it comes to getting like instruction on things I have acute just like a phobia of like well like one -on -one with an instructor being like all right what you're gonna do I just can't listen to what they say because I'm freaking out about fucking up and uh I really wanted to get into rock climbing like five or six years ago and so I you have to get certified to climb at the local gym to do like the big wall and get

like on belay and shit and so i just like learned everything ahead of time because i was so freaked out and so then you then you have to like go do with it with an instructor they're like all right well now you're gonna oh you already did everything and i was like i just don't i'm like i'm too scared to like fuck up so i was i watched a hundred youtube videos before i got here literally literally i just fucking like was at home like tying myself up and like getting ready for it but uh it's really fun i i haven't been in fucking forever uh we have all these climbing games now we should find a way

to convince danny to let us go rock climbing yes no clip crew well we'll get we'll do our own peak we'll do our own white life we'll do it yeah rl dude it's peak um now i'm just gonna say it because i know it bugs you you should have told me um now i'm gonna pretend not to be bothered by it yeah nice try i know it's i know you're holding it in you already revealed yeah he's so pissed um no that would be fun i think the only time i ever went rock climbing was uh if we did it like for camp they would uh we went to tim wharton's camp yes that's real um wait tim horton's camp i love revealing fun

canadian what the fuck is that so you know how uh mcdonald's does their camp stuff right now is that a thing i don't know i they have like a oh no they have like the hospital stuff yeah that's yeah they have like a charity children's home were you like a tim horton sponsored child yeah i was they backed me up it was they played in the arms of the angel or whatever and i was standing there on a commercial just jesse being have you ever wanted to let this little inner city kid you know what i mean when i say inner city uh get in a boat well here you go for five nine if you buy 300 double double

medium coffees then you could send this kid to camp no it's did it sorry that's the only tim hortons thing i know no that's okay that works because the i think the sports teams that they sponsored are called timbits i want to say i hate i hate it up here so much we're like it's it's like a amusement park of a country um i guess it was america all countries a little bit anyway tim horton's camp so tim hortons i think as an endeavor to support the community and to you know be as canadian as possible take some money that they make off of purchases in a certain period of time and then donate that i

guess to camps that are run around canada which is where they are um Um, and they just like kids get to go to that.

I think some of it's funded, some of it's not, um, but they're on campgrounds that you can go to regularly.

But anyway, I would only ever go with Tim Hortons camp, like in the summer, the schools would be like, Hey, you're not the worst student on planet earth.

Do you want to go to camp?

And my mom was like a couple of weeks without one of my kids have fun.

Uh, so we'd go and yeah, Tim Hortons operated all these, these camps.

It was just like a regular camp.

It wasn't like we had to have Tim Hortons branded coffee or anything.

I mean, we're all like eight years old, so we're getting down with any of that, but it was just a good time.

time but yeah that's that's what it was it was tim horton's camp that's what we always called it because i i just we don't have to dive into this any further i just want to say every time you say that tim horton's operated camps it sounds like yeah that does sound like nazified corporate endeavor i just i just it sounds very malicious to me you will you will enjoy all of the no all of the team no more tim bits please you are open up open fight um okay all right let's let's get out of that uh the steam next fest was last week i don't know if you guys played any demos whatsoever yes no thumbs up

thumbs down uh can i be brutally honest here i love video games there was a thousand demos i wanted to play but i there there was no game that i was like oh that looks like a cool game but i'm not convinced that i want to play it i just if i'm already convinced i don't want to play the demo because then it takes the wind out of my sails for the real thing yep i I completely get what you mean by that.

I have a freak problem in my brain where I need to find stuff that I wouldn't be compelled to play.

You know what I mean?

Like, I like taking the risk where I'll play a bunch of demos and like one in 100 will be really, really good.

And I'm glad that I played it and I didn't already know it was going to be good.

This time around, and I don't know whether or not the sentiment is, you know, I guess I'm a freak.

I play a lot of these things.

I don't know how many people who also play a lot of demos for Steam.

Next has felt this.

This was one of the ones where you knew what was good before you played it.

And that was basically it.

I don't think I found too, too many where I was surprised that it was as good as it was.

Like Morsels was one that got announced a little while ago.

It's like a Binding of Isaac style indie roguelike shooter thing.

It was really good.

But like, of course it was.

If you saw the trailer for that game, you didn't need to play the demo.

like it looks that good and it plays that good like it's really fun it was more inventive than i thought it would be i thought it would just be visually really interesting but like the gameplay mechanics were a lot deeper there's like stuff that you carry across different levels and that stuff can upgrade over time it's like a creature collector and that you have different abilities from each of the little morsels i guess no morsels is the food that you have left over because it's a capitalist joke um but like you can play as a rat and then you can play as a different thing this use bombs like

it's all really good but like totally you're totally right that like i saw it and i was like yes this will be good of course it will be good um frank did you have a chance to play anything or is anything that stuck out to you i know you played a couple demos at um summer games fest that uh that you enjoyed that happened to be part of dex fest as well yeah it was just whatever was at summer games fest like the biggest thing that stuck out i think is on summer games fest was uh yeah that ninja gaiden soul rage bound yeah like that was so i'm ready to play that like that was i really like that um

i'm sure there's others i feel like there's another game i messaged you let me double check um me to the hall or see i didn't play that no no yeah that actually is the one demo i did play um what'd you think i i was surprised by it and i don't good or bad surprise i was i felt a little it was more of a um more of a 2d souls game than i thought thought it was going to be like a little more of like a whimsical uh you know retro zelda adventure talking to colorful characters and they're like don't hit the chickens and then you're like wandering around but uh instead it was just like punishing combat and then

i mean like the sprite art is so gorgeous and so expressive that there are some characters in the beginning who can talk to um and i wanted to talk to them but then it's just like all right go out and fight these enemies with like attack patterns and then if you die you reset to the checkpoint and stuff which i i think i'll still really like it i was just surprised how much it was more of a um 2d action combat like 2d souls game rather than sort of like a lighthearted adventure yeah i i got that for sure i was uh surprised yeah how hard it was although i didn't find it super challenging but there

were moments of it where i was like this this would be really hard if you like didn't play games like this like if you didn't like castlevania i feel that was the thing i got a lot more castlevania out of this than I did Link's Awakening which I didn't expect and I think I'd have to play more of it before I could say whether or not I like that um there were elements of it that I know are in the game that aren't in the demo that I feel like probably needed to be there like stuff with the save system uh I think actually might have been there but like it was it was uh I don't know was it wasn't as

much of a centerpiece as I was hoping it would be yeah I need to play the full game I need to see more of the character stuff and where they go after those those initial initial beginning areas but um that's hard stuff to integrate into a demo too because a demo should be like a little sort of the hook like mechanical cross -section it should give you a little yeah exactly like a little narrative hook of like oh here's like a few colorful characters now you're in the gameplay this is what the game plays like because you can't have like a 20 minute like talking to grandma intro and then a demo because then

the demo's over and all you did was talk to grandma although that sounds like a good demo well that's the other problem i think that demos tend to have is like if they do if it's the literally the beginning of the game the beginning of the the game has to be peak it has to be really good like it has uh it has to be just like a banger right out of the gates that's that's hard to pull off for some games some of them you need like a narrative setup or you need to spend a long time explaining a mechanic which sometimes isn't super interesting for some people or there's like i played a lot of platformers

and metroidvanias gag me with a spoon that like were not fun because they were so focused on explaining how to play a 2d platformer which on the one hand if this was a commercial product i would expect them to do that because you can't assume everyone playing your game knows how to play these games that's how we get an insular industry that doesn't build on anything or or appeal to new audiences but if this is a demo made for people who are playing demos on steam just get to i know how to jump just get to it just tell me what the buttons are um so that that stuff was was a little frustrating uh

but then there's the other problem i think where you make a vertical slice that's like like a very specific thing for the demo.

And that I think can give you the wrong impression of what the game actually is.

Unless it's a really good, like tight recreation.

But sometimes there's one in particular that I played, which I liked because it was a weird vertical slice called the Little Tomb, the Mahalova Club and the Search for a Dead Body.

Frank, you gotta look this up, brother.

Just the Little Tomb on Steam.

You gotta see what this looks like.

What the hell did I play?

I will put footage in the video version if you're an audio listener just just go to the scene page or check out the video at the time that you're at right now um this game was so I don't even know how to describe it I don't know how to describe it it's like a third person little experiment where you are in a playground and you do some stuff and it was eight minutes long and it was so bizarre I don't I don't know they were like this is just a different thing this isn't the game okay this looks cute i this is like somewhere between like yakuza and katamari yeah i got oh yeah yeah yeah for sure okay

the dev team is based in kyoto i like this yeah it was it was that kind of weird where it's like now i want to know more this was just enough it was a good little a good little chunk a little bite um that was one of them uh do you guys mind if i just just rattle off a couple no demos yeah so okay have you seen anything about hell is us i know the title that's about it yeah that's really all there is to know um this was bad and then it was good which is i think a hard thing to do in a demo uh so basically this is a third person adventure game i would argue anyone who plays it will know right away

it's like alan wake 2 at the beginning Like you start in the woods.

You are a guy looking for someone.

It's, you know, visually it kind of is pulling on a lot of the same strings.

But the very opening of the game, you are being whoever Mr. Hellman is being us, I guess, is being interrogated by.

I don't know how to describe what he looks like.

It looks like a Resident Evil villain.

He's just like this man wearing a hat, smoking a cigarette with like a big double chin who's just asking you these bizarre questions that you don't know.

the answers to what are the numbers what do they mean um and then you start playing the game and it's like oh actually this is a puzzle game but also all of the puzzles at least for the beginning of the demo and most of the demo honestly we're like open this lock and then you would look at something and they'd be like and here's the combination for the lock and it was like okay all right i'll go do it it's not a puzzle uh it's like you know the beginning of bioshock infinite where they're like you got to open this door and then you just look at here's the code you're like like okay that's not a whatever

just just that sort of thing always bugs me but the combat and the design of the enemies was like i thought it was pretty fun like it's it's it plays like a souls like a little bit but you know what made me go oh hold on we might be playing a video game light attack was square on the on the playstation controller heavy attack was triangle i was like wait a second is this a character action game this is what kind of game is this uh so yeah the the combat I don't know it's just fleshed out enough in this way where there's a lot of interesting things that they're trying there's like a drone that you

bring along with you that can do separate attacks the enemies have long laborious wind -ups and they you know their design is a little interesting they have like holes in their face and they're like floating white creatures and then like sometimes they'll have this uh red diamond heart thing that'll come out of them and and you have to hit that first before you hit the enemies so but then there's other enemies fighting you as well it's like a little bit of a combat chest sort of thing going on um there's a lot more to it than i thought there would be the trailer made me think it was going to be

like a rip -off of death stranding but it's not which i get i i appreciated and it's a lot more combat focused than i thought it would be i don't know if it's good but i just thought it was interesting i didn't know what the hell it was going to be and it turns out it's a lot safer and also weirder than i than i was hoping for i guess um i just want to mention that one uh can i just post this and snapchat really quick at 56 seconds in the trailer there is a character who looks exactly like an aged up version of the singer of turnstile whoa you put that together so fast i mean i just grabbed two

images while you were talking but uh it might be i was just struck by how much he looks like i think it's brendan yates or whatever his name is sorry no no it's really not useful or relevant at all it just i just thought it was interesting no you nailed it that's a good poll I'll put that in the video version thank you you're welcome thank you for creating content all right you're welcome some respect on that one of the other ones that I played that I really enjoyed was Dead as Disco this is a third person combat game you're noticing a trend where all of the combat animations are timed to music

so that was like I was like that sounds interesting but I don't really know know how much i'm gonna get out of that like in theory it's just a character action game like uh melee combat you're playing as disco man fighting disco people um and you just beat the shit out of them to music and the punches and animations are timed and further there's a lot of like custom tracks that they have in the game i don't know if they're like covers or if they're music done by the studio or whoever um the animations are time almost like guitar hero like you know you would expect the drums are going to hit this point

especially when you're playing on certain difficulty levels you'll play like oh there's going to be a strum here so this happens and then this you know but here in combat when you're just in the middle of the flow of a combo the animation will slow down or there will be like a pause so there's a bunch of bespoke animations it seems like that are retimed based on the bpm or whatever's happening in the song and they sort of time it based on that i don't know what behind the scenes is going on or how they map that stuff out it seems very technically involved uh but it's really cool but the reason i

liked it so much more than just oh cool it lines up with the music there's a custom track importer you can use so you can add whatever songs you want and it feels really good when it's like a song that you know and you sort of are expecting the beats to hit because their own music like is still really compelling it's really fun but when you put a kendrick lamar song in this game and you're like it's it's you're waiting for the beat or to drop or whatever and it lines up oh it's like that's that you you hit the uh the peak of enjoyment with uh with video games it's just wobble up in there because it's

like yes okay good i just want to make sure is not enough um so good tv off that worked as well um yeah so many good tracks you could throw in there i threw a kickback the opening theme to chainsaw man and there that was really good faster song seemed to have a little bit of trouble with their automatic track importer but yeah i don't know i don't know what's gonna happen with that dragon border but like i hope that game does well enough it seemed like it did um to get like a buttload of money and they can just keep making really good songs and hopefully get some licensed tracks or something because that was a ton of fun

i could play that literally for hours i almost did it was a really good time um another one that i liked i just want to do a couple more um pig face oh yeah yes awesome awesome first person shooter that has that sort of what's the game i'm thinking of it's not man hunt condemned condemned thank you you knew you frank knows that condemned vibe of like oppressive tight spaces grimy environments enemies that feel like they just don't have any concern for their own lives that are just coming to get your ass but then they also have guns too um the combat feels amazing the gunplay feels really good

i think i don't know who who started the whole idea but like there's that shotgun test for first -person shooters if the shotgun doesn't feel good then the rest of the game can't possibly feel good shotgun feels amazing sniper rifle feels amazing it's like so stressful i've played multiple versions of this game over time and it just gets better every time if the demo is still available go check it out if it's not i think it's on itch .io as well um let's check it out there it might be available on there but regardless i'm so excited for that one just that they're playing it it's like i have not played

a first -person shooter like this before frank you you knew about it so like like have you given it a shot before or no they get the demo thing where it's like i'll play the game when it's out but it looks amazing and so yeah like i mean the the was it dusk forever ago was like an old school for yes that was like oh they they nailed it and we've since had a lot of like i mean like this is different than like a the boomer shooter term but yeah this looks really great yeah total fun this is also published by dread xp who uh published white knuckle as well it's cool to see them push it because dread

xp typically do like horror stuff more traditionally traditionally um and it's cool to see them publishing stuff that's like i mean you know pig face and white knuckle are both horror adjacent they're both like gritty and kind of spooky but they're not like jump scare horror or mascot horror it's not like the mortuary assistant where there's like a spooky guy in the corner or amanda the adventurer or whatever i think that's one of their games too right tv series games something like that um yeah it's cool to see them branch out a little bit more i hope they keep doing more of that because these

pickups have been very good for them and i hope that they uh they've done well and they can keep supporting those devs um uh just two more here strange antiquities this is a very jesse game uh it's basically a deductive puzzle sort of game where they did a previous one called strange horticulture which was a game about like figuring out what plants customers want based on context clues they give you a book that has descriptions of what the plants are like but the plants aren't tagged so you have a bunch of plants in your house in strange horticulture the first game or plants in your business and you

have to based on what characters say they want like oh i want a plant that makes me happy you have to like look through the book and figure out what plant makes them happy and then assume that's the plant but then maybe the description of it will be like and it looks like green and it has leaves that are in this shape so you have to like get really really in there and look at all the plants and sort of like deduce which when which one is the one that they're looking for and this one is strange antiquities it's the same sort of idea idea and that nothing's tagged, but they're more, they're antiques,

hence the name. So someone will come in and say, I'm looking for the seed of happiness.

And like, you'll look in the book and it's like, oh, the seed of happiness looks like this and it has this structure on it.

And then you could click on the items and they'll have the descriptions again.

So it's the same sort of idea, but I think they've just ramped it up here and they're doing more with the idea than I think the first one was capable of, or at least that they had considered or maybe had the budget for.

So in the first one, when you failed a bunch, there wasn't like a ton, Or at least I don't remember there being, like, a ton of issues.

Like, you didn't really, you could sort of just trial and error your way through it and eventually figure it out.

Here, when you make enough mistakes, eventually you get stuck in this cursed state because all of the antiques have, like, a little bit of a curse attached to them.

And you have to roll dice to undo the curse.

So that, like, you know, now you have this issue on the map.

I never failed because I'm really good at rolling digital dice.

The RNG gods were my favorite, so I'm not entirely sure what happens.

but it looks like there's something there that disincentivizes you to just you know just brute forcing it until you find the answer um so that was really cool i love that sort of stuff and uh i can't wait to be the full thing uh and one more that i thought was really fun um that was maybe a little bit more let me see if this one is a little more okay okay this one was i did not know anything about this until next fest this was the one that made me go this is why i do this this this is why i play all these random demos in hopes that i find something really cool uh kaput mortem oh yeah yeah caput

mortem m -o -r -t -e -m i'll have a link in the description all these games that we talk about in this episode as per always um but this one on steam kaput mortem uh i don't remember the name of the developer wild arts game thank you wild arts games they did a game called um oh my god born of bread which was i thought a pretty good mario paper mario style game um this one totally different direction visually so this is like sort of uh like an old pc like late 90s early 2000s pc adventure game looking at this thing but then the gameplay of it is it's a dungeon crawler but it's a puzzle game dungeon crawler

sort of thing so like you're going through this this uh the game opens where you see this big lighthouse up on a hill it's this big bright beautiful day but there's this creepy lighthouse and you get there and you have to descend into this dungeon that is dank and full of cobwebs it's dirty you can smell how mossy and moldy it probably is you can hear dripping water in the distance it's disgusting uh but the gameplay part of it that like really compelled me and this is jeremy was talking earlier about how fun it is to play games that are like very mechanically different or force you to consider

things that you hadn't considered about interacting with video games the way that you move the camera if you're playing on controller which is the way that they recommend it is like the triggers turn the camera and the bumpers or the r1 or l1 turn the camera up and down or whatever i don't know camera words they're not coming to mind but like you rotate the camera you operate the camera using using the triggers, and then your hand, which is how you interact with the world, is the right stick, but not like you like, Oh, I'll turn my body and use my hand.

Your hand is like a disembodied feature on the screen that you move around the viewport of the screen.

So your hand is like attached to your body as it always is.

Uh, and like you move it around on the screen with the right stick to interact with stuff.

It is such a weird approach to making that kind of game, but it makes perfect sense.

And once you get used to the controls, there's a little bit of combat that you have to do at certain points and it makes the combat so much scarier like i was thinking about how survival horror games i feel like part of the challenge of them is that they played poorly like in the past anyway now they're kind of they've been smoothed out the resident evil 4 remake like feels really good resident evil 2 feels great right but those games the challenge was like okay now you're stuck in place and you're in aim mode and you have to aim the gun and like you had to fight against the game to experience

some level of fear and now it's It's all purely visuals and sound effect and everything.

So it's not like you don't feel trapped in the system in the same way that older horror games tended to do.

This is going back to that.

I don't know how well it will work over time if it just gets frustrating for some people or if eventually you get used to the controls and the sort of challenge of that goes away and it just becomes, you know, a regular old survival horror game with some puzzles.

Whether or not that's the case, just the novelty of playing with that system was so much fun and it seems like it's a shorter game that they're aiming to make here.

so it sounds like it won't outstay its welcome and you won't have time to really become a master with the control scheme so i don't all in all just the way that it looks the way that it sounded and that novel gameplay approach and the way that they handled controls was just so compelling i couldn't stop playing i had to force myself to stop and move on to something else because i had like 100 other demos to play um but that one was was really really cool i'm excited for that one to launch awesome yeah i i like games that like i i'm glad to see developers exploring this sort of like bad controls

as good controls concept um i think that like yeah one -to -one hyper specific precise controls are good for certain things like i like you know games like celeste and meat boy like it'd be it'd be shitty if those controlled like mooncat because they're punishing um but yeah it's it's tense when you're like you know in white knuckle or in this you're like all right there's like a thing that's about to kill me it's like is it right but like your brain crosses wires and stuff and it's fun to you know you have to keep your composure and not panic in moments where the control scheme is so abstracted

because otherwise you're like I might get like I've let go of the mouse and I like let go and I fell and then I just like you panic smash buttons and it I don't know I enjoy that feeling of chaos totally yeah yeah it's absolutely like even even escaping the control part of it like making something that just feels different for the sake of it and like having to relearn controls like that's fun but I just like on a on a nerdy level perhaps the way way that it makes you reconsider stuff that you just accept as as truth like quality of life in in most games the things that we go okay this is going

to be handled by the game or this will be done in this way like when i play an older rpg or an older uh first person pc game uh or any pc game really like manual saves being a part of the game is something that like i have grown or i had to readjust to because i only started playing those games when i was like maybe 18 or 19 so i was i was used to playing like ps3 xbox 360 this game's autosaving don't worry it'll autosave i I swear you don't have to worry about anything.

So I'd like go back and play system shock too.

And like, so even that sort of stuff, right.

Where it forces you to reconsider saving as a system or, or just making you think like, Oh, this intrinsic thing that you understand about games, moving the camera, doing combat, climbing, any of that stuff, the way games can like re like force you to reconsider whether or not any of that is intrinsic, whether or not you can just accept basic rote elements as, as like, this is how it is.

and it will work that way as you expect that stuff gets me excited i love it i love it so more than brother hell yeah uh there was tons more stuff from next fest that i really enjoyed uh hurdling new game from the um oh man uh super brothers team which is really cool uh there was one i could i played called later skater which was like a skateboarding game but silly and a little off the rails the writing was really funny i found it really charming um that was really cool uh i think i'm gonna have a video out at some point uh talking about a bunch of the demos that i liked like probably all of the ones

that i thought were really really stand out um this one i played called uh super 10 pin which felt like an n64 that game was awesome i actually did play that demo too that one was really fun i was like shocked how much i liked it it was such a good approach of like they really captured the n64 vibe it wasn't like just the visuals the menus the music the sound effects it all felt accurately n64 styled it was really really good yeah tons of good stuff it is a shame though to go back to the beginning of this conversation it is a shame how hard it's getting to find the good games in next fest like

i've done what four or five of them now where i'd like really try to cover what's in there it's man it's it's a sea of ai generated stuff it's getting so bad and it's not it's not fair to anyone it really like it's not fair to smaller devs who are just trying to get their name out there and like get an opportunity opportunity, it's not fair to, you know, and then it sucks because there's bigger games that are like, you know, obviously going to be good.

Like the Volvo, I think I have like 10 demos in this one, which is really cool because like all of them are good games.

But then also it's like, you know, they have that marketing arm behind them.

They have their games with tons of wishlists.

So they're going to show up on the, on the highlights, even, even higher.

And then you look at the top 50 that dropped, like every steam next fest, they'll drop a, here's what the demos that most people played.

And the vast majority of them are free because they're demos, uh, free multiplayer co -op games, which like, yeah, is great.

But then that means the first 50 things are like lethal company style game, co -op shooter, co -op shooter, co -op shooter.

It's like Tarkov, this, this, this, there was one game in it though, that did stand out.

It was, it was like a, like a weird anime horny game.

It was in the top 50 and steam just had to be like, yep, it was there.

Don't, don't click on that one.

We promise. Turn on, turn on your adult filter.

Um, so yeah, Yeah, I don't know.

It's just a bummer.

The more that I get into this stuff and people have been charting it, it seems like more and more it's just getting harder to stand out next fest, as is the case in all places.

If you're making an indie game, it just seems harder and harder for people to find it.

So hopefully, I don't know.

I don't know if there's anything you can do to change that.

There's also just a lot of showcases on Steam now, like a lot of events, festivals.

It does feel like a little oversaturation when it's like the 90 % off all like fishing games from this one publisher just i feel like it's a semantic satiation where it's like how many fest if it's always a fest you know is it ever a fest it's never a fest that's right steam never fest coming soon oh that's good they should do that they probably will do that yeah no games today april 1st it's the never fest that's the only way to negate it is have a fast for nothing's on sale it's like the purge there's no video games on sale today oh no what are we going gonna do yeah that's steam next fest lots

of good stuff um let us know what you played and enjoyed in the comments if you want okay you can do whatever you want send us an email if you'd like which you can do and some people have this week frank uh you got some good emails here it sounds like yeah thank you guys you can you can send an email to podcast at noclip .video or in our patreon exclusive discord in the podcast chat channel we had a few questions honestly a lot of these are left over from last week because we spent so much time on summer games fest stuff stuff but uh yeah we have some uh first is from brennan ross gaming question uh

previously jesse mentioned the delineation between a 6 out of 10 and a 7 out of 10 game do you guys have any particular 7 out of 10 games good but flawed that you always think of for me it's the game wet absolutely dripping with style tremendously fun combat but also didn't have the polish or cohesion to become a bigger hit hmm that's a good question 7 out of 10 that comes to mind everything i play unlike is a 10 out of 10 obviously um hmm yeah in retrospect 7 out of 10 i like a win back for the n64 let's say uh it's an n64 cover shooter um and i don't know i haven't i haven't played it i it's

it is the sort of the proto gears of war um i don't know i haven't played it in a very long long time i i i've played it since you know 1999 like not that long ago but uh it was a let's see what yeah it's got like sixes and sevens across the board from from back in the day so i think that fits the bill there you go that's the problem with seven out of tens is like most of them because they don't stand out they kind of just slide off your brain you're playing it you're like yeah this is fun and then five years later you get an email from brendan ross and you're trying to remember what they are and you

just can't can't bring it to mind i'm scrolling through through my steam list even and like stuff that was good but didn't stand out isn't really coming up for me frank are there any uh seven out of tens that really to me it's always like i love the dynasty warriors games but they're all like capped at i mean there's a few that are even i really like that one piece number four was really good but it's also like the timing sometimes games hit very well but yeah like i love dynasty wars and i love earth defense force games but those are like the podcast games where it's like although whatever reason dynasty

warriors three because i think it was my first one that's me it's like a 10 out of 10 game just you know but um but yeah in terms of like i don't know dynasty war is its own genre of stuff and earth defense force um i don't know yeah you're right if you if you play a game that means you like it so it's like even calling it like a 710 i mean i guess i just played diablo 4 like that wasn't like life -changing but it was a fun game to grind for a month um yeah i don't know yeah it's sort of like guilty pleasure games the thing that you're like this was a lot of fun but i know it kind of sucks you

know Division 2 I'm like yeah that's a good one Division 2 yeah Division I would even say Division 1 I think that was just when it came out that was like an 8 out of 10 because my friends I all play it but Division 2 like I very few friends stuck with it so that was just the game stinks but man it's there's something about it something about it I think uh Elden Ring Night Rain is kind of like an 8 out of 10 game but I really enjoyed it I I'm not even doing a joke here I believe you it's like one of my least favorite FromSoft games ever but I had a lot of fun with it i'm like i'm pretty done with it

and i'm not gonna beat it but really i don't i mean i played like 30 hours of it and i'm satisfied a lot of fun with it and um yeah it's just you know there's something inherently less satisfying to me about a souls game that isn't like a big adventure but it's still yeah it's still very fun that's fair yeah it's like just doing the combat of a souls game which is like the fun part of souls is when you're not doing that and then you're doing combat like you walk into a room and it's like i wonder what this is and then a big fucking dragon drops down and you're like oh i guess i gotta fight a dragon i

thought it was gonna be like a somber moment if they just make a if they just make a from soft just say hey why don't we people love playing this game with their friends and people have been making seamless co -op mods for all our games since our you know multiplayer is baroque and byzantine and esoteric why don't we just make like a fucking from soft not like an mmorpg but like a you know dungeon multiplayer dungeon crawler in a world that would be probably the greatest game kingsfield old co -op would go kind of crazy though yeah just from soft adventure dungeon crawl with with the homies the dust

greatest game ever called the nintendo switch 2 it's not what it is it should be dustbloods uh i realize what my pick is it's every single assassin's creed game oh that's pretty good they're none of them are good none of them are great the first one conceptually but that was just the novelty of it those games have never been standout they have just been good good enough or you know what honestly i might go as far to say literally every single ubisoft game like there's a couple ubi art games that i think are pretty good like i like no never mind no i'm thinking about it they're also just fine like

rayman legends and rayman origins they're pretty good they're pretty good they're not they're not nines they're not tens they're really strong sevens like that uh avatar game frank you played it uh frontiers of pandora fucking what a boring start i never got past it i played like 30 minutes i was like i can't be like when is it gonna be over oh okay i did the lab thing oh now i'm going to talk to these people and oh i gotta find some fruit okay well that was fun uh yeah it's they make these games that like have compelling parts to them all so many interesting little little systems little little

trinkets none of them are are performed on well because they can't be because there's so many things going on there's stuff that they have to have to let sort of fall to the side so yeah that would be my pick literally all of ubisoft's output except for far cry 2 that one was pretty good that was maybe the one eight that i liked but yeah what a shame they should make a good one uh any other picks guys are we moving on to the next email yeah let's move on i got nothing it's a seven out of ten it's hard even i'm so polarized on games i'm either like this sucks or this is the greatest thing that's

what i'm saying the seven out of ten is like in the moment you can identify a seven out of ten but if time has passed and you can remember that game it has exceeded the seven out of ten limit it you're like it has to be a higher ranking than that because you didn't forget about it it like wasn't just fine it was actually good it turns out in your mind uh nicholas irving wrote in said hello noclip crew i've been playing a lot of pathfinder wrath of the righteous recently and it got me thinking about this question it's a crpg by owlcat games based on the pathfinder 1e rules which they did an amazing

job translating to a video game the game allows you to switch between real time with pause and turn base at the click of a button no idea how they pulled it off It feels so good every time.

The general story and character writing were solid.

The highs in this game could absolutely rival the incredible Moonrise Tower finale sequence of Baldur's Gate 3, Act 2.

But some parts of this game were so bad.

Some enemy encounters in this game, it felt like not a single person playtested them.

The armor class balancing is so wacky and the early crusade mode was very bad.

Have you played any games recently that gave you such a strong whiplash from I love this game and I can't believe people made such a transcendental experience to I hate this and everyone who worked on it I love the amount of emotion you put into that read it felt like you practiced it well done that's another hard one yeah games that give you whiplash I honestly it's funny that Baldur's Gate 3 is the reference point as the high point because I kind of had that feeling during Baldur's Gate 3 is that you're like when is this going to be over yeah the first two acts I was like this is the greatest

game ever made and then I got to three and i was like i don't even like this game was this secretly bad the whole time i it made me question everything it was the tears of the kingdom to my breath of the wild of the pursue x yeah i just i don't know man i i yeah i don't know balder's gate i guess it sucks because it's like a fucking it's like one of the greatest games of all time i couldn't finish it i fell off i just didn't want to play it anymore at a certain point that's a bummer man that's a shame too because like yeah so much of it seems so good but it just what was it that was long -winded

or like what was your issue there oh god it's been a while now i put me on the spot for a game i haven't played since it came out so you have to criticize one of the highest reviewed games of all time real quick yeah let me just spit out a masterpiece um no i felt like the first two acts felt very i i mean kind of exactly what this email is describing like they'd been played a lot more and refined a lot more i felt like they were pushing the right amount of sort of friction against the player i felt like there were encounters that were sort of smoother and then there were encounters that like

beat my ass but i could get through um i felt like act three it uh there were a lot of encounters that were like requiring you to kind of figure them out and learn them but they were so long -winded that game so desperately needs a fucking fast forward button that i just couldn't sit through these long fights of watching like this enemy move and then cast and then pause and then move and then cast and i just was so fucking bored i just need to fast forward button yeah that's just dnd in a nutshell i feel like you start off your adventure you're in a tavern you go and meet the queen she sends you

on an adventure and then i don't know 40 sessions in it's like and then i rolled the dice and oh okay and then what does the demon do can i have sex with the demon and that's how baldur's gate 3 solved the problem was they let you do that um you could fuck the bear it's a good game i'm trying i i was thinking of what my picks for this would be of like something i played that was was good at the start and then i got so tired of it by the end of it that i wanted it to just burn in a hole um that's maybe a little too rude end i wanted it to be over uh pacific drive which i think is a great game like

i think its opening is really good i think the tone is fantastic i think it's a ton of fun to play it's a really really like compelling especially the demo that i played for at the beginning uh one of the next fests i thought it was awesome and it really it took until until the end of the second new chunk of areas that I was like okay this loop is good going for a little too long I really wanted to finish it and I was like blitzing it for a week where it was like all I played and it reaches a point where just driving around starts to hurt your car and you have to like upgrade your parts and like

this one has anti -lead shielding and all that and it'll you know it'll keep out all the brain waves you can put a tinfoil hat in your car it's great they can't attack you and I was like oh man I'm not having fun with this anymore more it's like the loop just stopped being enjoyable of of grabbing items and crafting it and everything it's like it was a really really fun start and then it just yeah just fell apart for me so i think that's a good one for uh for that pick and then the other one is a game that we did a documentary on uh dredge that game is three quarters pretty good and then the last

bit of it i was like did i ever like this at all like it's just it just was so long and like Like, the loop didn't change.

It was kind of just go fishing, find what you need, bring it to the guy, and then the story will move on.

One time, that's fine.

Two times, that's fine.

Three times, okay, that's enough of that.

Four times, I don't know.

At that point, I was tired of it.

So, I think that's really it for me, is games that have an interesting loop for a little bit.

There's like a time limit on how long that could be interesting.

And whether or not you're willing to build on that and in what ways is, for me, the sort of the turning point.

is like i don't need you to totally like i don't need a 2d platform to suddenly become a third person shooter or something in the middle of it so i keep being compelled but i do appreciate when there's new mechanics there's new there's something interesting that that put it puts a twist on it that makes me go oh the thing i've been doing for 20 hours camera the thing i've been doing for 20 hours uh can can be changed in some way so that that's that's i think for me that's the sticking point uh one more yeah or if you have any picks yeah i mean i i the way you're talking about like enjoying the loop

and then getting sick of it i feel like that's how i was with the shenmue games i love like but again like looking back fondly like i think shenmue wanted to like some of the funniest games ever made but the loop does get so tired where it's like all right you get to a new town you got to meet the shopkeeper you have to like talk to the barber barber shop guy well it's it's like wednesday he's not around till sunday so go kill time in this town for four days straight and it's like i just want to beat this game i'm so sick of this crap but now i have to like just idle or like so it's a game where if you're

playing it like over the course of a year it's probably awesome back in 1999 but if you're like just trying to run through it like oh my god you get so sick of it or there's like boss fights or stuff with like bullshit qte's and you have to watch the crappy cut scenes again so like that was the game that has strong whiplash there's moments that are so funny and the moments that are so tedious and bad and then yakuza they just like iron it out then it's like awesome but shenmue is that where it's like it's so charming and there's parts that are so stupid and antiquated and i feel like you'll get

those experiences like playing a lot of older games it's like oh this is great and then it's like why is this a thing we stopped video games stopped doing that 30 years ago for a reason yeah and this is the reason um yeah i think it's an argument for shorter games too because i think I can spend less time with the mechanic and sort of not get to that saturation point where it gets like the novelty is sucked out of it because I've done it a billion times.

So, yeah, I mean, I like a short game where I just spend a little time with the mechanic.

I sort of have like a mastery level with it or I get to like the highest level they're willing to push me.

And then, yeah, if there's kind of like nowhere left to push the player and it just sticks around, then it's like, I'm not sure.

It's sad to end a game and be like, oh, this overstayed its welcome by about three hours.

or longer. Common problem, unfortunately.

Yeah, and one more emu, Frank.

Yeah, Josh wrote in.

Hey, crew. Jeremy brought up City of Heroes on last week's podcast. I almost failed high school because City of Heroes literally cried when I heard it was getting shut down.

But I wanted to email you guys and say that private servers have been back up and are thriving for a while now with NCsoft's Blessing.

And there's a link to it from a Polygon article talking about the new story.

I play on the Homecoming servers and it feels just as busy as as it was on live I don't really have a question I just really love City of Heroes much love Josh that's a perfectly good email I've never even played City of Heroes but I anyone who has love for uh for an old MMO I get it that's my that's my Star Wars Galaxies yeah I feel like also um just to the concept of companies okaying private servers I wish that was more common I feel like there's so many old MMOs or just online games in general that I'd love to play that you just can't because there's no server support i was talking uh we i

became friends this guy jordan he listens to podcasts uh at a summer games fest he works for heart machine and i was just he was texting me we were talking about final fantasy 11 yeah and like that's a game i missed out on and i the other day i specifically looked up like can you play the 360 version still and like they shut servers down it still exists on steam but fun fancy 11 is like the number one mmo where it's oh i wish i could sit down and play it but it just me too i'm dying to play 11 right and i know i could just like resub to 14 and just immediately be thrusted in it's a nice community

but it's like oh 11 is like the thing i missed out on it's like it seems like it's just not worth the effort to like to try to get into these days especially when it's like i haven't even beaten found fancy seven remake or found fancy 16 or five there's so many other like single player fun fantasy i can get into but it's like oh man 11 is like is like the top shelf like i want to play it i just do i would love to do i think this is this is a uh like a area to explore with maybe like crew stuff is i think it'd be cool for us to find ways to play uh online games that are dead together and do videos

on them because i'm dying to fucking play resident evil outbreak dude call it dead game yeah the front the series is right there it's called dead game bad devs bad and and that's been the fun of star like i'm still playing star wars battlefront 2 oh yeah i like like like i'll play at the end of the night it's so funny because i have a friend who's in wales and uh he'll it's like the morning for him before he has to do work or anything like that it's like i'll be about to go to sleep and it's just like passing like ships in the night like oh let's just play a battlefront for a little bit and then

it's it's and the servers are still going i think i saw on reddit like the june 29th resurgence day we will show developers we want battlefield battlefront this is our last stand um but it's like i don't know i'm just gonna keep playing till i get the achievements i need but yeah i really like battlefront 2 but yeah resurrecting i mean even my friend that same guy we that we we played division 2 so there's something so fun about picking a random ass multiplayer game and like just getting super into it for a few weeks um yeah city of hero again my brain is like oh if i can get achievements playing

city of heroes i'm happy to exist city of heroes homecoming uh see if you can get retro achievements going on it maybe they got something right that's a good point but that's literally how wow classic came and came to be is like blizzard wasn't doing it the the private servers got so big that blizzard had to like do a cease and desist and then they're like okay actually do you and you guys want to work for blizzard all right tell us what you did and they had a meeting that's so cool and like and so they consulted on the wow classic servers and then they kind of were able to have this mutual benefit i

think it was like give us your tech or they had they brought the guys in and and they consulted with them, and then let the servers be or something, and then they launched WoW Classic, and now, I mean, WoW is also another thing I always want to get into, but I don't know.

It's, I don't know.

If only you got paid to do it, then it would be easier to stomach, right, Danny?

Then I'm in, then I'm in, then I'm in.

But it's like, I'm 34, I'm on heart medicine or whatever.

Sorry, don't say it like that.

As long as I can keep living for at least another 30 years, that's another, and I should, but that's more time to play video games you know I don't know so there's a lot of games to play so that's why I'm just saying enjoy what you can Battlefront 2 is still my favorite game of the week that's my game of the week still is Battlefront 2 I really like it another online game I would love to play with you guys is Fantasy Star Online like the PS2 one or the Gamecube one I'll play it whatever's available they have Final Fantasy Fantasy Star Online Fantasy Star Online 2 it's on it's like it's on the PlayStation store

and Xbox you can't get achievements there is like crossover I remember before they put it on consoles having to sign up on a Japanese website to get it to work but yeah you can play that on consoles yeah I was joking there's actually a Dreamcast version that was the yeah we've ported to Windows and we really start Dreamcast version two with expanded content we should totally play the Dreamcast version that'd be awesome I I played the Xbox version I remember back then you had to pay like 10 but you know call like a number and give Sega your credit card I think you can buy it on yeah i played fantasy

star online on xbox for like a few months and uh it was i was really nice because it's like hack and slash mmo it's fun i remember when i was i think 10 years old i had never played fantasy star online because i didn't have uh dreamcast but i uh i read about it in a magazine and i drew a bestiary of creatures that i imagined would be in that game like i just went to be like yeah there's like a monster he looks like this these these are his abilities uh because i couldn't play it it was that was my first foray into game dev as like a nine -year -old that's better than reading the back of the box

on the way home as you were drawing characters in a game that you didn't play although i used to do that i had when kirby superstar was not out yet a super nintendo game i uh i had a nintendo power this summer and i went away i used to go to upstate new york for like a month every summer and i brought the nintendo power with me that had like the feature article with like three pages of like first ever screenshots of kirby superstar and i would just read it every day i would just fucking it's just three pages about kirby superstar and i would just imagine how sick it was going to be and it was it's

a great game yeah nice that's what it's all about the game the game in your mind is perhaps more important than the game on the screen that's true the kirby superstar that existed in my brain was superior to probably any game that exists in the in the world now exactly certainly better than peak was it was a peak would you say kirby superstar in your mind I'm not going to dignify that with a response that's a yes to me alright I think we should end this podcast because I'm sweating my ass off still on here my camera's even fighting for its life thank you so much for listening we have a lot of stuff

coming up on noclip like I said a lot of crew stuff or whatever it's called slash atsecrettape whatever that means we got some quick looks coming we got one for Peak which we're going to record after this and I've had 10 minutes to sit in front of the air conditioner to cool down some Summer Game Fest stuff has already dropped you can check that out really funny stuff from Frank I thought that entire thing was just so well done you did a really great job on the editing on that and just your whole presentation you're really good at doing these vlogs and I hope you can do more of them man because this is I

know that's why that jet set while I'm dying to share it hopefully it goes live hopefully so hopefully there's a bonus pod that we recorded last week on the Minecraft movie sorry a Minecraft movie only one of them not the only one that exists I thought that was maybe the best movie pod we've done so I'm very excited for that to go up it's awful but it was a lot of fun yeah it was it was a good conversation where i think we had some very especially uh you and danny i was just shitting on the thing the whole time but some very interesting conversations about what that kind of movie is who it's for how

do you translate minecraft into a film uh we fixed it too we rewrote the movie and it's better so there's a lot of moments where we figured it out if you want to hear a better version of the minecraft movie then just listen not here there was no reason we have to do this again no I'll do it again and yeah more stuff from the Everbloom technical series first episodes live you can watch that right now on sound design learn all about that very interesting stuff of how games are made more episodes in that series coming eventually you know it's busy time Danny's got a lot of stuff all sort of piled

up at once as per always but you know still have the disco Elysium doc coming you can watch draw a fortress if If you want, all the episodes are live and we always have new stuff coming in on the Patreon.

Patreon .com slash noclip.

You can subscribe there to listen to that Minecraft episode.

I'm sure you want to do that.

Trust me, it's good.

It's actually a good episode.

It's a very good conversation.

It's almost as long as the movie.

It might be longer.

I can't remember. The movie was 100 hours long as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, you check that out there.

Again, that's patreon .com slash noclip.

You already know. You know what's going on.

You know what it is.

You know what it is, baby.

And yeah, that's episode 232.

again the games we talked about this week were uh white knuckle peak mario kart world on the nintendo switch 2 and a bunch of steam next fest demos i'm sorry one more thing about white knuckle the game makes you know there's like an evolutionary response when you're afraid of heights your hands like poor sweat so you can grip rocks better because you're like a primate uh not you all of us all right thank you i had to clarify it sounded mean yeah um i sweat so much playing white knuckle that um both of the the slide pads on my mouse came off oh my god both of them there's two top and bottom and both

of them came off that's how much sweat was pouring out of my hands playing this game you were gaming so hard you broke your mouth i alternate titles for white knuckle that i've come up with are uh clenched butthole and um sweaty palms well i it is called white knuckle it's you know when you're holding on so tight that your hands your knuckles start to go white from the loss of blood right yeah yeah i like i like to clench a whole more that's yeah all right thanks for listening everyone we'll see you next week all right bye © transcript Emily Beynon

[Noclip Crewcast Episode 232: Exploring Climbing Games, Steam Next Fest Demos, and the Nintendo Switch 2]-[Mario Kart World, PEAK, Steam Next Fest]

📋 Summary

Noclip Crewcast Episode 232: Gaming, Gripes, and Gear

The "Gripes Corner" and Industry Updates

The Nintendo Switch 2 and Mario Kart World

The Rise of "Hard" Climbing Games: White Knuckle and Peak

Steam Next Fest and the Search for Quality

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript